Alex J. Knudsen
About
Alex’s path to becoming an author started with a love for film, horror films, primarily in his youth, which led to a love of reading Fangoria magazine, a subscription he still has today. “My dad took me to the drive-in to see The Shining opening weekend. I was five years old. FIVE! As horrified as I was, I will always be thankful because this is where my love of storytelling took hold.” The first author he became obsessed with was, unsurprisingly, Clive Barker. Whether it was his Books of Blood or his novels, Clive’s writing transported Alex into another realm of vivid imagination he had yet to experience.
Alex’s own imagination and desire to tell his own stories began in the late 80s when his parents purchased the family’s first Hi8 video camera. He immediately started making short films, ridiculous ones with his friends, and for school projects, something unheard of at the time. “Every time a big paper came up in high school, I would propose to my teachers that I make a movie instead. They were so baffled at the request that I think they all said yes because they didn’t know how to react.” Alex directed the films, acted in front of the camera, and edited in camera.
This obsession continued into college, where he majored in acting at the University of Southern California, afterwards founding his own independent film company, Gantry Productions. He wrote, produced, directed, and edited two features and four shorts, as well as directing and editing numerous music videos. After writing a screenplay trilogy that he knew was too ambitious to shoot on his own, he took his wife’s advice, a fellow published author, to transition the screenplays into novels.
The mystery trilogy, entitled The Loss, would not, however, be the first novel Alex wrote. For his debut work, he returned to his love of horror to write the epic horror novel The Nawie. “Transitioning from writing screenplays to writing my first novel came naturally to me. Much like acting, directing film or theater, this was just another form of storytelling, which is something I’ve been obsessed with since I was a child.”
Alex’s next novel will be Lost Grove, the first in a two-part mystery scheduled to be released in the spring of 2024. To be followed later in the year by the second book in the story, The Obriallis Institute. What about The Loss trilogy? “I swear, it’s coming. The first novel, Disappearance at Devil’s Churn, is complete, but Lost Grove snuck in there and demanded to be written before I could finish the rest of the trilogy. I want to finish all three books before I release them. They need to be released in quick succession so I don’t piss people off with too many lingering mysteries hanging in the air,” he says with a laugh.
Alex grew up in Minnesota and then spent the next twenty-five years living in Southern California. He currently lives in Oregon with his three beloved basset hounds and his fellow author wife. When he’s not writing, Alex spends his time watching the NBA, especially his hometown Timberwolves, devouring horror movies (“I do watch other movies, I swear!”), and has a particular fondness for woodworking.