February 8, 2026
By Adam Messer
Steven Philip Jones is an author who loves horror and adventure and has been telling stories since he was a wee child.
Please introduce yourself.
Hi, all, my name is Steven Philip Jones. I’m a husband, dad, grandpa, and I’ve been selling my stories to all kinds of media since 1987. My best known credits are H. P. Lovecraft’s Worlds, my Sherlock Holmes pastiches and my non-fiction text The Clive Cussler Adventures: A Critical Review.
What genres do you write and why?
I’m a genre writer. I’ve always gravitated towards horror and adventure—I don’t know why and I don’t care—but I’ve written plenty of other genres: mysteries, westerns, romances, science fiction, fantasies. Right now I’m writing my first hard case crime novel.
What is your earliest memory of reading?
I suppose either “The Yellow House Mystery” or a book from some thirties or forties or fifties series about a boy and his dog. I want to say it was called “Ruff and Ready” but I don’t think that’s correct. The title “Paydirt” comes to mind for some reason. All I remember for sure is that the main character and some friend of his are throwing a football back and forth across a street and end up accidentally hurling it through the open rear window of a passing car. Now what are they going to do to get it back? For a kid’s book, that’s okay conflict.
When did you know you wanted to write? How did it happen?
I know it happened on a cool day in August 1969. I was nine years old and was looking out an upstairs window at our backyard. My dad was walking from the garage towards the house and it hit me that I wanted to be a writer.
A little backstory: my dad bought one of those cast iron Underwood antique typewriters for work and he brought it home a few months earlier. God, those Underwoods are beautiful. I’ve got a repurposed lamp made out of one in my office. Anyway, I sat down in front of it and Dad never got it back. I literally took to it like a duck to water, except I started writing stories. After that, whenever a teacher or someone else asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I told them: “A writer.”
That is the earliest memory I have, but a few years ago I came across my Kindergarten report card and there’s a comment on it from my teacher: “Steve loves to tell the other children stories.” I still don’t remember doing anything like that, but it shows I’ve always been inclined towards making up stories.
What’s one of your favorite scenes in one of your books?
It’s from an historical-mystery called “King of Harlem.” The setting is Harlem in 1936 during Orson Welles’s Voodoo Macbeth for the Works Progress Administration. Ther scene is where the detective, a retired Chicago Cubs pitcher named Sassafras Winters, is being stalked by three callous fellows inside The Lafayette Theater. Winters turns the tables on them by taking advantage of the sets, lighting and costumes. I still enjoy reading that scene.
What makes a good character? A bad one?
A good character is any character that you want to keep reading about. Someone you’d like to have a beer with. Hero or villain, it doesn’t matter, though you might want to be friends more with the former. A bad character is any character you could not care less about. No beer for him.
What moves the story for you?
Solid action. Solid narrative. Solid dialogue. Ditto plot and characters and structure.
What is your favorite book and why?
Dracula! I buy new copies of that book the same way I buy every new Neil Diamond compilation that comes out. I love the Sherlock Holmes Canon and Edgar Allan Poe’s greatest hits, but nearly every writer born twenty years on either side of me were influenced by Doyle and Poe, too. But Dracula is my favorite book. I love reading it and about it, and I am very very proud to be the first writer to faithfully adapt the novel and “Dracula’s Guest” into a different medium, in this case comics.
Why? Dracula mixes together my favorite genres, horror and adventure. It takes place in two of my favorite settings, late Victorian England and some lost wilderness. You have the clash of two eras, the Old World with The Industrial Age… the clash of Good and Evil… and Count Dracula is the greatest villain in literature! Only Fu Manchu comes close to touching him and it’s not really that close. Dracula sucks up all the oxygen in the book’s first eighty pages, then he only appears a couple more times in the next 250 or so pages, but he still dominates the story. You know, I’ve never thought about it before, but that may be a big reason why I love the film Star Trek: Wrath of Khan so much. Khan does kind of the same thing and that’s a hard trick to pull off.
What do you want to say to your audience?
Hi. How are you doing? I hope life is treating you well.
What advice do you have for new writers?
Well, mainly, that you should only try to get into this game if writing is part of your DNA. Remember my Kindergarten card? Making up stories has always been something I do. Can you say the same?
I’m not suggesting you ignore having a life or a family, but be aware that balancing those things with writing can get tricky if not frustrating at times. Kipling was right. He travels farthest who travels alone. But that is true or a lot of professions. Still, Stephen King once said something like, if writing was outlawed tomorrow, he’d keep at it and hide his stories under the floorboards. It wouldn’t matter if no one read them, because whenever a few days go by without him writing something, he starts to have withdrawal symptoms. I’ve been there, and if you’ve ever felt that way, then I’d say writing is in your DNA, too.
Beyond that, learn to write. Read about it. Take come classes. Think about the craft. And be fascinated by life. Learn as much as you can about as many different things and people as you can. And all the while write and write and write some more. And, finally, get used to disappointment. You may be a terrific writer but there is no guarantee you will ever succeed financially, so having a day job is a good idea.
Do you have anything else you would like to add?
To anyone out there who’s ever read or listened to any story I’ve written, I hope you enjoyed it.
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