Vile Men

From the author's official website:

Rebecca Jones-Howe was born in Vancouver, but was moved to the sunny interior of Kamloops, British Columbia before she was able to hate the rain. She grew up with her sister in a patchwork post-war home that neighboured a large park with a swimming pool, so she had a lot of time to spend outside.

Always a shy child, Rebecca found solace in writing. She found great joy in penning stories in the third grade, where she and her classmates survived bizarre inland hurricanes, thwarted movie theatre murderers with toilet plungers, and killed ghosts by stepping on them. The chance to entertain her friends by reading her stories in class upped her self-esteem tenfold. Writing quickly became her go-to hobby.

Had Taylor Swift been around during the pop starlet days of Britney and Christina in the early 2000's, Rebecca probably wouldn't have been such an angsty teen. She spent most of her high school years writing lovelorn poems about guys who didn't like her. When she was seventeen she watched the cult classic movie, Heathers, and she learned that being an outsider didn't mean that she had to hate herself on a perpetual loop. She wrote a lot of introspectively dark short stories in her later teens, which paved the path to her wanting to pursue writing as a career.

After graduating, she took a year off school and work to write. Her so-called "Hiatus Year" proved to be a dud, as she spent most of her mornings drinking an entire pot of coffee with the hope that the caffeine would help her write. She also had a very minimal job cleaning the local post office sorting facility, which was an experience that built up far too much writing inspiration than it probably should have.

Rebecca went to college with the intention of getting a degree in Journalism, however, she dropped out in her second year when her Creative Writing class became the only one she ever went to. Since then, she found a group of like-minded writers online at LitReactor, and she refined her craft through classes and small groups. In 2012, she was the winner of the first WAR writing competition. She made it to the final eight in the second WAR event, and eventually built up a selection of stories that would become her first collection of short fiction, VILE MEN, due in summer of 2015 from Dark House Press.

Her short stories have been published in PANK, Pulp Modern, Punchnel's, Pantheon, Out of the Gutter and Pulp Metal Magazine, as well as The New Black, and Exigencies anthologies.

Rebecca currently lives in Kamloops, British Columbia with her husband, daughter, and two cats. She loves Canadian politics, gin, shopping online, mid-century style, and burning seasonally-appropriate scented candles. When she's not writing or working her crappy retail job, she crochets retro-inspired dolls as a part of her sister-duo craft business, Hound&Tooth.