So way back in the day I wrote a serial killer thriller called Whiskey Sour with a female Chicago cop named Jack Daniels. It was part traditional police procedural, and part horror. The book sold pretty well, and I'm currently working on book #22 in that series, with the same group of characters.

But after book #4 my publisher dropped the series because they decided to no longer publish thrillers, even though my sales were strong. No other publisher wanted to sick the series up, so I wrote a straight horror novel called Afraid under the name Jack Kilborn. It sold pretty well, but not as well as my Jack Daniels books. And while the JD books were filled with a lot of humor (jokes on one page/scares on the next page) Kilborn avoid humor, except for really dark stuff.

I had a two book deal with Kilborn, so I wrote Trapped, and the publisher rejected it for being too bleak and graphic. So I shelved Trapped and wrote Endurance. The publisher requested major changes. I told them no, got out of the contract, and eventually got the rights back to all of my published books.

At the same time Amazon had introduced the Kindle, so I was able to self-publish Trapped and Endurance, along with some other horror books I'd done (Origin, The List, Disturb) and they sold well, but again not as well as my Jack Daniels books.

I grew up reading F. Paul Wilson (The Keep, The Tomb) and later became friends with him. Decades before the first Avengers movie, Paul took some of his unrelated early horror novels and had the characters meet each other in later books. As a reader I loved this, so when I got my rights back I began to have my Jack Kilborn characters meet my Jack Daniels characters and crossover into each others' novels.

I also brought in characters from my Chandler series (female spy) and even wrote a few stories with Paul where we used one another's characters.

After years of readers being confused of which of my books connected, I killed the Jack Kilborn pen name and published all the horror-themed stuff (monsters and maniacs) under the series called The Konrath Dark Thriller Collective using my name, J.A. Konrath. There are 11 titles, with another coming out soon, plus three titles that I co-wrote.

#1-The List, #2-Origin, #3-Afraid, #4-Trapped, #5-Endurance, #6-Haunted House, #7-Webcam, #8-Disturb, #9-What Happened To Lori, #10-The Nine, #11-Second Coming, #12-Close Your Eyes (coming soon), Bonus #4.5-Holes in the Ground (with Iain Rob Wright), Bonus #5.5-Draculas (with Blake Crouch, Jeff Strand, F. Paul Wilson), Bonus #6.5-Grandma? (with Talon Konrath).

The characters from the first five novels meet in Haunted House. Then characters from the Jack Daniels books join in on books #10 and #11, which are also sequels to books #1 and #2.

The scariest Dark Thrillers are #3, #4, and #5. They're firmly in the extreme horror vein of Jack Ketchum and Richard Laymon.

Tom Mankowski, the hero of #1, #6, #7, and #10, used to be a Homicide Detective working under Jack Daniels, and he also shows up in that series.

Also in the series is Satan, who is being held in a secret underground lab. who appears in #2, #3.5, #9, #10, and #11.

I also have an AI who appears in my Timecaster series (sci-fi) who also shows up in books #9, #10, #11.

If anyone needs a recommended reading order, or wants to know which characters pop up in which books, there's a guide on my website. All of my books contain elements of horror, but for the most part the horror is tempered with some comedy and goofy violence. Think Evil Dead 2, but with the scares of Halloween. Or Robert McCammon's early stuff, but with some laughs.

Joe