Richard Howard was born in April 1943 in Twickenham, in the county of Middlesex, England. Among the strongest influences in his life has been symphonic music, which he discovered at the age of 11, especially the works of Dmitri Shostakovich, Gustav Mahler, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Allan Pettersson, and Alan Hovhaness, whose several hundred works he has catalogued. [A complete transcript of his 1983 interview with Hovhaness can be found at www.hovhaness.com where there is also a link to the catalogue of works.] His earliest literary interest was a fascination with the world conjured by Lewis Carroll, an interest that grew to include Edgar Allan Poe, Saki, M.R.James, A.N.L.Munby, Arthur Machen, Sarban, William Samson, the shorter prose works of Oscar Wilde, and Henry James novel, The Turn of the Screw. He is the first to admit that his education and lifestyle have been unorthodox, which has given him an outsider s view of the world from which he feels he has greatly benefited. He worked at Pinewood Film Studios as a sound technician in the 1960s and then at Twickenham Studios before leaving for Cornwall to write his first novel in 1970. This he later destroyed along with several short stories and a second novel, a remaining fragment of which appears in the present book as the short story The Prisoner. In 1992 he joined The Actors Institute in London where he completed The Mastery and a considerable number of intensive acting workshops. He continued this interest with Tom Radcliffe s London Group Theatre, culminating in a performance of Harold Pinter s One for the Road, in which he played the part of Nicholas. Subsequently he completed a three year diploma course in counselling and has done further training in hypnotherapy. From an early age he has been interested in anything to do with the paranormal and has participated in several nocturnal investigations into ghostly phenomena. He is married, lives in Surrey and is currently working on his first screenplay."