That child was ... Edgar Allan Poe.

On behalf of all us mere plagiarists who have come along in his wake, we are extremely grateful to those two parents!

I myself however was born in 1964 in Wigan, Lancashire, England.

This location is situated between two great cities: Liverpool and Manchester.  The first being quite an extraordinary producer of horror writers, namely: Ramsey Campbell and Clive Barker, and the second lending its name to an extraordinary film, The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue (sorry couldn't think of anything else horror-related for Manchester!)

I grew up with a love of humour and horror in equal amounts, the humour being Monty Python's Flying Circus and the horror being supplied by The Pan Book of Horror (a horror anthology series - for those less enlightened souls who don't know what it was!)

I have, since the age of 14, written much humour and horror of my own.

I have just had my debut (non-fantasy) related novel published, Ever Fallen in Love, about growing up in the 70s punk era in the north of england.

In the past, I landed a job writing articles for a short-lived men's lifestyle magazine (which shall remain nameless) for which I penned an article about Clive Barker, and customising hearses, amongst other things!

Shortly after leaving the magazine, I began writing a novel, Malevolent.  No luck with agents on completetion prompted me to put some of my fiction - including the first three chapters of this work - onto the Internet in the hope of being discovered.  (I have now shelved that particular novel and am currently working on a children's dark fantasy trilogy, which is looking very promising and i'm on about the 5th draft of the first book

As a lot of you know I am the editor of Lost Souls Magazine, my own online ezine, an usuallyd include one of my own stories and in the past, a few articles I had written about horror and fantasy related this and that.

David Barton

August 2003 (Revised March 2011)