Splatterpunk legend and award-winning horror author Edward Lee announced his retirement on August 20 with a brief but earnest Facebook post.
“Friends, on this memorable day that is August 20, the great HP Lovecraft’s birthday, I must announce my retirement,” Lee wrote. “Getting too old and too hobbled with health problems to continue. The tank is officially empty, but I must say that since 1982, it’s been a wonderful ride, and I’m privileged to have written for all that time and to have had you all for an audience. Without you all, I couldn’t have done any of it. So let me use this space to convey to you my most heartfelt thanks. I wish you all the very best!”
Lee, 68, is a master of horror fiction and is most known for his intensely — some say over-the-top — extreme works like Header, The Bighead, White Trash Gothic, and The Pig. His four-book City Infernal series is another of his more popular works where he introduced readers to an inventive version of Hell via the city of Mephistopolis. Lee cites H.P. Lovecraft as his strongest influence, but make no mistake, Lee is an unmitigated original who himself influenced some of the top extreme horror writers today. Any authors worried about crossing perceived lines of depravity with their fiction never need to worry because Lee paved over the lines while paving the way for future writers of extreme horror.
The trailblazing Lee wrote more than 50 novels, brazenly forging his own path with a brand of horror that pushed the envelope and challenged the imaginations — and stomachs — of even the most hardcore readers. In 2022, five-time Splatterpunk Award winner Ryan Harding wrote in his foreword for The Bighead: The Demon Text, “All of us only needed to read about two chapters to understand that our preconceived notions on the limits of imaginative sickness had been shattered forever.”
On a personal note, much of Lee’s output is right up my alley as I love backwoods horror. Creekers is my favorite Lee novel. The two things that impressed me most about Lee’s work is, No. 1, how many times I actually said under my breath “geez Louise” while reading some of his books. No. 2 is how much I laughed even though I was reading the most debauched scenes I’ve ever read. It wasn’t a funny laugh either. It was an uncomfortable laugh like “heh-heh-heh” usually followed by “geez Louise.” Lee is one of the few authors I’ve read who can elicit a visceral response from me. Nobody writes quite like Lee.
Among Lee’s notable works is his story “Mr. Torso,” which was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award in the Short Fiction category in 1994. Lee won twice at the inaugural Splatterpunk Awards in 2018, taking home Best Novel for White Trash Gothic and Best Novella for Header 3, which he co-authored with Ryan Harding. He’s received a total of nine Splatterpunk Award nominations and was the recipient of the 2020 J.F. Gonzalez Lifetime Achievement Award for his contribution to extreme horror fiction. His novel Header was adapted into a film released on DVD in 2009, and it featured him and the late Jack Ketchum in cameo roles as state troopers.
I think one of the strongest testaments to Lee’s influence is the novel Lakehouse Infernal by Christine Morgan. The story is not only inspired but set in Lee’s Infernal universe. Morgan shared in an interview I wrote for Ginger Nuts of Horror that Lee’s “vision of Hell incorporated mythologies beyond just the Dante-esque and Judeo-Christian, while also modernizing it to keep pace in its twisted way with earthly technology, combining torture and horror and atrocity with wit and humor and some of the most fantastically vivid and graphic descriptive language I’d ever seen was just so brilliant, so fun! I think what really clinched it was something right near the beginning, with a demonic scepter made from petrified aortas; that anybody could even THINK of that little detail!” By the way, Lakehouse Infernal won the 2020 Splatterpunk Award for Best Novel.
According to his Amazon bio, Lee was born on May 25, 1957, in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Bowie, Maryland. He served in the U.S. Army’s 1st Armored Division in Erlangen, West Germany in the late 1970s. In his civilian life, Lee worked as a municipal police officer for a short time in Cottage City, Maryland. He also attended the University of Maryland, majoring in English, but quit in his last semester to pursue his dream of becoming a horror novelist. Lee wrote in his spare time while working as the night manager for a security company in Annapolis, Maryland for more than 15 years. In 1997, he realized his dream of being a full-time writer, spending many years in Seattle before moving to St. Pete Beach, Florida.
As I write this, Lee’s retirement announcement received nearly 500 reactions and more than 140 comments from authors, fans, and readers praising him, thanking him, and acknowledging his influence on horror fiction. Among the commenters and well-wishers on Lee’s retirement post were authors Chet Williamson, Kristopher Rufty, Robert Essig, Christine Morgan, Michelle Garza, Eric LaRocca, Candace Nola, and Daniel Volpe.
Here’s a sampling of the comments.
“Your work has created an amazing ripple effect that will always continue on,” commented two-time Splatterpunk Award-winning author Aron Beauregard.
“You’re one of the best to have ever done it, and so many of us owe you a debt,” added Splatterpunk Award nominee Judith Sonnet.
“You will forever be a legend, Ed,” commented Bram Stoker Award-winning author Kealan Patrick Burke. “Glad to have known you, however peripherally. Generations will continue to hold you in high regard, and rightly so.”
“You are a living legend,” added author Terry Miller. “Your work turned me onto a whole new world of horror books, showing me that it didn’t have to be so cookie-cutter. Thank you for the stories.”
“Applause for all you’ve done,” commented Mort Castle, a 2023 recipient of the Bram Stoker Award’s Lifetime Achievement Award. “Applause, too, for the professional way you’ve done it. You have been and are the real deal. And thanks for offering a role model in an era in which worthies like you are often not easily found. Dig your retirement — lots.”
Two-time Bram Stoker Award-winning author Brian Keene credited Lee as one of the writers who inspired his career. Keene and Lee were two of nine authors who collaborated on the 2013 novel Sixty-Five Stirrup Iron Road.
“Edward Lee’s retirement is bittersweet,” Keene wrote on Facebook, “but it’s something that few authors ever actually get to do, and I like that he can now spend his good days rereading Lovecraft, M.R. James, Dunsany, and his other favorites. And that is something all of us can be enviable of. When I was first starting out, Lee, Dick Laymon, and Dallas Mayr (Jack Ketchum) saw something in me. I don’t know what or why. But because of them, I’ve had an almost 30-year career doing what I love. And I will always love them and will always be grateful.”
LIONEL RAY GREEN 
Leave a comment