Terence Taylor was born in Jamaica, New York, and spent his childhood traveling the United States and Europe as an Air Force brat. Born black, gay and Catholic, the eldest child in a military family, Terence was whipped and emotionally abused while growing up by a father who raised him as brutally as he had been. Thanks to an eccentric maternal grandmother who shared her interests, Terence found refuge in horror movies and her eclectic collection of comic books, science fiction, classic mythology and fairy tales, and retreated into stories of his own.

Ironically, after college, Terence's storytelling skills led to twenty years of writing and producing children's television shows that idealized family life. At night, he roamed East Village dance clubs, art galleries and wrote stories that evolved a fictional worldview darker than that of his friends in children's and public TV. Not fitting into either the "African-American" or "queer" literary worlds, Terence found a unique voice in his childhood escape -- horror. His sinister, often satiric urban stories chronicled troubled everyday lives that tip over the edge into the astounding.

After ten years in Los Angeles, Terence abandoned children's television in 2001 to return full time to his first loves, New York and horror fiction. He arrived home two weeks after 9/11. Since then he's finished his first novel and had stories published in all three Dark Dreams anthologies, the first collections of horror and suspense stories exclusively by black writers. A Publisher's Weekly review called the third anthology, Whispers in the Night, "another slam dunk...after 2006's Voices from the Other Side" and added that "Outstanding stories by returning contributors include...the best of the bunch, Terence Taylor's brilliant discussion of racism, friendship and Hurricane Katrina in WET PAIN."

Terence Taylor's first novel, BITE MARKS: A Vampire Testament, is a Grand Guignol roman à clef set in 1980s New York, with notorious people and events woven into a fictional nightmare of the downtown art world/club scene. It takes us from a Fifth Avenue penthouse to subways inhabited by vampires who prey on late night commuters, from a West Village brownstone to East Village dance clubs and art galleries.

Behind the scares it's a story of diverse people in circumstances that seem beyond control, who can only survive by putting aside their differences to work together. It's been bought by St. Martin's Press as part of a two book deal, which includes a recently completed follow up to BITE MARKS, called BLOOD PRESSURE, which picks up the story of the survivors twenty years later. He's now working on Lucid Tea, a novel set in contemporary New York about love, loss, lucid dreaming and a cable deal with the Devil.

Terence uses the horror genre to explore deeply affecting human issues in our rapidly changing world, in the tradition of social commentators in other popular genres, such as Kurt Vonnegut, Ismael Reed, Mark Twain, Walter Mosely and Mikhail Bulgakov. What he calls horror falls into the categories of magical realism and satiric fantasy. Real people and events, contemporary and historic, are fictionalized and cannibalized to flesh out Terence's worlds, which gives his work the eerie familiarity of urban myth.

For him horror is a literature of fear and desire, from Homer and Edgar Allen Poe to Stephen King and Scott Sigler. He believes that "there's almost no literary atrocity imaginable that hasn't been exceeded in real life. Horror should no longer be just topping gruesome acts with worse, but digging deeper for the motives behind them, finding the horror in our humanity, and how we redeem ourselves."

After redemption, fear and desire are at the heart of Terence's writing and he uses one to illuminate the other. He mines what we dread most to create frightening fantasies rooted in a recognizable reality. By exploding what scares us into worst-case scenarios, he seeks to expose our true desires and what they say about us, no matter where that takes him. In the words of his namesake, Terence, a playwright of the Roman Republic, "Homo sum, humani nil a me alienum puto" -- "I am human, nothing that is human is alien to me."

Terence is a member of the Writer's Guild of America East, and received a BS in Communication Arts and Science from St. John's University, where he graduated Cum Laude. He currently resides in Brooklyn, in a happy world of his own invention.