About the Author

A lifelong Pennsylvanian, Daniel Pretorio has been in love with language for as long as he can remember. Long before he wrote fiction, he was copying dictionary definitions into notebooks by hand. This daily ritual reflected an early obsession with precision, usage, and the weight of individual words. Today he counts H.W. Fowler, Bryan Garner, and William F. Buckley Jr. among his most formative influences, alongside the literary and horror titans whose names fill his bookshelves.

By day, Daniel Pretorio works as a senior software engineer. Although this career that has little to do with haunted Victorians and fractured psyches, it represents the kind of systematic thinking that makes a complex novel hold together. He has taken numerous writing courses over the years, though he considers himself fundamentally self-taught, his voice shaped by voracious reading.

Tenebrous is his second novel and the first installment in the Belcorte Horror Series. His first book, originally published under a small press, will be revised and re-released as The Hour of Anguish, a prequel and the third entry in the series. In preparation for Tenebrous, he spent considerable time studying real therapeutic sessions, clinical papers, and first-person accounts of borderline personality disorder. He sought to represent Jillian Duport with honesty and compassion rather than sensationalism.

His love of horror began in childhood, when he was watching films like Blood and Black Lace, A Bell from Hell, and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? That formative diet of cinematic dread has never loosened its grip. He loves all eras of horror cinema, the 1970s in particular.

Daniel lives in Pennsylvania with his family and two cats, neither of whom are named Poe, though both may be conspiring to brick him into his basement.