Melanie Tem

Melanie Tem (1949–2015) was an American author of horror and dark fantasy, born in Saegertown, Pennsylvania. Alongside her writing career, she worked for decades as a social worker with elderly, disabled, and at-risk children, experience that informed the emotional realism of her fiction. Her debut novel, Prodigal, won the Bram Stoker Award for First Novel, and The Man on the Ceiling, co-written with her husband, fellow horror writer Steve Rasnic Tem, won both the Bram Stoker Award for Best Long Fiction and the World Fantasy Award for Best Novella. The couple, married for over three decades, also collaborated on Daughters and other works blending domestic drama with supernatural dread. Tem died in 2015 after a recurrence of breast cancer first diagnosed in 1997.