Matthew Heilman earned a PhD in English Literature from Duquesne University, with a focus on nineteenth-century British Literature – specifically, Romanticism, Victorian novels and poetry, and gothic and supernatural fiction. His dissertation explores the work of Anne Bannerman – a Scottish poet and contemporary of Walter Scott, Joanna Baillie, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge – ‘known’ for her supernatural ballads and femme fatale figures.

Matthew’s favorite writers are the Brontë sisters, Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, Henry James, Edith Wharton, May Sinclair, J. S. Le Fanu, M.R. James, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, Thomas Ligotti, Anne Rice, and Stephen King. Contemporary favorites include Adam Nevill, F.G. Cottam, John Langan, Sarah Waters, Laird Barron, Simon Strantzas, Philip Fracassi, Matt Cardin, Michael Wehunt, and Nathan Ballingrud.

In addition to his literary studies, Matthew is a connoisseur of dark music. Thanks to an influential older sister, he was reared on The Doors, Black Sabbath, The Rolling Stones, and Madonna, and was introduced to thrash metal at a dangerously impressionable age. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, he was a resident DJ for Pittsburgh’s longest-running goth/industrial club night, where he regularly spun gothic rock, post punk, and darkwave music. He also wrote CD reviews and conducted interviews with bands for the online zine StarVox in the early 2000s. Today, his tastes have broadened to include classic country, soul, and 80s/early 90s hip-hop alongside the usual death/doom, black metal, shoegaze, punk, and goth rock.

When he’s not devouring music biographies, DC comics, or scary music, he watches atmospheric horror movies and period films based on classic literature. He shares with Ryan an affinity for The Exorcist, The Shining, Alien, The Thing, and The Changeling, as well as more recent indie horror films like The Witch, A Dark Song, Hereditary, Midsommar, The Babadook, The Dark and the Wicked, and I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House.

He resides in Pittsburgh.