Bentley Little was born in Arizona
a month after his mother attended the world premiere of Psycho. His best friend in grammar school was Stephen Hillenburg,
who went on to create the Nickelodeon cartoon Spongebob Squarepants. Bentley received his BA in Communications
and MA in English and Comparative Literature at California State University
Fullerton, the alma mater of James Cameron and Kevin Costner. A brilliant
student who graduated at the top of his class, he was nearly expelled in his
junior year following a rancorous closed-door confrontation with college
administrators. The reasons are unknown as his records remain permanently
sealed. His Master’s thesis was the novel The
Revelation, which was later published and won the Bram Stoker Award in
1991. Since then, he has written ten more novels and his work has been
translated into seven different languages. Several of his novels have been
optioned for film.
Although
Bentley has a huge and growing legion of fans, his relationship to critics and
the horror establishment remains problematic. Publisher’s Weekly has
called his work “nightmarishly brilliant,” but both Kirkus and Library Journal
have refused to review his work and mention of his name in their pages has been
strictly prohibited. A reclusive figure who grants few interviews and is rarely
seen in public, Bentley has still managed to so anger editors of anthologies
and horror magazines that they will not review his work or print any of his
short fiction. In her Year’s Best
overview, Ellen Datlow has consistently pretended that Bentley Little does not
even exist! Conversely, the world’s top two horror writers, Stephen King and
Dean Koontz, are huge fans of Little’s fiction. Draw
your own conclusions.
Published
reports that for several years Bentley worked in a series of carnivals and
strip clubs throughout the Southwest or that he founded a radical environmental
group to perform acts of eco-terrorism can neither be confirmed nor denied.
A true underground success story, whose
fame has grown entirely by word of mouth, Bentley Little has produced the best
horror fiction of the 1990s and seems poised to break through to the mainstream
in the new millennium. The fact that bookstores in Alabama and Mississippi will
not carry his work, that his books have been banned from libraries in 34
states, that at least 18 college literature course currently teach his fiction,
that he has made bitter enemies with literally dozens of other writers and
editors, two of which have vowed to physically attack him if they ever see him,
virtually guarantees that this provocative author will be providing us with
thought-provoking horror for a long time to come.