Chris Priestley
His father was in the army and so he moved around a lot as a child and lived in Wales. He was an avid reader of American comics as a child, and when he was eight or nine, and living in Gibraltar, he won a prize in a newspaper story-writing competition. He decided then “that my ambition was to write and illustrate my own book”.
He spent his teens in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, before moving to Manchester, London and then Norfolk. He now lives in Cambridge with his wife and son where he writes, draws, paints, dreams and doodles (not necessarily in that order). Chris worked as an illustrator and cartoonist for twenty years, working mainly for magazines & newspapers (these include The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Economist and the Wall Street Journal) before becoming a writer. He currently has a weekly strip cartoon called 'Payne's Grey' in the New Statesman.
Chris has been a published author since 2000. He has written several books for children & young-adults, both fiction and non-fiction, and
has been nominated for many awards including the Edgar Awards, the UKLA Children's Book Award and the Carnegie Medal. In recent years he has predominantly been writing horror.
Ever since he was a teenager Chris has loved unsettling and creepy stories, with fond memories of buying comics like 'Strange Tales' and 'House of Mystery', watching classic BBC TV adaptations of M R James ghost stories every Christmas and reading assorted weirdness by everyone from Edgar Allen Poe to Ray Bradbury. He hopes Uncle Montague's Tales of Terror will haunt his readers in the way those writers have haunted him.
“In my confused state I wondered if I had not died and gone to hell. And if this was the case, I wished that I had been allowed more opportunities to sin, for this seemed a rather excessive judgement on what had been a frankly dull and blameless life. But I was not dead. I could see that now.”
“She had the the most extraordinary capacity for falling asleep at a moments notice. Any kind of pause in the routine was an excuse for a nap. I swear she was more cat than human.”
“But she was no guardian angel. She was not trying to help me at all. She had been trying to claim me as she had claimed the lives of my fellow passengers.She was the thing that remained forever unseen in my visions of her tales. She lurked near the bodies of those whose whose lives were so cruelly taken. She was there always, waiting.”
“Does something amuse you?' asked Uncle Montague.'I was merely reminding myself, Uncle, that I am getting too old to be so easily frightened by stories.''Really?' said Uncle Montague with a worrying degree of doubt in his voice. 'You think there is an age at which you might become immune to fear?”
“I stood a little self-consciously. I was of an age when I was still unsure of myself in such formal matters as greetings and partings.”
“Give me a funeral over a wedding any day,.' said Uncle Montague with a sigh. 'The conversation is almost always superior.”
“From the plough to paper, from the wheel to house, from tool handles to sailing ships. Man would have been nothing without trees.”
“Just because something is told as a story and that story is part legend or myth, or feat of imagination, does not mean there is no truth in it.”
“After all, it was only a story,' I said, determined to prove her wrong. 'All manner of terrible things may happen in a story. They may be startling at the time, but it passes. One gets caught up in the narrative, but the dangers aren't real, are they? Things happen in any way the storyteller chooses. It is all just made up.”
“Writers were a strange sort; I knew that much from the newspapers.”