Who Am I?

Jason Bovberg got his start in publishing back in 1998, with the creation of his small press Dark Highway Press, collaborating with Robert Devereaux to publish Devereaux’s controversial Santa Steps Out, a self-proclaimed “fairy tale for grown-ups.” He followed that up by editing and publishing the highly acclaimed weird-western anthology Skull Full of Spurs, which collected tall tales from the likes of Richard Laymon, Jack Ketchum, Nancy Collins, and Edward Lee.

After an extended break raising a family and working for the tech industry, Bovberg penned a nostalgic noir in the Hard Case Crime vein called The Naked Dame, a naughty romp through the underbelly of 1950s Los Angeles.

In 2012, he began writing what would become the Blood trilogy—Blood Red, Draw Blood, and Blood Dawn—the first of which was picked up by Permuted Press. He likes to describe the Blood saga as a cross between Dawn of the Dead and John Carpenter’s The Thing, a wild tale of alien possession that has the trappings of a zombie story but is far more wacko! For the second two volumes, Bovberg resurrected Dark Highway Press to publish his books on his own, also bringing The Naked Dame to print for the first time.

In 2020, inspired by his first pulp-noir novel, he wrote Loser Baby, a multi-perspective crime romp through some of his old stomping grounds in Santa Ana, California. He followed that up with a raunchy border noir, Tessa Goes Down, also experimenting with perspective. Both of those novels are wild, comic thrillers that maximize voice. You might consider these Bovberg’s pandemic novels. Continuing in the pulp-fiction route (this time with a minimized voice), he wrote The Long-Ago Dead, specifically inspired by the great French crime writer, Jean-Patrick Manchette, and his masterpiece The Prone Gunman.

He lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, with his wife Barb and his daughters Harper and Sophie.