Meet the team members of the Horror Lounge: Contributor Jack Walters

As far as I am concerned, the written word is one of the most sublime powers in existence, alongside heavy metal and cats. As far back as I can remember, the first and the third of those have been my primary calling in life. I’ve been reading and writing every bit of genre fiction I can get my hands on as soon as I could tell one letter from the other, but at risk of damaging my ethos, I had a very love-hate relationship with horror in my youth. Like a moth who could read a thermometer, I was drawn to the light but too easily burned to get too close.

I devoured anything fantasy-related after my father made the interesting choice to teach my twin and I Dungeons and Dragons at age 6, and I can recall writing bad Star Trek: Enterprise spoofs in third grade. The scariest stories I dared delve into were “spooky” episodes of crime dramas and ghost stories which fell closer to Scooby-Doo than spectral. I got nightmares from A Haunting in Connecticut, when I could bear to watch them with sound. However, I could never resist reaching into the dark, especially in literary form. However, there was one sub-genre which infected me with a relentless and inescapable phobia: Zombie Apocalypse yarns.

An unwise reading choice of an article about the zombie crazy of the late 2000s left me sleepless for two solid weeks, with nightmares of the undead hordes destroying all of society haunting my dreams. This phobia stuck with me right up until high school, where a random encounter with the “World of Survival Horror” seduced me into woods lovely, dark, and deeply terrifying. At a going away party for a friend who loved zombie media, I watched Resident Evil: Afterlife, a movie I still argue was the shark-jump of the series but also served to spread the infection.

After that, you couldn’t keep me out of the horror section. I fell into Zombie games such as Left 4 Dead, which put me back in touch with Resident Evil, which eventually led to stumbling across the S. E. Perry Resident Evil novels. Soon, zombies became just another monster I couldn’t get enough of, alongside Eldritch-Evils-Mankind-Was-Not-Meant-to-Know, slashers, and sea monsters as the top of the tombstone. I also began to develop a love of horror movies, the cheesier the better. Evil Dead, Friday the 13th, and countless creature-features on the Sci-Fi channel kept me riveted to my screen, while horror games such as Dead Space, Left 4 Dead, and of course Resident Evil kept me white-knuckling my controller. Even the tabletop became another way to spread the fear as I traded DnD for Call of Cthulhu and Vampire: The Masquerade. 

By the time I finished my degree at the University of North Texas (Creative Writing with a minor in Japanese and a certificate in tech Writing) I had started looking deeper into the darkness and exploring why we look out the window into the night and make monsters of the shadows. As much as I loved having copious amounts of blood, bodies, and bad acting as background and making readers of my fiction shiver, I was amazed at how, once you looked past the special effects, the horrors we fought and fled from through stories were really the same fears and foibles humanity has experienced since we first found fire and used it to hold back the night, and that brought a new passion: discussing and analyzing the horrors which stirred in my dreams and slithered down to the end of my pen.

Today, I get to combine so many of my passions into one place. I first stumbled into being published with 1428 Elm in the Summer of 2025, which led me to a regular seat in this lovely little lounge of horrors with an amazing team I am pleased and proud to be a part of when I’m not working as a college writing tutor and freelance writer, playing all manner of games, or working on my own shuddersome yarns. So, pull up a chair and mind the shadows. They're dark and dangerous, but that’s where the fun hides.