Ron Dee

FYI: I also have books published as David Darke.

I am and have been classified as a horror author. True enough, in the beginning of my writing, I did begin writing stories with hints of horror, but primarily I started out to become a science fiction author... I wrote several early short stories and got steered into horror early probably because I used to watch a lot of the British Hammer horror films on TV. In high school I and another student I then met got together to adapt Bram Stoker's 'Dracula' as a high school play (this was more than twenty years before the great novel was rewritten by the Godfather brain as Coppola's Dracula)...

After this and getting into acting and Drama in school, I became interested in making a high school play based on fictional hauntings in the house built by the man who invented the Winchester rifle which I read about in a Disney magazine distributed back then by Gulf gasoline stations. I later found out that this had already been done a couple of times by Shirley Jackson and Richard Matheson Sr., respectively...but I wrote this as my first novel, 'Boundaries,' which was also the movie made by my high school Thespian class that I wrote and directed. My first wife played one of the major roles and it was through the making of this film and some plays hat we became acquainted.

But, as writing was far less expensive than making films and video cameras were not then easily available or affordable if they had been....I continued to write now that I was bitten by that so called writing bug... Actually, I would probably have steered that direction anyway since I have a lot more confidence in my ability to achieve what I wish to without relying on others, which in ways is good, but a curse to my personal life...

But years and years passed before I became professionally published again after my soon forgotten first novel.

And then, kind of like the proverbial breaking dam...I achieved two published novels within six months of each other by two different publishers in 1989-1990... These novels were Brain Fever, which I had originally titled 'Piece of Mind' and which was published by Zebra Pinnacle Books,my editor being Wendy McCurdy. Although I had been disappointed initially that she and Zebra had not been interested in my book 'Blood Lust' (originally titled 'The Traveling Salesman')+, I was very happy about that when Getah Kothari and Jeanne Cavelos of Dell Publishing found it of interest shortly after Zebra turned it down and agreed to buy it when after they requested and I made some revisions that were minor to write in effort but made some fairyly major changes (in a good way) to the flow of the novel.

Then, before the novel was even published, Jeanne called me and said she was putting together a new horror line for Dell that was to be named Abyss and she wanted me to write a vampire novel for it, and that it could be loosely tied to 'Blood Lust' if I chose. And so was born 'Dusk.'