John Howard (author)

John Howard is an English author, born in London in 1961. His fiction has appeared in anthologies, magazines, and the collections The Silver Voices, Written by Daylight, Cities and Thrones and Powers, and Buried Shadows. 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 resort of Balcic; the novellas "The Fatal Vision" (in Cities and Thrones and Powers) and The Lustre of Time form part of an ongoing series with Steaua de Munte architect and academic Cristian Luca as protagonist. Numbered as Sand or the Stars attempts a 'secret history' of Hungary between the World Wars.

John Howard has published three collections jointly written with Mark Valentine. Secret Europe comprises 25 short stories set in a variety of real and fictional European locations. Ten of the stories are by Howard and fifteen by Valentine. The expanded edition published in 2014 added an introduction and an extra story by Mark Valentine. Inner Europe (2018) is in the same vein, and comprises six stories by Howard and seven by Valentine. Powers and Presences (2020), This World and That Other (2022), and Possessions and Pursuits (2023) are tributes to the 'theological thrillers' of Charles Williams.

Howard contributed a story to Dreams of Ourselves, an anthology published in tribute to the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa. Contributors and editor used Pessoa heteronyms, with the authors' names only revealed in the sealed envelope supplied with each copy of the book.

Since 2003 John Howard has occasionally collaborated on short stories with Mark Valentine. Seven have featured Valentine's long-running series character The Connoisseur, an occult detective whose real name is never revealed. All tales of The Connoisseur then extant, including the collaborations, were reprinted in The Collected Connoisseur (Tartarus Press, 2010).

John Howard has written essays for numerous magazines including Book and Magazine Collector, Supernatural Tales, Wormwood, Studies in Australian Weird Fiction, and All Hallows for the Ghost Story Society. He contributed essays to the Fritz Leiber 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 (McFarlane, 2009), all edited by Benjamin Szumskyj. Most of these essays were included in Touchstones: Essays on the Fantastic (2014), which was a British Fantasy Award nominee the following year. In 2013 Howard took over the review column Camera Obscura in Tartarus Press' journal Wormwood, which he conducted until it ceased publication in 2022.