Nicholas Grabowsky

Nicholas Grabowsky (born May 7, 1966) is a horror/fantasy author and screenwriter.

Biography

Personal Life

Nicholas Grabowsky was born Nicholas John Grabowsky in Norwalk, California on May 7, 1966, to parents Arthur J. Grabowsky and Doris Ruth Moreno. From 1966 to 1995, he resided with his family in Southern California, where Anaheim, California is heralded as his hometown although he also resided periodically in surrounding towns such as Garden Grove, California. He began writing fiction as early as the third grade at the Thomas Alva Edison Elementary School in Anaheim, where his teacher assigned students to pen their own tall tales after viewing Disney film shorts such as Paul Bunyan in 1958 and Pecos Bill. As early as the sixth grade, while attending Dr. Jonas E. Salk Elementary School, he had written dozens of short scripts and novellas and had drawn a series of comics entitled Gooneyville, which he regularly photocopied and distributed to classmates, as well as audiotaped variety segments entitled The Swiss Robber Show, where he'd utilize scripted recorded voices from locals combined with sound effects and celebrity voices and music from radio and television which he sold for a dollar apiece to faculty, students and neighbors.

His creative writing continued through junior high and high school, where he consistently sought the attentions of Hollywood with screenwriting and acting pursuits and involved his writing in various periodicals such as Jack N' Jill Magazine, until a strict conservative Christian Penticostal upbringing and involvement with a number of related denominations and Christian cults found his interests redirected in his late teens towards evangelism, related contemporary Christian music, and songwriting. By the time he was eighteen years of age, he was preaching and often singing largely original songs and playing piano to congregations of over a thousand people with a mannerism and style similar to Keith Green, infused with further influences notably from Steve Taylor and Randy Stonehill.

In 1993, Nicholas' parents purchased a house in Sacramento, California, for retirement, and moved to their new home with Nicholas' autistic sister Carol Jean Grabowsky. In June 1995, Carol went missing from her adult education services school, and Nicholas devoted his time to search for her, along with local news media, a host of volunteer searchers, and the assistance of such celebrity personalities as Charlotte Blasier, wife of O. J. Simpson defense attorney Bob Blasier. Carol's body was found by two boys in a drainage ditch near Discovery Park, Sacramento, in October 1995, which remains to this day a closed case with the details leading to her death entirely unsolved.

Of note is the fact that Nicholas is the grandson of Alfred Moreno, a 1940s general manager of Los Angeles' Biltmore Hotel, whose brother, Antonio Moreno, was the great Hollywood silent film actor/director who starred in hundreds of films throughout the early twentieth century and, most notably, in Universal's Creature From the Black Lagoon.

Writing career

After acquiring jobs as an extra in Hollywood for such films as Masters of the Universe and Night of the Creeps, and pursuing a modeling career, his pursuits found him an acting coach in the form of Walter Koenig, Star Trek's Chekov, who introduced Nicholas to a New York publisher of mass market paperback novels. His first novel, Pray Serpent's Prey, originally a Christian allegory of vampires invading a small Montana town involving a preacher who learns that the power of God alone could save the central characters, and which Grabowsky began penning in high school, was accepted and published by Critic's Choice Paperbacks/Lorevan Publishing (the same publisher as Koenig) under the pseudonym of Nicholas Randers. Grabowsky penned subsequent published works under the Randers name including The Rag Man' and Tale of the Makeshift Faire before 1990, and romance novels and self-help books under the pen name of Marsena Shane which include Sweet Dreams Lady Moon, The Easy Way to Great Legs, Your Heart Belongs to You and June Park up until 1991, when he broke away from his pseudonyms entirely. He also wrote a commissioned sequel to Wes Craven's Shocker, which was never produced. In 1988, he wrote the novelization of Halloween IV which was published under his real name, which went on to be a bestseller.

Grabowsky is "A well-established author of horror/fantasy fiction". In 2001, he completed his signature novel The Everborn, which won the award for Science Fiction Novel of the Year (2004) from the American Author's Association. In 2002, he established the small press of Diverse Media, which published a critically acclaimed special limited edition of his Halloween 4 novel. Following this he released works such as Diverse Tales, The Wicked Haze, the children's book Flatty Kat: Tales of an Urban Feline with Phyllis Haupert, and Nick Reads & Reviews, and Grabowsky subsequently cemented himself as a prominent name in horror/fantasy literature with those and a list of other novels and short stories, poetry and scripts. In 2008, he established the small traditional publishing house of Black Bed Sheet Books, which publishes fiction from many authors largely in the horror/fantasy category, and Black Bed Sheet Productions, which produces independent genre feature film. In 2008, he co-wrote the screenplay for Into the Basement with Norm Applegate, based on Applegate's book, for Triad Pictures, scheduled for release in 2009. Nicholas Grabowsky's work can now be seen in comic form. In 2010 Shot In the Dark Comics, an independent comic book company, acquired the rights from Grabowsky and has released a set of comics taken from his popular book "Red Wet Dirt." http://shotinthedarkcomics.com/1.html Looks like "A Rat To Me," has already been released in August 2010. The follow-up graphic novel The Father Keeper will be released in 2011.

Quotes about Grabowsky

"My Dear Nicholas: You seem to me---in a way that's entirely admirable----a man out of time. You're writing horror epics when the audience has become increasingly numbed by cinematic hokum and stale ideas. I salute you: your ambition, your dedication, your achievements, your blissfully complex imagination...." -Clive Barker

"Grabowsky succeeds in making the whole world creepy...." -Heidi Martinuzzi, E! Entertainment Television

"Grabowsky's writing is at times touching and emotional, however, his real talent is his ability to infuse his writing with a sense of dread and loathing that I have not experienced since H.P. Lovecraft..." -Tahoe Daily Tribune

"Grabowsky has imagination to spare.....!" -Sacramento Bee

"Impressive storytelling....." -Wes Craven

Bibliography

Novels

• (1988) Pray, Serpent's Prey (Nicholas Randers)
• (1988) Halloween IV
• (1988) Sweet Dreams, Lady Moon (Marsena Shane)
• (1989) The Rag Man (AKA 'Tattered,' Nicholas Randers)
• (1989) June Park (Marsena Shane)
• (1990) Tale of the Makeshift Faire (Nicholas Randers)
• (2002) The Everborn
• (2002) Halloween IV: The Special Limited Edition
• (2005) The Wicked Haze

Collections

• (2006) Diverse Tales
• (2008) Red Wet Dirt

Nonfiction

• (1988) The Easy Way to Great Legs (Marsena Shane)
• (1988) Nancy (Biography of the First Lady) (Marsena Shane)
• (1989) Your Heart Belongs to You (Marsena Shane)
• (2008) Nick Reads & Reviews

Anthologies and Publications of Recent Note

• (2005) Embark to Madness (Introduction)
• (2005) War of the Worlds (Introduction)
• (2005) The Invisible Man (Introduction)
• (2006) Buck Alice & the Actor-robot (editor, by author Walter Koenig)
• (2006) Fear: An Anthology of Horror & Suspense (Introduction)
• (2007) Shocking Tales of Murder & Insanity (Editor, by Jake Istre)
• (2007) Echoes of Terror (short story, Looks Like a Rat to Me)
• (2007) Doorways Magazine (Issue #4, short story, The Yuletide Thing)
• (2008) You're Dead Already...Living in Hell (Editor, by Jake Istre)
• (2008) From the Shadows (short story, The Freeway Reaper)

Children's

• (2006) Flatty Kat: Tales of an Urban Feline (with Phyllis Haupert)

Comics

• (2010) "Looks Like A Rat To Me" (Shot In The Dark Comics)
• (2011) "The Father Keeper" Graphic Novel (Shot In The Dark Comics)

References

• Fantastic Fiction.co.uk [1]
• Encyclopedia of Speculative Fiction [2]
• Open Library [3]
• American Author's Association [4]
• Internet Movie Data Base [5]

External links

• Official website
• Black Bed Sheet Books
• Nicholas Grabowsky at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database

See Also

• List of horror fiction writers