Michael Marano

Michael Marano is an American horror novelist and film critic, born in 1964 in Buffalo, New York. His debut novel, Dawn Song (1998), won the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel from the Horror Writers Association. He also published the novella Displacement and the short-story collection Stories from the Plague Years, which draws together work written across more than two decades. Beyond fiction, Marano built a parallel career as a film critic, and his genre commentary has been referenced by other writers discussing horror and science-fiction film and television. His fiction favors a literary, character-driven approach to horror over conventional scares, reflecting that critical background. Marano's award-winning debut placed him among the notable new voices in American horror fiction in the late 1990s, and he has continued to publish short fiction and criticism in the years since.