Edward Morris was born on Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina in 1975, and grew up in Hollidaysburg, Pennsylvania. He graduated Temple University in 1998 with a BA in Film, and lived in the Bay Area for a year before transplanting to Portland, Oregon: where he lives and works with his Muse, gallery artist and graduate art therapy student Serena Blossom Appel. Morris was nominated for the 2009 Rhysling Award and is under consideration for the 2010 Bram Stoker; he was a 2005 nominee for the British Science Fiction Association Award, and was considered for the 2005 Sidewise Award for Alternate History.

Morris's novels include The Frank Principle, Blood of Eden, O Fortuna, and Atlantis 1999: A Memoir. His shorter works have appeared thrice in Murky Depths, twice in Interzone, and forty-two times elsewhere, in seven countries and four languages. There Was a Crooked Man is his first collaboration with Mercury Retrograde.

When I was five years old, we lived in a rambling farmhouse in the back sticks of central Pennsylvania. My sisters and I had the run of about an acre. My father would read us Bradbury and Tolkien by candlelight in that farmhouse. It was from there that my mother turned me loose in local libraries all over the country on various outings, and noted my captivation with an antique series of Universal Horror Pictures tie-in books in particular.

One of my earliest memories from the farm was Mom allowing me to stay up late and watch Lon Chaney's The Wolfman on WTAJ-10's Shock Theatre program. Just as I'd done two years before when allowed to watch the ball drop in Times Square, I fell asleep, this time in a clothes basket in the living room.

I saw The Wolfman for the first time three years ago, and have my own opinions about it now. But when I was a kid, those spooky backdrops looked shot-for-shot like the area of Central Pennsylvania where I grew up.

The towns have names like Centralia (see also the horror movie and video game Silent Hill) and lie just a stone's throw away from the original stomping grounds of the Blair Witch.

I grew up in Blair County (a mere thirteen miles from the birthplace of Fabulist master Jeff VanderMeer). Recently, I had the honor of introducing The Blair Witch Project at the 2008 H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival with Julia Fair, one of the team of writers who created the movie. Julia agreed wholeheartedly that said region of the country from Burkitsville, MD to the New York border is a hotbed for such things, one which any writer would be an idiot not to capitalize on.

It was as if a comet of supernatural energy passed over Blair County a million years ago, and all of us kids were still picking up on the vapor trail. The library in Hollidaysburg, where we moved 'to Town', was chock-full of classical ghost-story anthologies and young-adult SF and horror with lavish illustrations: all stories almost as weird as the ones going on outside, in Town.

I brought it all home, and brought them all here, the late Mr. Mailer's snowflakes from the void in sno-cone form, injected with dark, sweet psychedelic syrups no one can pronounce.