Stephen Laws is a full-time novelist, born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1952. Married, with three children, he still lives and works in his birthplace.
Educated at Manor Park Technical School, he left to take up a career in local government. During this time, his short stories appeared on radio and appeared in various anthologies, winning him a number of awards.
Concentrating on a genre which is close to his heart - supernatural horror thrillers - his first novel, GHOST TRAIN was published in 1985 and gained excellent reviews, together with a degree of notoriety when subsequently published in paperback: posters of the novel, bearing the logo 'A journey into innermost terror' were removed by British Rail from each of their mainline stations due to fears that 'passengers might confuse this with our own advertising and become alarmed. . .'
A £30,000 publicity campaign went down the tubes as a result.
Laws' second novel - SPECTRE - followed in 1986 and is set in his birthplace, Byker. (A horror from the past stalks a group of childhood friends) The novel consolidated his position as a forerunner in the field of supernatural horror.
THE WYRM followed in 1987 (with its locale based on Hexham and Elsdon) and THE FRIGHTENERS in 1989 ( an Underworld novel in both senses of the term; in which a gangland war is fought using supernatural 'hit-men').
In 1992, Laws' police-procedural/horror-thriller, DARKFALL, was published to great critical acclaim - dealing with an electrical storm descending on an office block, resulting in the disappearance of everyone inside it.
Click on the book covers for information on each title.
