Michael Marshall Smith is a novelist and screenwriter. Only Forward, his groundbreaking first novel, won the Philip K. Dick and August Derleth Awards. Its critically acclaimed successors Spares and One Of Us were optioned by major Hollywood studios.

He has since written the internationally bestselling novels The Straw Men, The Lonely Dead and Blood of Angels, and his menacing thriller, The Intruders, was adapted as a major BBC television series. He lives in California with his wife, son and two cats.

Brian Evenson is the author of a dozen works of fiction.

He has been a finalist for the Edgar Award and the Shirley Jackson Award, and has won an International Horror Guild Award and American Library Association's award for Best Horror Novel.

He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at CalArts.

Richard Thomas is the owner and managing editor of The Whiskey Reviewer, a leading web magazine for whiskey reviews and mixology and drinks news. Thomas’s opinions and advice on whiskey have appeared on ABC News, Discovery Channel programming, Style magazine and elsewhere. He was a longtime travel contributor to Yahoo!, and he has written for outlets as diverse as Dremel.com, USA Today, Chilled, Inside Hook, and Paste.