Douglas Clegg
Douglas Clegg (April 1, 1958-) is an American horror and dark fantasy author, and a pioneer in the field of e-publishing. He maintains a strong Internet presence through his website and LiveJournal. In addition to editing the Horror and Writer's Workshop subject areas for Barnesandnoble.com, he was Director of Online Marketing for Stealth Press, which published hardcover editions of popular books that are currently out of print, selling directly to readers via the Internet, until the company floundered in 2002. In 2000, Clegg and his friend, novelist M.J. Rose, formed The Intercom, a short-lived online marketing consultancy for authors and publishers. Their current effort at niche-marketing is Pigeonhole Press, which publishes a line of promotional e-books.
In May 1999, Clegg’s novel Naomi became the Internet’s first publisher-sponsored e-serial, garnering write-ups in Publisher’s Weekly and Business Week. The former called it "arguably, the first major work of fiction to originate in cyberspace." Some four thousand mailing list subscribers received free chapters of Naomi on a weekly basis, boosting print numbers for the Leisure paperback (published in spring 2001) from the low 50,000 range to over 125,000. Clegg donated all royalties from the paperback edition to the National Down’s Syndrome Society. All 1,500 copies of the limited-edition hardcover from Subterranean Press were sold-out within seven weeks.
Born in Alexandria, Virginia, Clegg grew up in an artistic family, and wrote his first story, about the death of his pet mockingbird, at the age of nine on a typewriter his parents had given him a year or two earlier. For years, he kept his writing secret, hiding his stories and sometimes destroying them, if he thought they might be found. He cites as formative influences the Edgar Allen Poe poems and Bible stories his mother used to read aloud, and Twilight Zone episodes.
Clegg received a bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Washington and Lee University, where he co-founded an International Film Program and became a morning news DJ on college radio. After graduating, Clegg taught junior high English, and worked as an editor for Ziff-Davis Publishing in Washington, DC. In 1986, he moved to Los Angeles to work for KCBS News. Throughout this period, he wrote reviews and entertainment articles for a small magazine. His first novel, Goat Dance, was nominated for Outstanding First Novel by the Horror Writers Association. Written in 1987, it was rejected by Zebra and Leisure. Clegg was convinced it would languish until an editor from Simon & Schuster took it to Pocket Books, which published it in 1989. Pocket also published his second, third, and fourth novels, Breeder, Neverland, and Dark of the Eye. Clegg changed his publisher to Dell for his next novel, The Children’s Hour, but Dell dropped its horror line four months later, leaving him without a publisher. His sixth novel, Bad Karma, written under the pseudonym Andrew Harper, was published by Kensington/Zebra, and adapted for the screen by Randall Frakes. The resulting movie, directed by John Hough and starring Patsy Kensit, was released as Hell’s Gate in the United States, and Bad Karma internationally.
In a 2000 Dark Echo interview, Clegg said, "I had family members who thought I was foolish to keep writing horror, and I had writing colleagues who jumped ship from horror, or who broke down from it, or felt they needed to move beyond it, or pronounce it dead. But me, I'm crazy -- I believe that horror is the truest expression of the human voice -- well, horror and love, what exists among mankind -- and that in writing horror, I'm pulling the veil back a little bit. I'm saying, in what I hope is an entertaining way, 'Look, see what you're afraid of? It's not a monster, it's not a demon, it's knowledge that terrifies us. Knowledge of any number of things, and here in this novel, I'm exploring a bit of it. Knowledge of who we are, where we're going, what fate has in store. We're afraid of what we already know is down the road. Now, let's face it through the imagination.'"
Clegg found a new publishing home with Dorchester’s Leisure imprint, a small New York publisher committed to its horror line. Leisure brought out The Halloween Man in 1998, Clegg’s anthology The Nightmare Chronicles, (which won the Bram Stoker Award and the International Horror Guild Award) in 1999, and two novels, You Come When I Call You and Mischief, in 2000. Also that year, Cemetery Dance Publications published the print edition of Clegg’s novella Purity, which Clegg had made available for free download on his website, and the author launched another e-book, Nightmare House, which was serialized on a weekly basis on the DouglasClegg mailing list at Onelist.com. A bidding war erupted between three companies for sponsorship of the mailing list for the duration of the serial. Cemetery Dance won, and paid Clegg a five-figure fee for his free email novel, which was published in hardcover the following year. Cemetery Dance also sponsored the Harrow Haunting website, which offered readers multi-media along with the e-book. A sequel to Nightmare House, The Infinite, became Leisure’s first hardcover in 2001.
On Nov. 17, 2005, Clegg and Raul Silva, his partner of sixteen years, were joined in a civil union. The couple has a menagerie of adopted pets, and enjoys hiking and bicycling.
Clegg's latest published work is The Priest of Blood, a dark fantasy about vampirism and mythology, set in an alternate medieval history.