Meet the Author
About MK Randall
Nevermore: The Night My Love Affair with Horror Began
Some kids grow up on fairy tales. I grew up on Poe.
While other mothers read their children stories of princesses and glass slippers, my mom tucked me in with The Tell-Tale Heart. I was five years old when she first read The Raven aloud, her voice soft but haunting, lingering on that famous line—
“Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore.’”
That was it. Hooked. Done for. While other children drifted off dreaming of castles and talking animals, I fell asleep to the rhythm of madness and melancholy. I didn’t stand a chance. I was an addict at five years old.
By the time I was ten or eleven, my reading habits had outgrown the bedtime stories. I discovered Salem’s Lot—my first real horror novel—and that book changed everything. Stephen King’s vampires weren’t charming or elegant; they were terrifying, crawling through windows and feeding on neighbors in small-town America. It was the first time I realized how horror could take the ordinary and twist it into something extraordinary and awful.
After that, I dove headfirst into the blood-soaked classics: Dracula and Carmilla. Each story fed my imagination—ancient castles, forbidden love, shadows that whispered your name. But my curiosity didn’t stop at fiction. I became fascinated by the real monsters—Countess Elizabeth Báthory, the woman rumored to have bathed in the blood of virgins, and the unsolved horror of the Black Dahlia murder, where truth was far stranger and darker than any story.
And then, of course, came The Vampire Lestat. Oh, how I fell for him—seductive, lonely, cruel, and human all at once. Anne Rice made the darkness beautiful, and I never looked back.
Looking back now, I realize I was a goth girl before there was even a word for it. I wore black because it felt like home, not rebellion. I loved the shadows not because I wanted to hide, but because I found beauty in what others feared.
My love of horror has never been about blood or gore—it’s about the poetry of darkness. The way fear makes us feel alive. The way monsters reflect our humanity.
It all started with a mother’s bedtime story and a raven that never stopped saying “Nevermore.”
And really… how could I ever go back to fairy tales after that?
