John Waynick

Urban, Gaslamp, and Cosmic Stakes walk into a Saloon

John Waynick writes about the places where lamplight fails and old things wake. His stories unfold in fog-wrapped streets and forgotten American corners; worlds where con men stumble into genuine hauntings, where the cosmic and the intimate collide, and where the rules governing reality turn out to be more negotiable (and more dangerous) than anyone suspected. His work lives in the shadowland between urban fantasy and cosmic horror, where personal stakes meet forces that don't care about persons at all. When he's not writing fiction, John builds environments for film, TV, and video games, bringing the same obsessive attention to atmospheric detail that bleeds into his prose. He's been working in 3D art for over two decades, though he finds fictional worlds considerably more cooperative than render engines. He believes the best stories happen when ordinary people with very human problems, in worlds where the extraordinary is considered ordinary, encounter something that shouldn't exist, and then have to figure out how to survive it anyway.