Midlisters

"No one ever said my work was without merit. Know why? Because I wasn't Hollywood, and I got a free pass because it was literature. I got a free pass because the murder in my books was just a word. Make believe. It meant nothing. Until it happened for real."Jason Tennant is a writer of violent horror novels whose career is mired firmly in a maddening swamp of frustration somewhere north of nowhere and south of success. He is a "midlister", those thankless souls who labor in the shadows of sometimes better, sometimes luckier writers, and it's starting to take its toll.Kent Gray is the wildly popular author of a string of so-called "sex-fi" novels. He's wealthy, handsome, and the object of Jason Tennant's professional jealousy.Welcome to Baltimore, Maryland, and the Aurora Science Fiction & Horror Convention, where these two men, midlister and bestseller, will meet for the first time, and the midlister motto "Better Read Than Dead" will be put to the ultimate test.Because true horror cannot be contained within the pages of a book, or by the men who write them.With an introduction by Jack Ketchum

About the Author

Born and raised in a small harbor town in the south of Ireland, Kealan Patrick Burke knew from a very early age that he was going to be a horror writer. The combination of an ancient locale, a horror-loving mother, and a family full of storytellers, made it inevitable that he would end up telling stories for a living. Since those formative years, he has written five novels, over a hundred short stories, six collections, and edited four acclaimed anthologies. In 2004, he was honored with the Bram Stoker Award for his novella The Turtle Boy.Kealan has worked as a waiter, a drama teacher, a mapmaker, a security guard, an assembly-line worker at Apple Computers, a salesman (for a day), a bartender, landscape gardener, vocalist in a rock band, curriculum content editor, fiction editor at Gothic.net, and, most recently, a fraud investigator. When not writing, Kealan designs book covers through his company Elderlemon Design. A number of his books have been optioned for film.Visit him on the web at kealanpatrickburke.com.

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