I was born and raised in the D.C. where tourists don't go--a land of soul food and Scrapple. We lived behind the neighborhood movie theater, and my mother took me to everything from the time I was barely out of diapers. When I reached the ripe old age of about six, I couldn't wait for the Saturday creature features. Giant mutant bugs, the monsters of Ray Harryhausen, Roger Corman's Poe films, and the frightfests of William Castle were among the early influences that warped my writer's muse into a breeding ground for--to borrow a line from Morbius in Forbidden Planet--my "Monsters from the Id." In Castle's The Tingler, when Vincent Price told us to scream because the Tingler was loose in the theater, you better believe I screamed. On the literary front I soon discovered Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft and followed the trail they blazed into Poe's "ghoul-haunted woodland of Weir."
