A.J. Vale

A.J. Vale grew up in a small town in Ohio, where he learned early that the most unnerving thing about dangerous people is how ordinary they seem.

That lesson has followed him. Over the years, he's found himself in uncomfortably close proximity to real evil — a housemate whose brother turned out to be a serial killer, and a man taken in as a roommate at the request of his church, a husband supposedly working through marital trouble, who later murdered his wife and left behind five children, the youngest still a newborn. Then there were the others — a rotating cast of people who seemed drawn to his orbit without ever quite being invited in. He never went looking for any of it. It just had a way of finding him.

A lifelong reader of murder mysteries, thrillers, and psychological horror, Vale eventually did what writers do: he turned his experiences into fiction. His novels draw from that particular unease of small-town life — the way a community can collectively decide not to look too hard at certain people, and what grows in that blind spot.