F.G. Cottam was born and brought up in Southport in Lancashire, attending the University of Kent at Canterbury where he took a degree in history before embarking on a career in journalism in London. He lived for 20 years in North Lambeth and during the 1990s was prominent in the lad-mag revolution, launch editing FHM, inventing Total Sport Magazine and then launching the UK edition of Men's Health . He now lives in Kingston upon Thames and his fiction is thought up over daily runs along the towpath between Kingston and Hampton Court Bridges. F.G. Cottam is the author of ten paranormally themed novels, a sequence begun with his award-winning The House of Lost Souls , first published in 2007 and translated into 16 languages. Recently he has delved into shorter fiction with a series of novellas themed around the Jericho Society, a sinister cult born in the French Revolutionary Terror and sustained since in a condition of strict secrecy. This cult originally featured in Cottam's novel Dark Echo , described in a Times review as: 'The perfect ghost story.' The novella series launched with his story, An Absence of Natural Light . His latest full-length novel is Harvest of Scorn , which completes the New Hope Island trilogy begun with The Colony and continued with its sequel Dark Resurrection . Cottam's stand-alone novels of paranormal terror include The Waiting Room , The Lazarus Prophecy and Brodmaw Bay .