Douglas Clegg | |
---|---|
Born |
Alexandria, Virginia, United States |
April 1, 1958
Occupation | Novelist, short story writer |
Genre | Horror, Fantasy, Genre fiction, Dark fantasy |
Spouse | Raul Silva (2005-present) |
Website | |
www |
Douglas Clegg (born April 1, 1958) is a horror and dark fantasy author, and a pioneer in the field of e-publishing. He maintains a strong Internet presence through his website and LiveJournal.
Born in Alexandria, Virginia to a "family of artists", Clegg had "scribbled stories" from a young age and then started typing them at age 8 when his parents brought home a typewriter. One of his first tales was an adventure about his pet mockingbird, which had recently died. His first horror story was for a school assignment at Sleepy Hollow School about St. Patrick’s Day, in which snakes take their revenge on St. Patrick and the people of Dublin. Clegg wrote his first novella-length work, called Asylum, at age 17.
Clegg graduated from Washington and Lee University, with a degree in English Literature.
Clegg finished writing his first novel, Goat Dance, in 1987. Pocket Books published it in 1989, and Goat Dance was nominated for Outstanding First Novel by the Horror Writers Association. Pocket also published his second, third, and fourth novels, Breeder (1990), Neverland (1991) and Dark of the Eye (1994). Clegg's next novel, The Children's Hour (1995), was published by Dell, but the imprint dropped its horror line four months later, leaving him without a publisher. His sixth novel, Bad Karma (1997), written under the pseudonym Andrew Harper, was published by Kensington Books, and later adapted for the screen by Randall Frakes. The resulting 2002 film, directed by John Hough and starring Patsy Kensit, was released as Bad Karma internationally and as Hell's Gate in the United States.
In March 1999, Clegg announced that he would be distributing his new ghost novel Naomi in serial installments via email.Naomi debuted in May 1999 and became the Internet's first publisher-sponsored e-serial.Publishers Weekly called it "arguably, the first major work of fiction to originate in cyberspace." Some four thousand mailing list subscribers received free chapters of Naomi on a weekly basis, boosting print numbers for the 2001 Leisure Books paperback version from the low 50,000 range to over 125,000.