Phillip Thompson

“I have found that violence is strangely capable of returning my characters to reality and preparing them to accept their moment of grace. Their heads are so hard that almost nothing else will do the work.” — Flannery O’Connor

I grew up in rural East Mississippi, where I spent a huge portion of my childhood reading comic books (Batman), pulp fiction novels, history, and stories from Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen mystery magazines, courtesy of an aunt. The public library was the best building in town.

I’ve written six novels: Enemy Within, A Simple Murder, Deep Blood, Outside the Law, Old Anger, and Not Dead Enough. My short fiction has appeared in O-Dark Thirty, the literary journal of the Veterans Writing Project; The Starlite Pulp Review, Thrills, Kills ‘N’ Chaos; Out of the Gutter Online; The Shamus Sampler II, Yellow Mama, Near to the Knuckle, Mysterical-E, and The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. I attended the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference as a fiction writer. Follow me on Twitter at @olemissgrad38.