ABOUT LEE

From an early age, reading and writing were the only things I could do with any aptitude. People laughed at things I said when I was a child, so I became a show-off. And I think I might have become a perfectly normal human being, too, were it not for Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, that dog detective cartoon from the 1970s featuring creatures like “The Ghost of Captain Cutler,” “The Creeper” and “Space Kook.” I was captivated by the show’s combination of monsters, mysterious settings and goofiness. Then I got my hands on MAD magazine, Creepy and Eerie, Stephen King and Poppy Z Brite, Twisted Sister tapes, David Lynch movies, and everything I could find by William S. Burroughs. I was for all intents and purposes useless at that point, so I became a college professor.

As a fiction writer, I’m the author of the horror story collection Backwaters: 12 Murky Tales and Ballad of Jasmine Wills, a novel that takes on reality TV, body shaming and hicksploitation. I’ve published short stories in Cosmic Horror Monthly,  Southern Humanities Review, If I Die Before I wake vol 3, Shadowy Natures from Dark Ink Books, HellBound’s Anthology of Bizarro, Dark Dossier Magazine, Steel Toe Review, and the Scare You to Sleep Podcast.

On the scholarly side, I’m the author of nonfiction books Zombiescapes & Phantom Zones and Ecosublime. I’ve published articles in Twentieth-Century Literature, Mississippi Quarterly, ISLE, Canadian Literature, Studies in the Novel, and South Central Review. I’ve presented academic papers in such places as the Sorbonne, Tsinghua University in Beijing, Dogus University in Istanbul, and the Warsaw School of Social Psychology. I’m a professor of English at the University of Montevallo, and my areas of expertise are ecocriticism and critical theory.