John Howard

Who is John Howard?

John Howard is an English author, born in London in 1961. His fiction has appeared in several anthologies and the collections The Silver Voices, Written by Daylight, and Cities and Thrones and Powers. The majority of Howard’s stories have central and eastern European settings; many are set in the fictional Romanian town of Steaua de Munte. The Defeat of Grief is a novella set in Steaua de Munte and the real Black Sea resort of Balcic; Numbered as Sand or the Stars attempts a 'secret history' of Hungary between the World Wars.

Secret Europe is a collection jointly written with Mark Valentine comprising 25 short stories set in a variety of real and fictional European locations. Ten of the stories are by Howard and fifteen by Valentine.

Between 2003 and 2007 John Howard collaborated on eight short stories with Mark Valentine, six of which featured Valentine’s long-running series character The Connoisseur, an occult detective whose real name is never revealed. All 23 tales of The Connoisseur, including the collaborations, were reprinted in The Collected Connoisseur.

John Howard has written articles for numerous magazines including Book and Magazine Collector, Supernatural Tales, Wormwood, Studies in Australian Weird Fiction, and All Hallows for the Ghost Story Society. He contributed essays to the Fritz Leiber special issue of Fantasy Commentator and to the books Black Prometheus: A Critical Study of Karl Edward Wagner, Fritz Leiber: Critical Essays, and The Man Who Collected Psychos: Critical Essays on Robert Bloch, all edited by Benjamin Szumskyj. In 2013 Howard took over the review column Camera Obscura in Tartarus Press' journal Wormwood.