Steven SA Sidor Books in Order

If you want bleak Midwestern crime: Skin River → Bone Factory
If you want supernatural thrillers in the present day: The Mirror's Edge → Pitch Dark
If you want pulpy monster adventure: Fury From the Tomb → The Beast of Nightfall Lodge
If you want cosmic horror in Arkham: The Last Ritual → Cult of the Spider Queen → Lair of the Crystal Fang
If you want sci-fi zombie mayhem: Death System: Zombicide Invader

Steven Sidor was born in Chicago, and that city seems to stay in his work even when the stories head somewhere stranger. He later studied at Grinnell College and earned a master's degree in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Today he lives near Chicago with his wife and two children.

He has said that storytelling started early. As a boy, he lived in a Chicago two-flat with his parents, sister, grandparents, and a grandfather he adored, a man with a long, colorful past. When his grandfather died, Sidor began writing stories partly as a way to hold on to him and partly because he had already learned that stories could leave something behind.

Stories also helped him survive.

He was bullied as a kid, and he discovered that if he could tell a good enough scary or neighborhood story, the boys who wanted to rough him up would stop and listen instead. He also spent time talking with older people on front porches and stoops, picking up local legends, crime stories, and gossip that were probably a little too grown-up for him. That mix of menace, curiosity, and human detail still feels central to what he writes.

By the time he was in school, teachers had noticed he could write. An English teacher gave him the kind of quiet encouragement that sticks. At Grinnell he won short story contests and thought he might go straight into a top creative writing program, but that plan fell apart when he was rejected. He pivoted, went to Chapel Hill, studied eighteenth-century literature, and wrote a thesis on Jane Austen. For a while he thought he might become a professor, until reading The Secret History reminded him that what he really wanted was to write fiction.

Before publishing books, he worked a long list of jobs that sound like the start of one of his novels: fry cook, jazz-club waiter, cactus seller, and case manager in social services. He also managed the night shift in an institution for adults with mental illness. He wrote at night, after work, and he still says nighttime is when he does his best work.

He came up through short fiction first, publishing horror stories online and using them to build confidence. Then he rewrote his first novel, heavily, listened to tough editorial feedback, and kept going until it sold. That book became Skin River in 2004, followed by Bone Factory, The Mirror's Edge, and Pitch Dark. Readers who like these books tend to respond to the cold Midwestern settings, the damaged people trying to hold themselves together, and the way ordinary crime slowly starts to feel haunted.

Then he leaned harder into the supernatural.

Writing as S.A. Sidor, he moved into pulp adventure and cosmic horror with Fury From the Tomb and The Beast of Nightfall Lodge, then into tie-in fiction with The Last Ritual, Cult of the Spider Queen, and Lair of the Crystal Fang. Even with the genre shift, the through line is easy to spot. He likes outsiders, people with more nerve than safety, and places where old violence never really stays in the past. He also likes a good monster.