'It has escaped, you know,' he said matter-of-factly. He hopes Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror will haunt his readers in the way those writers have haunted him. In recent years he has predominantly been writing horror.Įver since he was a teenager Chris has loved unsettling and creepy stories, with fond memories of buying comics like 'Strange Tales' and 'House of Mystery', watching classic BBC TV adaptations of M R James ghost stories every Christmas and reading assorted weirdness by everyone from Edgar Allen Poe to Ray Bradbury. Has been nominated for many awards including the Edgar Awards, the UKLA Children's Book Award and the Carnegie Medal. He has written several books for children & young-adults, both fiction and non-fiction, and He currently has a weekly strip cartoon called 'Payne's Grey' in the New Statesman.Ĭhris has been a published author since 2000. Chris worked as an illustrator and cartoonist for twenty years, working mainly for magazines & newspapers (these include The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Economist and the Wall Street Journal) before becoming a writer. He now lives in Cambridge with his wife and son where he writes, draws, paints, dreams and doodles (not necessarily in that order). He spent his teens in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, before moving to Manchester, London and then Norfolk. He decided then “that my ambition was to write and illustrate my own book”. He was an avid reader of American comics as a child, and when he was eight or nine, and living in Gibraltar, he won a prize in a newspaper story-writing competition. His father was in the army and so he moved around a lot as a child and lived in Wales.

The dead of winter by chris priestley