His first novel, Covenant, won the Bram Stoker Award for a First Novel in 2005. His sixth novel, NightWhere, was a Bram Stoker Finalist in 2013.Over the past decade he has published eight novels: Covenant (2004), Sacrifice (2007), The 13th, (2009), Siren (2010), The Pumpkin Man (2011), NightWhere (2012), Violet Eyes (2013) and The Family Tree (2014). His first five novels were issued in mass market and trade paperback by Dorchester/Leisure Books. Limited hardcover editions were also issued from Delirium Books, Necro Publications and Bad Moon Books. In 2011, Amazon.com's 47North imprint licensed his Leisure catalogue and his most recent novels have been released through Samhain Publishing. Covenant, Sacrifice, Siren and NightWhere have been translated or are in the process of being translated and released in Poland, Turkey, France and Germany.

Over the past 20 years, John’s short fiction has appeared in more than 50 magazines, including Space & Time, Dark Discoveries and Grue, as well as in a couple dozen anthologies, most recently in Necro Files: Two Decades of Extreme Horror, The Green Hornet Casebook, Kolchak: The Night Stalker Casebook, Best New Werewolf Tales (Vol. 1), Best New Vampire Tales (Vol. 1), Best New Zombie Tales (Vol. 2) and Fell Beasts. His short stories have also been translated and published into Italian, Polish and French. A wide selection of his short fiction has been collected in five short story collections – Deadly Nightlusts (Blasphemous Books, 2010), Creeptych (Delirium Books 2010), Needles & Sins (Necro Books, 2007), Vigilantes of Love (Twilight Tales, 2003) and Cage of Bones & Other Deadly Obsessions (Delirium Books, 2000).

“Letting Go,” one of the short stories from Needles & Sins was nominated for a 2007 Bram Stoker Award and three other short stories from the collection have been included in the Honorable Mention List of the annual Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror anthology co-edited by Ellen Datlow.

John is also the editor or co-editor of the anthologies Swallowed by the Cracks (Dark Arts Books, 2011), Sins of the Sirens (Dark Arts Books, 2008), In Delirium II (Delirium Books, 2007) and Spooks! (Twilight Tales, 2004). In 2006, he founded Dark Arts Books (www.darkartsbooks.com) to produce trade paperback collections spotlighting the cutting edge work of some of the best authors working in short dark fantasy fiction today (the press has since produced seven anthologies). He is also a digital artist and musician – some of his dark techno songs serve as the soundtrack to the horror fiction CD-ROM anthologies Bloodtype and Carnival/Circus, and in 2003 he scored Martin Mundt’s comedic serial killer stage play “The Jackie Sexknife Show” in Chicago.

John shares a deep purple den in Naperville, Illinois with a cockatoo and cockatiel, a disparate collection of fake skulls, twisted skeletal fairies, Alan Clark illustrations and a large stuffed Eeyore. There’s also a mounted Chinese fowling spider named Stoker courtesy of fellow horror author Charlee Jacob, an ever-growing shelf of custom mix CDs and an acoustic guitar that he can’t really play but that his son likes to hear him beat on anyway. Sometimes his wife is surprised to find him shuffling through more public areas of the house, but it’s usually only to brew another cup of coffee. In order to avoid the onerous task of writing, he records pop-rock songs in a hidden home studio, experiments with the insatiable culinary joys of the jalapeno, designs book covers for a variety of small presses, loses hours in expanding an array of gardens and chases frequent excursions into the bizarre visual headspace of ’70s euro-horror DVDs with a shot of Makers Mark and a tall glass of Newcastle.