The Worm in Every Heart (35 page)

Born in England
and raised in Toronto, Canada,
GEMMA FILES
has been a film critic, teacher, and screenwriter. She won the 1999 International Horror Guild short fiction award for her story “The Emperor's Old Bones,” which appears in her collection
The Worm in Every Heart.
Both it and her earlier collection,
Kissing Carrion
, feature stories that were adapted into episodes of
The Hunger
, an anthology TV show produced by Ridley and Tony Scott's Scot Free Productions. She has also published two chapbooks of poetry. Her first novel,
A Book of Tongues: Volume One of the Hexslinger Series
(ChiZine Publications, 2010), was a Stoker first novel finalist and won a
DarkScribe Magazine
Black Quill award for “Best Small Press Chill” in both the Editor's and Readers' Choice categories.
A Rope of Thorns
(2011) and
A Tree of Bones
(2012) complete the trilogy. An Omnibus Edition including three new Hexverse short stories (“Hexmas,” “Like A Bowl of Fire” and “In Scarlet Town (Today)”) was released in December, 2013.
We Will All Go Down Together: Stories of the Five-Family Coven
, a story-cycle of linked short fiction, was released in August, 2014. Her latest novel,
Experimental Film
, will be released in November, 2015. You can find out more about Gemma Files at
http://musicatmidnight-gfiles.blogspot.com
.