Photo: Astrid Stawiarz/Getty Images (2017)
Sample of authors
King, Stephen
Stephen Edwin King was born in Portland, Maine. His father, Donald Pollock, a vacuum cleaner salesman, sailor and philanderer (King has a half-sister in Brazil), went through a number of aliases before he changed his surname to King. When Stephen was two years old, his father went out to buy cigarettes and never came back. Stephen grew up in poor circumstances with his mother Ruth and his...
Literary figures
John Silence
Gender: Male
Algernon Blackwood wrote only six short stories about John Silence, ‘physician extraordinary’, but the mysterious, rich doctor with unnatural psychic powers is nevertheless a classic as the ‘occult detective’. Inspired by Sherlock Holmes, he uses logical reasoning to expose ‘magical’ criminal deceptions, but uses his psychic ability to solve mysteries – the result is horror fiction with a detectiv...