Armstead, Joseph

The oldest child of a military family that settled in New Hampshire after living in Italy, the author currently lives in Northern California.

Always fascinated by the macabre and the visceral, he has written and developed stories around horror and the occult as presented in a cool and rational scientific way. His writing can be classified as a mixture of “splatterpunk/cyberpunk/hong kong cinema” with influences as diverse as Robert Ludlum and Clive Barker, to Stephen King and William Gibson, to John Woo and Francis Ford Coppola. He believes that horror fiction IS literature, once it is imbued with intelligence, good craftmanship and honesty by its authors and if it stays far away from the cliched, the prosaic and the wretchedly corny. He bases what he writes in the ‘here and now’, in Reality, and no matter how off-the-wall the subject matter, he strives to make the story logical. He wants the ring of truth to it. He wants the reader to enjoy themselves and to be wrapped-up in self-contained world of wonder and danger, but at the same time he wants them thinking ‘Could this happen? Could there conceivably be a grain of truth in this?’ To his mind, that adds spice to the novel and makes the story three-dimensional.