Edward Lee

Edward Lee was born (er, jettisoned) into the world on May 25, 1957, and was raised in Bowie, Md. He has sold 15 novels and continues to pursue the ludicrous profession of freelance writing. From 1976-79, he served in the U.S. Army Security Agency and then was transferred to the 1st Armored Division in Erlangen, West Germany, where he was the only M60A1-series tank gunner with a security clearance. Full of German beer, he returned to Maryland and was hired as a municipal police officer in a town on the D.C. line called Cottage City, where he got to arrest a guy, witness an autopsy, stop traffic in the middle of D.C. rush hour and slap a cigarette out of a punk's mouth. He quit after three months to go back to college -- then he promptly quit college because he decided he wanted to be a writer. His first novel, written under the pen name Philip Straker, came out a year later but was a hunk of junk called Night Bait. For the next 15 years, he worked as a night watchman at a retirement community and wrote by day. He quit the night watchman job in 1997, moved to Seattle -- mainly because he got sick of Maryland PCP-brain-corroded rednecks giving him the finger for driving the speed limit, and Seattle has dungeness crabs for cheap (shellfish is of the utmost importance to him) but, lo, he eventually got sick of Seattle's nine-months-a-year of rain. He is now living life in the sunshine of St. Pete Beach, Fla. His distant creative endeavors include more hardcore horror novels, a political thriller, a military tech thriller, a "true-life" thriller, a pop-literi abstraction for which he just won a modest grant, several horror scripts and God knows what else. His favorite horror novel is Our Lady of Darkness by Fritz Leiber; favorite short story, "Loveman's Comeback" by Ramsey Campbell; most influential author, H.P.Lovecraft. His favorite baseball team is The Only Team That Matters: the Yankees. Favorite football team? The fuckin' Redskins, who can't even beat Dallas even with their $100,000,000 worth of recently purchased superstars. Additionally, he probably cooks seafood better than any writer in the history of the genre.