STEPHEN ROMANO is an Amazon best-selling author, screenwriter and multi-media artist. He is the author of many novels, including the spectacularly-acclaimed thriller RESURRECTION EXPRESS from Simon and Schuster, and BLACK LIGHT, a supernatural suspense novel from Little Brown and Company, on which he collaborated with top Hollywood screenwriters Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan of the legendary SAW horror movie series. Stephen is also the writer of INCIDENT ON AND OFF A MOUNTAIN ROAD for Showtime's Emmy Award-winning MASTERS OF HORROR cable series. Stephen's 2006 short story collection THE RIOT ACT garnered wide critical acclaim and his ground-breaking illustrated novel SHOCK FESTIVAL from IDW was similarly praised, receiving a BOOK OF THE YEAR award in 2008 from Rue Morgue Magazine. His professionally commissioned e-novel for Amazon's Kindle World imprint, WAYWARD PINES: BEFORE THE FALL enjoyed more than 12 months on the best-seller list. His hard-hitting thriller METRO, now on sale through Pocket Star, was also highly acclaimed.
Stephen has written many other motion pictures, including DEADLY INFLUENCER, WEB CAM GIRLS, YOU KILLED MY MOTHER, NEXT DOOR NIGHTMARE, FRAMED BY MY SISTER (AKA TRIPLE THREAT), SHE IS NOT YOUR DAUGHTER, ESCAPING MY STALKER and the award-winning experimental short film EVERY DIGITAL GHOST, which he also co-produced. All of his Lifetime and Showtime films are available HERE at Amazon Prime. Search them!
Stephen's many graphic novels and comic books, available exclusively through his own direct-market publishing company Eibon Press include BOTTOMFEEDER, WASTELAND 1989, MANIC, Lucio Fulci's ZOMBIE, GATES OF HELL, HOUSE BY THE CEMETERY and THE BEYOND.
Catch him, hire him, harass him, or hug him at stephenromanoshockfestival.com or eibonpress.com
HIGH PRAISE FOR THE INTENSE VISION OF STEPHEN ROMANO.
For METRO:
"Holy hell. Nitro-charged, blood-thumping, brain-twisting entertainment. Romano isn't messing around."
---JOE R. LANSDALE, internationally best-selling author of COLD IN JULY and the HAP AND LEONARD series
"This dark and graphic rip of a ride is not for the faint of heart. But if you like books that force you to stay awake (at night), and you want something that will make my sentences look positively terse, then this is your book. Stephen Romano is amazing with words."
---TAYLOR STEVENS, New York Times Best selling author of THE INFORMATIONIST
"Metro is a bloodbath to remember. Stephen Romano writes the way an AK-47 fires, six hundred words a minute, all of them hitting their target and spreading for maximum damage. He's got a superhero trained from birth to reduce the scenery to shreds and kill guys you love to hate. When you get to an action scene - and there are enough to satisfy any gamer - strap yourself down because Romano has found remarkable ways to destroy life. He really is a high-energy killing machine, and if Red Bull is your drink then Metro is for you - heart-pumping mayhem performed by the bad guys of course, but also by people who speak well, nice people forced to do bad things."
---WILLIAM KOTZWINKLE, New York Times Best-Selling Author of E.T. THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL and A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STRET PART 4: THE DREAM MASTER
"If you're an aficionado of pop culture, paranoia, violence, Trivial Pursuit, and terrific writing, you'll love METRO by Stephen Romano."
JOSS CODERO, acclaimed author of WEST PALM
For THE RIOT ACT:
"(Stephen's stories) have that kind of magic where you take something wild and wooly, and tell it in such a way that you just can't doubt it. They make you feel, and they make you think, even if they are for the most part, disturbing. Fact is, THE RIOT ACT may be the best new short story collection I've read in years. Stephen Romano isn't fu**ing around."
---JOE LANSDALE, best-selling author of THE BOTTOMS and BUBBA HO-TEP
This is a guy with a vision, a real narrative style, a dark and mesmerizing worldview. It's as if Joe Lansdale, Dave Schow, John Skipp, and Norm Partridge all had a long, wild weekend in Vegas replete with moonshine, .45s, snakeskin boots, twleve kilos of uncut Colombian coke, Five Thai hookers, and the dug-up corpse of Jim Thompson, spent three days out of their minds, and woke up the following morning to find little baby Steve Romano in the middle of the hotel room gurgling, "Daddy! Daddy!" And yes, that really IS the only way to explain how solid his fiction is. Brutal, full-on street-cred, sharp, insightful, human, authentic, bloody, savage, asskicking, but smooth and altogether pure. Seriously, you've got to check him out."
---TOM PICCIRILLI, best-selling author of THE LAST KIND WORDS
Stephen Romano writes like he's on fire. And I don't mean with some funny notion like The Muse, or the Lord. No, he writes like someone just SET HIM ON FIRE . . . THE RIOT ACT is some of the most urgent, blistering, breathlessly paced, microscopically observed, mordantly hilarious, heartbreakingly hopeless, and utterly devastating bloodbath fiction ever burned into print."
---JOHN SKIPP, best selling author of THE SCREAM and JAKE'S WAKE
For RESURRECTION EXPRESS:
"Resurrection Express has the pacing, technical detail, and unshakable suspense to excite thriller fans, and even readers who typically retreat from the high-tech context will appreciate . . . A must read for followers of Andrew Vachss and Charlie Huston."
---BOOKLIST (Starred Review)
"The pace never slackens in screenwriter Romano's superior debut thriller . . . Extremely satisfying. Romano doesn't pull his punches."
---PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY (Starred Review)
"Resurrection Express moves like a bullet train on a twisting track. The result is a slick, satisfying thriller, in which the reader is constantly wondering, who is on whose side."
---MYSTERY SCENE MAGAZINE
"Romano plunges into a frenetic plot that doesn't slow down until the very last word, (investing) in sturdy characters who can make the non-stop action plausible."
---CHICAGO SUN-SENTINEL
"Compelling, devastating and brutal, with battle-hardened prose and relentless energy, Stephen Romano has crafted one hell of a first novel. A juiced-up, whacked-out, back-to-the-wall book that reads like a ride through the Knife and Gun Club on the night of a full moon, riding the Resurrection Express will leave you dizzy from betrayal, speechless from reversals, and quite possibly battered and broken by its revelations."
---GREG RUCKA, New York Times bestselling author of the Queen & Country series
"A high-voltage blast! Romano's action scenes are light years ahead of the pack, fueled by muscular prose, terrifying villains, and Elroy Coffin--a protagonist for the ages. RESURRECTION EXPRESS is one of the finest examples I've encountered of noir's evolution into the 21st Century."
---BLAKE CROUCH, best-selling author of the WAYWARD PINES series
"RESURRECTION EXPRESS is a rip snortin' white knuckle ride. Highly recommended!!"
---DON COSCARELLI, director of Phantasm, The Beastmaster and Bubba-Ho-Tep
"RESURRECTION EXPRESS is a cinematic, hyperkinetic, action-packed thriller."
---JEFF ABBOTT, New York Times bestselling author of THE LAST MINUTE
"Stephen Romano's imagination is so scary-brilliant, you should be required to obtain a controlled dangerous substance license before opening RESURRECTION EXPRESS."
---DUANE SWIERCZYNSKI, New York Times bestselling author of Fun and Games.
Stephen Romano's taut prose is as unrelentingly violent and brutal as the story he tells. Resurrection Express is a killer debut that demands attention. A scorching read.
---BRIAN AZZARALLO, New York Times bestselling author of BATMAN: JOKER
"Horror scribe Stephen Romano makes his crime fiction debut in the sci-fi tinged thriller Resurrection Express . . . a compelling mystery that marks an auspicious crime fiction debut."
---CRIME FICTION LOVER.COM
"The book has the heightened freneticism of a drill-quick action film. It's long, over 400 pages, but the momentum keeps you always on edge."
---GRIFT magazine
"From noir to apocalyptic at the speed of sound! This book is relentless. It has the feel of a grind house auteur working with a two-hundred million dollar budget . . . you feel pummeled by the end of the novel. That said, RESURRECTION EXPRESS questions ideas of love and hope. Just don't expect any happy answers.
---MYSTERY PEOPLE.COM
FOR SHOCK FESTIVAL:
BOOK OF THE MONTH, OCTOBER 2008! One of the greatest homage to B-cinema ever undertaken . . . SHOCK FESTIVAL is a breathtakingly thorough overview of over 100 movies and a slew of filmmaker and actors who never existed -- but which you'll believe actually did by the time you finish reading. And your eyes don't even have to touch the words to be convinced, thanks to the down-to-the-smallest-detail perfect collection of posters, newspaper ads, still photos and other visuals Romano and his art team have created.
---FANGORIA MAGAZINE
BEST FICTION BOOK OF 2008! While the term mockumentary practically wrote itself, it's going to take a clever writer to describe Stephen Romano's fictional alternate history of exploitation films . . . (Romano) has created a vivid universe filled with films you'd love to see and personalities you'd line up at a convention to meet, lavishly illustrated with a plethora of eye-popping posters, lobby cards, on-set still and ad mats for such ficional films as THE UNDERTAKER AND HIS WIFE and STARFIRE BEYOND THE GALAXY. Fans swept up in the recent wave of grindhouse nostalgia NEED to buy this book!
---RUE MORGUE MAGAZINE
"Romano's pseudo-journalistic accomplishment is a genuine revelation, an event that's rarely if ever been done before: the merging of fact and fiction into something too outrageous to be the truth and too disarmingly ghastly/gorgeous to be anything but.
---THE AUSTIN CHRONICLE
"Among the most impressive feats of sustained imagination I've encountered in quite some time, if not ever."
---FRIGHT.COM
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