<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

Roberta Lannes (b. 1948) was born in Southern California and currently lives in Valencia with her husband, British software developer for the J. Paul Getty Trust, Mark Sealey. She was a member of a professional improvisational comedy troupe, and did stand-up comedy in a club on Sunset Boulevard before becoming a fine and digital arts teacher at Valencia High School. Lannes’ father was a financial manager for the film production companies of many Hollywood actors, so she was fortunate to meet two of her favorite famous monsters, Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, unmasked. She began writing stories around the age of six, sharing them with some of her father’s clients. The one about a cat with forty toes that ate the eyes of children horrified her godmother Barbara Stanwyck, who told her that she would grow up to be a “writer of scary stories”. In 1986, Dennis Etchison discovered Lannes in his writing class at UCLA and published her first horror story, “Goodbye, Dark Love” in his acclaimed anthology Cutting Edge. Since then, her many visceral and erotic short stories have been published in such magazines and anthologies as Fantasy Tales, Iniquities, Pulphouse, Ténèbres, Alien Sex, Splatterpunks and Splatterpunks II, The Bradbury Chronicles, Still Dead:Book of the Dead II, Dark Voices, Best New Horror, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, The Mammoth Book of Werewolves, The Mammoth Book of Frankenstein, Dark Terrors, Darkside: Horror for the Next Millennium, Love in Vein II, Lethal Kisses, The Mammoth Book of Dracula, Dark of the Night, Bal des Loups-Garous en Présence du Fantastique, White of the Moon, The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women, Taverns of the Dead, Don’t Turn Out the Light and Dark Delicacies. Lannes’ debut short story collection, The Mirror of Night, appeared from John Pelan’s Silver Salamander Press in 1997.