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Tom Pawlik is the highly imaginative, Christy Award–winning author of Vanish, Valley of the Shadow, and Beckon. His thought-provoking, edge-of-your-seat thrillers are infused with nonstop suspense that grabs you on the first page and won’t let go until the last.
Tom’s fascination with the weird, the creepy, and the unknown began at a very early age when he was introduced to a nineteenth-century storybook called Der Struwwelpeter—a collection of nightmarish morality tales by a German physician who obviously had too much time on his hands. The Mother Goose–meets–Stephen King nursery rhymes included “Daumenlutscher” (“Thumbsucker”), a disturbing yarn about a young boy who was warned that if he continued to suck his thumbs, the local tailor would chop them off with his sewing shears. Other macabre tales warned against playing with matches and being overly messy. Needless to say, Tom never played with matches, generally kept his room clean, and to this day retains the use of both his thumbs.
But the psychological damage was already done, and Tom’s warped imagination turned him to writing his own creepy stories at a rather young age. Alas, no publishers were brave enough to bring them to print, so Tom would not realize his lifelong dream of becoming a published author until the ripe old age of forty-two. Today, Tom lives in Ohio and is happily married with five children of his own… who, oddly enough, never sucked their thumbs.
Visit Tom’s website at www.tompawlik.com.