Mort Castle

Mort Castle (born 1946, Chicago, Illinois) is an American horror author, editor, and writing teacher whose more than five hundred short stories and seventeen books have been published in a dozen languages across six decades. He has won three Bram Stoker Awards, two Black Quill Awards, the Wired magazine Golden Bot, and has been a Bram Stoker finalist nine additional times, an Audie Award finalist, a Shirley Jackson Award nominee, an International Horror Guild Award nominee, and a four-time Pushcart Prize nominee.

His fiction includes the psychological horror novel Cursed Be the Child (Leisure Books, 1994, recently restored to print), about a five-year-old girl whose imaginary friend is the tortured soul of a murdered Romany child; The Strangers (1984, named one of the Top Ten Thriller-Horror Novels Published in 2008 by Newsweek Poland in its Polish translation as Obcy), about a sociopath moving through ordinary suburban life; The Deadly Election (1976), his supernatural-political debut; and the Bram Stoker Award-winning collection New Moon on the Water from Dark Regions Press.

He edited the contemporary classic Writing Horror (Writer's Digest, 1997) and its expanded revision On Writing Horror: A Handbook by the Horror Writers Association, the standard craft reference for the horror field, with chapters by Stephen King, Harlan Ellison, Joyce Carol Oates, Jack Ketchum, Ramsey Campbell, Nancy Kilpatrick, and other working horror writers. With Sam Weller he co-edited the Bram Stoker Award-winning Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury (William Morrow, 2012), a Book of the Month Club Alternate, Shirley Jackson Award nominee, and Audie Award finalist as an audiobook, and the graphic novel companion volume from IDW.

He has also been a working musician and folk singer, a stand-up comedian, a professional stage hypnotist, a high school English teacher for eleven years, a magazine and comic book editor, and a writer in residence at three high schools. He teaches in the fiction writing program at Columbia College Chicago, where his courses include Researching and Writing Historical Fiction and Story in Graphic Form, and has given more than one thousand keynotes and seminars at writing conferences. In 2000 the Chicago Sun-Times News Group named him one of twenty-one Leaders in the Arts in Chicago's Southland.