John Howard is an English author, born in London in 1961. His fiction has appeared in several anthologies and the collection The Silver Voices. The majority of Howard’s stories have central and eastern European settings; many are set in the fictional Romanian town of Steaua de Munte. The Defeat of Grief is a novella set in Steaua de Munte and the real Black Sea

Black Sea

The Black Sea is bounded by Europe, Anatolia and the Caucasus and is ultimately connected to the Atlantic Ocean via the Mediterranean and the Aegean seas and various straits. The Bosphorus strait connects it to the Sea of Marmara, and the strait of the Dardanelles connects that sea to the Aegean...

 resort of Balcic.

Between 2003 and 2007 John Howard collaborated on eight short stories with Mark Valentine

Mark Valentine

Mark Valentine is an English author, biographer and editor.Valentine’s short stories have been published by a number of small presses and in anthologies since the 1980s, and the exploits of his series character, "The Connoisseur", an occult detective, were published as The Collected Connoisseur in...

, six of which featured Valentine’s long-running series character The Connoisseur, an occult detective whose real name is never revealed. All 23 tales of The Connoisseur, including the collaborations, were reprinted in The Collected Connoisseur (Tartarus Press

Tartarus Press

Tartarus Press is a small, international award-winning, independent small press run by R.B. Russell and Rosalie Parker. It has two distinct specialities....

, 2010).

Howard has written articles for numerous magazines including Book and Magazine Collector, Supernatural Tales, Wormwood, Studies in Australian Weird Fiction, and All Hallows for the Ghost Story Society

Ghost Story Society

The Ghost Story Society is a not-for-profit literary society whose members share an interest in supernatural fiction. Founded in Britain in 1988, it currently has an international membership and is administered by joint organizers Christopher Roden and Barbara Roden, owners of Ash-Tree Press, with...

. He contributed essays to the Fritz Leiber

Fritz Leiber

Fritz Reuter Leiber, Jr. was an American writer of fantasy, horror and science fiction. He was also a poet, actor in theatre and films, playwright, expert chess player and a champion fencer. Possibly his greatest chess accomplishment was winning clear first in the 1958 Santa Monica Open.. With...

 special issue of Fantasy Commentator (No. 57/58, 2004) and to the books Black Prometheus: A Critical Study of Karl Edward Wagner (Gothic Press, 2007), Fritz Leiber: Critical Essays (McFarlane, 2008), and The Man Who Collected Psychos: Critical Essays on Robert Bloch

Robert Bloch

Robert Albert Bloch was a prolific American writer, primarily of crime, horror and science fiction. He is best known as the writer of Psycho, the basis for the film of the same name by Alfred Hitchcock...

(McFarlane, 2009), all edited by Benjamin Szumskyj.

John Howard also wrote the introduction to a new edition of Francis Brett Young

Francis Brett Young

Francis Brett Young was an English novelist, poet, playwright, and composer.-Life:Brett Young was born in Halesowen, Worcestershire. He schooled first at a private school in Sutton Coldfield...

’s classic 1924 horror novel Cold Harbour (Ash-Tree Press, 2007).