Gregory Funaro Books in Order

Gregory Funaro grew up in Cranston, Rhode Island, and he started making stories early. In fourth grade he wrote one called The Ghost in the Window, a title he still jokes might be his finest work, even though the manuscript has long since disappeared.

The stage came before the page. After high school he studied theatre at the University of New Hampshire, then went on to earn an AM in theatre arts from Brown University and an MFA in acting from the FSU/Asolo Conservatory. He later worked as an actor in New York City and in regional productions around the country.

Writing was not the original plan.

By his own account, it started more casually than that. While working with an acting troupe, he began pouring spare creative energy into screenplays and fiction, first as a hobby and then as something harder to put down. He has said he never had a single lightning-bolt moment that turned him into a novelist. It simply grew, idea by idea, into a second career alongside many years teaching drama at East Carolina University, where theatre and storytelling kept feeding each other.

His first published novel, The Sculptor, came out of a childhood image that stayed with him, the statues around his grandfather's pool and the eerie thought that they might come alive at night. Funaro flipped that memory inside out and imagined living people turned into sculpture instead. The result was a dark thriller built around FBI agent Sam Markham, art historian Cathy Hildebrant, and a killer obsessed with Michelangelo. He wrote much of that first thriller on an early-morning schedule before teaching, which fits the driven feeling of the book itself. He followed it with The Impaler, another brutal Markham case that keeps the focus on obsession, ritual, and the strain of hunting monsters for a living.

Then his work took a sharp turn toward younger readers. After the birth of his daughter, he found the daily move from researching violent criminals to caring for a new baby harder and harder to square. That shift opened the door to Alistair Grim's Odditorium and Alistair Grim's Odd Aquaticum, middle grade fantasies that mix Victorian atmosphere, magical machinery, sea monsters, and a runaway chimney sweep named Grubb who finds an unexpected family.

He likes stories where strange places have rules of their own.

That shows up again in Watch Hollow and The Alchemist's Shadow, where Lucy and Oliver Tinker step into Blackford House, a home full of clockwork secrets, living wooden animals, and danger in the surrounding woods. The house is a setting kids can imagine walking through, but it is also a machine, a mystery, and sometimes a trap. These books are spooky, but they are also warm, with a strong pull toward family, courage, and the idea that a house can hold both comfort and fear. Readers who enjoy puzzle-box settings and a little darkness without losing heart tend to find a lot to like there.

In 2025, Funaro returned to adult suspense with All the Silent Bones, a story about childhood friends, an old pond, and the kind of buried damage that does not stay buried. Across his books, whether he is writing for adults or kids, he keeps coming back to hidden histories, found family, damaged people, and the moment when ordinary life tips into the uncanny. His books have been translated into more than half a dozen languages, and Watch Hollow was a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection.

He now lives with his family in Rhode Island. After a long run teaching theatre, he is listed as a professor emeritus and still at work on new fiction.