Dan Wells is an American horror and science fiction author. He wrote his first movies, based on the Choose Your Own Adventure series, when he was in second grade. He followed up with several novellas, a serial and a series of comic books when he was in high school. He finished his first serious novel when he was 22. He is a graduate of Brigham Young University, with a bachelor degree in English, emphasizing writing and editing.
He is best known as the author of the John Cleaver series of fantasy horror books: I Am Not a Serial Killer (2009), Mr. Monster (2010), and I Don’t Want To Kill You (2011). The books follow 15-year-old John Wayne Cleaver, a diagnosed sociopath who lives above a morgue owned by his mother. He fears that he is fated to become a serial killer due to being plagued by constant homicidal urges, and so lives by a set of rules designed to keep his violent impulses in check. His careful regime of self-denial is threatened when he becomes ensnared in a serial killer case in which he senses a connection with the killer.
Horror writer F. Paul Wilson described I Am Not a Serial Killer as a “dazzling, unputdownable debut” with a protagonist “as chilling as he is endearing.” Young adult fiction author Jack Heath praised it as having “plenty of thematic merit”, and noted that “all the characters are richly identifiable, including–and I can’t stress enough how impressed I was by this–the serial killer…Wells is a first-time novelist, and yet he’s already created a sympathetic villain, the holy grail of thriller writing.”
Wells is one of the four authors (including Mary Robinette Kowal, Brandon Sanderson, and Howard Tayler) that contribute to the podcast Writing Excuses.
In 2012, Wells started a dystopian young adult series, beginning with Partials, followed by Fragments in 2013. The third and final volume in the series should be out in 2014.
He has also released two standalone novels, A Night of Blacker Darkness (2011, as Frederick Whithers) and The Hollow City (2012), as well as multiple short stories and essays.
Wells was nominated in 2011 for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer. A Utah native, he currently resides in Stuttgart, Germany. He is the brother of author Robison Wells.
Photo by Coltonlg. Text adapted from the author’s article and the I Am Not a Serial Killer on Wikipedia.