Ontario Horror Author Tobin Elliott: Ugly Stories & Terrible People

Dear horror literature fans, welcome to this edition of our Dread Con Treasures: interviews from Dread Con 2024. Today, we bring you an edition with one of our favourite Ontario horror authors: Tobin Elliott. I am impressed by the talent of so many local authors, and Tobin is for sure one of those who has left me mesmerized.

As a short story, Skarekr0e and I were walking through the flea market, eating hot dogs, when he mentioned that someone had recommended the author Tobin Elliott to him. At that moment, we spotted one of his books on a shelf, and, by an incredible coincidence, we were talking about him when Tobin himself turned around and started talking to us. We talked about how excited we were to meet him and how much we had heard from him and wanted to read his books. We bought a book and juggled our hot dogs while trying to talk to him, hand him the books, and get an autograph without smearing them with mustard.

From the very first moment, we realized what a wonderful person he is. The only thing left was to get to know his work, and to be honest, I still can’t believe that an author of such incredible and horrifying stories is so close to us, right here in Oshawa, Ontario. It’s impossible to describe in a few words how the first book made me feel, so we’ll save that for a future blog post. For now, I’ll leave you with this wonderful interview with Tobin:

SINISTER CUPCAKES: Please introduce yourself, and please tell us any pen names or pseudonyms you write under.

TE: Hey! I'm Tobin Elliott and I write under the wildly creative name, "Tobin Elliott" ...come on, with a handle like "Tobin" did I really need to bust out something different? A little about me, huh? Fine. My tagline (and also the name of my two-volume short story collection) is that I write "ugly stories about terrible people doing horrible things." What? You want more? Fine! So bossy! Geez! I've been married for almost 34 years, and I have two adult children, one married, one engaged, both absolutely crazy in the best way. I also have a three-year-old Doberman/German Shepherd cross who possesses about two brain cells, and lives to be loved.

SC: Tell us where you're from and any details about your background or past you wish to share

TE: I was born and raised in Oshawa (aka "The Dirty Shwa") but also spent some formative teen years in a cool little town called Barry's Bay. Fun fact: I fictionalized Barry's Bay into the town of New Hope and set much of my six-book horror series there. There's absolutely accurate landmarks and historical events woven into the series. I've been writing for about fifty-ish years, but got really serious about it not quite thirty years ago. I've been writing quite a bit since then, and I've been lucky enough to have something published pretty much every year since 2010.

I was a Communications Specialist for a large Canadian Telecom company, where I created and rolled out communication campaigns for the roughly 8000 employees globally, ranging from simple emails to large web-based and poster campaigns. And I also taught Creative Writing at two different college campuses for almost two decades and I'm proud to say I saw quite a few of my students go on to be published. Finally, I come from a highly dysfunction family of sociopaths, narcissists, and addicts. I draw on a lot of that in my horror.

SC: What are some of your favourite horror authors or books and why?

TE: Stephen King (obviously), especially 'Salem's Lot, The Shining, It, and the Night Shift collection. Clive Barker (also, obviously), especially Imajica and The Great And Secret Show. Jack Ketchum is brilliant and definitely an influence. His Girl Next Door novel taught me a better way to write. Of the newer mainstream horror authors, I really like Matthew Lyons (The Night Will Find Us, A Black And Endless Sky) Philip Fracassi (Behold The Void, Boys in the Valley) Brom (Slewfoot, Evil In Me) Andy Davidson (In The Valley Of The Sun) Keith Rosson (Fever House, The Devil By Name) And, seriously, if you haven't read Carsten Stroud's incredible Niceville trilogy (Niceville, The Homecoming, The Reckoning), you're seriously missing out. Police procedural, military action, and deep, thick, Southern Gothic horror. There's nothing else out there like it.

I"m also a big fan of indie authors such as Dave Buzan (In The Lair of Legends) J.E. Erickson (Dust Bunnies From Hell, Tale of the Abrams Witch) L.C. Marino (Bury The Child, Burn The Girls) Claire Horsnell (The Crowsbrook Demons, The Caretakers) C.F. Page (Native Fear, Orphans of the Atercosm, Anterior Skies, Vol 1) Andrew Najberg (Gollitok) Tim McGregor (Hearts Strange And Dreadful, Eynhallow) Tamel Wino (Ékleipsis, Ékleipsis: the Abyss) Mike Dineen (Latcher) Marcus Hawke (Grey Noise) Dr. Stuart Knott (Here There Be, Whispers From The Black) Brian Bowyer (Old Too Soon, Kill Factor) Eric Leland (Inhuman)

SC: What are some of your favourite horror movies and why?

TE: My favourite horror movie of all time was, is, and always will be The Exorcist, simply because it was the first horror movie to truly scare the everliving shit out of me. I'm less about the slasher and more about the dread, so for me, I like stuff like The Blair Witch Project, The Thing, Nosferatu (seriously, can anyone out-vampire Max Schreck as Count Orlok?), Psycho, Alien, Evil Dead, The Descent, Jaws, the original Night of the Living Dead, Rec, The Cabin In The Woods, The Others, Paranormal Activity, The Babadook, The Strangers. I know I'm missing a ton, but these ones all managed, in one way or another, to build that anticipatory sense of dread in me. That manipulation of my mind, where I'm conjuring possible horrors to come, is a powerful feeling. And, sometimes those horrors do come, which is terrible, but also cool, because it was what I expected. Sometimes, the horrors I expect don't come...sometimes it's worse. Either way, a splendid time is had by all.

SC: What do you like to do for Halloween? What are your favourite aspects of the spooky season?

TE: Okay, here's my hot take...yes, I'm a horror author. Yes, I love horror. But I avoid Halloween like the plague. I dislike it immensely. For me, October in general and Halloween in particular feels like a cleaned up, watered down, sanitized version of something really cool but now it's family and kid friendly. So, what I like to do for Halloween—says the miserable, grumpy old horror author—is pretend it doesn't exist, and my favourite aspects of the spooky season is the relief felt when November 1st rolls around. Hey, I never claimed not to be weird.

SC: Now that we have broken the ice... How would you describe your writing style?

TE: I love the fictional horror monsters. The vampires, the werewolves, the mummy, the zombie, that creature in that black lagoon, that monster that Dr. Frankenstein made, the demons that are looking to possess us, and the Great Old Ones who are just a thin veil away, looking to cross over and crush us like the ants we are. At the same time, of all of those, I still believe that we humans are still the worst monsters out there, because we're real and our appetite and ability for cruelty to each other is unmatched by any fictional horror. So, I mash them together as much as possible.

For me to describe my writing style, I'd say it's very realistic, very visceral. I see myself as a weird, lumpy conglomeration of Stephen King's storytelling, Jack Ketchum's never-look-away-never-blink visceral cruelty, Elmore Leonard's sharp, crackling dialogue, but also (hopefully) the gorgeous language of Ray Bradbury, and the madness and dread of H.P. Lovecraft.

SC: What are your favourite aspects of horror in general?

TE: For me, it's two things. The first is to have a story (either one I've written, or one I'm reading) get inside the reader's mind enough, to paint that vivid, emotional picture with compelling characters, to make that reader experience that delicious dread that comes with being terrified that things may not work out well. And sometimes? They don't. So, if the reader gets crushed, that's not necessarily a bad thing. The other is that horror allows us a safe place to pull out those demons we've carefully and systematically dug holes—or at least very shallow graves—and drag them into the light. We can twist and turn them, bend them this way and that, and examine them to understand what it is about them that messes us up so badly. And then, we can move them around and control them. They're still scary, they still may have a hold on us, but at least for a little while, WE control THEM. Good horror is about feeling emotion. We can experience the darkness, but we live to talk about it later.

SC: What are your horror inspirations?

TE: Interesting question. Aside from all I've mentioned above, I think, for me, I get inspiration from everywhere—song lyrics, stories on the internet, world events, reading something and thinking "oh, I'd do that so differently," and from life experiences. In the second collection of my short stories, I have a handful of stories that were inspired by that family I mentioned above. In my dedication, I thank them for inspiring the stories even as they put me through hellish experiences that no kid should ever feel. There's an amazing song by the Canadian band, The Grapes of Wrath called "All The Things I Wasn't" and I thank my family for showing me the wrong paths to take, that I was then able to avoid, and I thank them for all the things I wasn't. Inspiration is a funny thing.

SC: When do you think your passion for horror and literature started? Is there a certain event or period that you can say started your captivation with it?

TE: Literature in general started simply because, when I discovered novels (initially SF books from Robert A. Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, and Isaac Asimov), I discovered there were literally millions of worlds I could escape to from the one I lived in. My captivation with horror in particular started with three stories read at different times, but they snowballed into a lifelong fascination. The first was reading Ray Bradbury's short story, "The Veldt" ...for whatever reason, that one grabbed me. It was the horror of something that can't happen, happening, but it also had this huge helping of wonder that I'd never experienced prior to that. It was the wonder that hooked me.

The next was Stephen King's Carrie, because I was a bullied kid in school (though younger than Carrie. I was about twelve when I read it), but I could identify with the crazy parent, the awful classmates, and that burning rage that simmered just beneath the surface. It showed me that reality could be fictionalized. The last one was Graham Masterton's The Manitou, as it took a frankly ridiculous concept, doubled down on the ridiculous, yet offered up an epic, explosive finale that was mindblowing. So, these all taught me that, along with the requisite scares and dread, a decent horror story could also bring the wonder, the reality, and also blow my mind with a huge finish.

SC: What do you see as the biggest challenges of being an author in the horror realm?

TE: I think there's a few angles that can be tough. The first is, while mainstream, traditionally published horror can be fun, and I do read and enjoy it, it does tend to feel like it's product put out for the masses. It's a little less edgy, a little more safe. So, it can be tough to be someone who pushes the envelope to get published by one of the trad publishing houses. So, that leaves the smaller publishing houses, and some are doing amazing things, and some are...well, we've all seen some of that drama play out. I love that the smaller presses are more willing to take risks, but there's also risks associated with some of the smaller presses. So, we gotta do our research (then again, we should be doing that anyway). Horror can be a hard sell. I have two friends who write more on the—shall we say spicier side—and, my god, they sell SO MUCH MORE than any horror author I know. But, the ones who love horror? They LOVE it, and that's what makes all the effort worth it.0

SC: Do you have any rituals or a specific creative process while you write?

TE: I have to write in the morning. Honestly after noon hits, I'm pretty much oatmeal north of the eyebrows. Typically, when I write, I will play music. Sometimes, it's just whatever I want to have on in the background, sometimes it's a song or an album that has the feel I'm going for. And, very often, there's coffee involved. As for the act of writing, before I start something new, typically, I'll bullet out the story very very roughly. Like, five-ish bullets max for a short story, maybe ten to fifteen for a novel. Then, as I write the story, I delete the bullet point I've covered. The only other two things I do are, number one, to give myself permission to write crap on the first draft. Utter shit. It's fine. Because I know when I come back around the second time, I'll have the entire story at least down, so now I can do the necessary clean up and improvements. And second, as I write, I usually don't write until the well is dry. Instead, I'll write for a certain length of time, and leave myself a bit of a prompt at the end so I know where to pick up without having to go back and read. That prompt typically is an unfinished sentence, something like, "Sam walked down the hall and she" and leave it there. But I'll leave a note saying something like, "she sees signs of the werewolf that was in the house" or whatever, so I know where I'm going next.

SC: What's the most important lesson you have learned about writing?

TE: A couple of things. Don't expect it to be right the first time. The first draft is shit. So says Hemingway, so says, Elliott. Write every damn day. But, the one that stands out above all else for me is, "If what I'm writing doesn't hurt, then I'm not digging deep enough." Make it hurt.

SC: Which of your own books is your favourite or the one you are most proud of? 

TE: You're asking me to choose my favourite child, damn you! Fine, I'll play your silly little reindeer game. For novels, I think I'm most proud of the last book in my six-book horror series. The book is titled Flesh and Blood, and it's the one I didn't think I could write. I knew I wanted to end the series by bringing back at least one character from each of the previous five novels, but I had no idea for the story... ...until I did. When it came to me, it all downloaded into my head in the span of a minute. I had it all. Then, I delayed writing it, because I wasn't sure I could do it justice. And, normally, it takes me a good year of futzing around with the writing to have it nailed down, but this one took me just over three months. I didn't write this one, it just dictated itself and I typed it out. And I was so happy with how it came out. There's nothing worse than investing time to read six books, only to have the ending disappoint you. This one, to me, is the best written book of the series, and it wraps it up really well. I've had nothing but glowing reviews of that book. So, yeah, I'm proud of what I accomplished with that one.

SC: Who is your favourite character from your books?

TE: This one's easy. Sam, who we first meet in Blood Loss, the third book of the series. She's a foul-mouthed kid who's mother has died and is now with her father full time. She was a complete delight to write from start to finish, and she had so many surprises for me along the way. I adore Sam.

SC: Which is your newest book?

TE: My newest book is actually two books, Ugly Stories About Terrible People Doing Horrible Things, Volumes One and Two. They collect 23 of my short stories, spanning from when I started getting serious about it, around 1997, right up to two stories that I finished literally days prior to publishing them. They have some of my oldest work, and they also have a couple of stories that I think are the best writing I've ever done, anywhere. And the covers are cool as hell, too.

SC: What are you working on now?

TE: That's a big question. Currently, I have a non-fiction book that I'm revising that is likely my best chance at ever getting published by a mainstream publisher. It's a harrowing story that I can't really talk much about right now. I'm also working on a follow up to a novel called Revelations that I co-authored with Dale Long (who writes under the name Robert Edgar Walton). It's the story of the Four Horsemen who were the children of Adam and Eve who find their humanity again through their interactions with four interesting humans...and when God calls upon them to bring the Apocalypse, they say no. We have three books planned in this series, with the first one to be published through Watertower Hill Publishing around 2027. At the same time, the two of us are also plotting out the follow-up novel to Miscreation, a novel that follows a re-envisioned Frankenstein's monster as he seeks immortality. The reader will meet some other fun literary monsters along the way. Miscreation will be published through Watertower Hill in July 2026. I also have a haunted house/possession novel that's about half done that I'd like to finish up early next year, as I have yet another novel floating around in my head based on a novella I had published about ten years ago, called The Wrong. Finally, I have at least four short stories at various stages of completion that I'm picking away at. Yeah, it's a little crazy to live in my head at times.

SC: Where can people find your books, and how can they find out more about you? (Social media, websites, physical store locations, etc.)

TE: I've made it very easy and collected all the links here: https://linktr.ee/TobinElliott As for where you can find my books in physical locations, if you're in the GTA in Ontario, you can find them at most of the Chapters/Coles/Indigo stores in and around Toronto, Ajax, and Peterborough. If indie bookstores are more your thing, definitely check out Little Ghosts Books in Toronto, they have my stuff too.

Okay now for the hard questions. 

SC: What separates you from other horror writers? 

TE: I've been told by past managers in my old corporate jobs that I'm guilty of "Tobinizing" people. What they meant was, I have always set very high standards for myself, and I have little patience for those who don't have that same high level of excellence expectation of themselves. So, I'm not a perfectionist, because that's an impossible goal. But I do have high standards, and that applies to all aspects of my work. I will never release anything if I have a whiff of doubt about how good it is. I'd rather hold it back and get it to where it needs to be than to dump a substandard story on anyone. Along with that, I happily pay a big chunk of money to get a really good, highly professional edit done on everything before it goes out. And I'd argue that my covers are better than most trad-published books. They rock. And even when it comes to the audiobooks, I searched and searched until I found the perfect voice to narrate them, and Jenn Johnson is absolutely killing them. So, I can absolutely guarantee a quality horror story, from packaging to content. But I'll also refer you to the very last question in this blog for an insight on how I build some of that content.

Aside from that, as I said above, I'll pull in the supernatural creatures, but I'm also going to hit you with the real life fears that I can draw on from my own personal experience. Fictional fear is great, but fictionalized real life horror can really slap you around. Plus—from what I can tell from reading a lot of writers' posts on social media—I don't want just happy, shiny reviews. If you hate my work, TELL ME. If you have harsh, critical feedback, I WANT IT. I'll never shy away from those that spent the time with my writing, but I didn't live up to their expectations. I want to know, so I can get you next time.

SC: What would you say is the most strange or unusual thing that has happened to you?

TE: Oh geez, I'm limited to ONE? I could fill a novel just on my son alone, and he's likely the most strange and unusual thing I deal with on a daily basis, but...no. Or, I could tell you about the time I found myself on stage, interviewing three women as an unwilling participant in The Dating Game, but...no. Or, what about that time I sat terrified in my tent while a large bear ate all the food...then started sniffing the tent for more? No... I'll go with something a bit darker. Many, many years ago, in those dark days of the very early 1990s, prior to mobile phones being ubiquitous, I found myself needing one. My brother had been caught driving under the influence and had lost his license for a year, so I got to use his car for that time. However, when we did the hand-off, he'd forgotten that he'd left a bunch of tools in the trunk, so we'd made arrangements to meet one evening. I'd drive out to his new apartment, about a 45 minute drive away, and hand them off. Unfortunately, I'd only been to the apartment once before, and I ended up getting turned around and lost. So, I needed to call him for directions. I pulled into a corner gas station, and parked the car out of the main flow of traffic. There was a guy using the pay phone—one of the older types that was a full enclosure, with the folding door—and a couple of other guys just outside the booth. I figured I had a bit of a wait, but it was somewhat cool out, so I kept the engine on and the heater going. I was maybe fifty feet from the booth. As I waited, I actually got out of the car to stretch my legs. I'd been driving for over an hour trying to find the place. And, as I stood by the car, a third guy came out from the side of the gas station, and walked by me toward the phone booth. He was big, well over six feet, well over two hundred pounds. It wasn't until he was at the booth that I noticed he had a large piece of wood with him, as he'd been carrying it down beside his leg. It was at least four inches on a side, and about four feet long. A sizable piece of lumber. As I was clueing into this fact—and this is about the moment when everything geared down and went into slow motion mode in my mind—he nodded to the two other guys outside the booth. One moved closer to the booth, and slid open the door. The guy with the lumber raised the wood until it was head height, holding it like a bazooka or something, and then he drove that four foot length of wood edge on into the head of the guy on the phone. I still can see the man's stunned expression as the wood cracked into the side of his face, slamming his head back into the phone. He dropped the handset, and the other guy outside the booth reached in and pulled him out. He fell, sprawled on the pavement and that's when all three men put the boots to him. They were kicking the shit out of him. I looked around very quickly, thinking...KNOWING...someone would be calling 911. Instead, what I saw was one guy pumping gas, steadfastly looking away from the scene. I saw the guy in the little gas station booth sitting, his head lowered as though in concentration of something he was reading, and both hands up shielding his eyes from noticing anything going on around him. "Nope, nothing going on here." Then I turned back to the three guys and their screaming, begging victim. And that's when the big guy with the chunk of wood turned, looked directly at me, pointed, and said, "You're next, asshole." I guess because I was the only witness. Anyway, I jumped in the car—thankful that I'd left it running—and blew out of the gas station. I drove a block away to another gas station, and used that phone booth to call 911. Then I drove back, parked at a strip mall across the street from the first gas station. The three guys were gone. The guy who'd been beaten was gone. And the police never showed up in the twenty minutes I sat there, terrified. Eventually, I called my brother, got the directions, got to his place. Drank some coffee until the shakes slowed down, and drove back home. Carefully. That memory has never left me, and god only knows what happened with those four guys. I never saw anything on the news or in the local papers. But, eventually, it ended up being fictionalized as Chapter Seven in Blood Loss, the third book in my six-book series.

SC: What is the one question you always want to be asked but never do? 

TE: We know you write horror, Tobin. We know you read it. Obviously you like it. But what does horror give back to you? Well, thank you, Sinister Cupcakes, you purveyors and perpetrators of ghoulish, garish, gluteny goodness! I've never been asked this before, what a great question! First off, there's the fans and the readers, such as yourself, who are simply an incredible and incredibly kind and supportive community. Since I started going out and doing the in-person events, I've been consistently blown away by how wonderful everyone is. To the uninitiated, those who enjoy horror are seen as creepy, weird, mentally unstable, and somehow mean-spirited people. I've literally sat at a table of non-horror authors who, upon hearing what I write, simply shunned me and talked amongst themselves as though

I didn't exist. Meanwhile, attending horror-centric events is an uplifting, enjoyable experience filled with laughter and the joy of meeting amazingly fun, like-minded people. Writing is very much a solitary thing. I sit in my office and I stare at my screen and bleed into my keyboard, and desperately hope that I write something that might resonate with someone. So, to then experience that entirely different feeling when I meet with others that do the same, as well as those that read it...that's one thing I get back...camaraderie and the feeling of belonging to a community. I'm not alone. But what about those times when I'm alone and staring and bleeding all over my keyboard? It has its own rewards. There's no feeling like the feeling of a story coming together, all those disparate parts clicking into place and my gut telling me, "yeah, this one? This one's a good one." It's a feeling of triumph, of creating something of worth, of accomplishment. So, I get that from it, too. Not necessarily strictly related to horror, of course, but that's my chosen genre, so I think it counts.

And finally—at least for me—it's also very much a time of self-reflection and self-study. I laugh when my wife or kids or close friends reads something of mine, then give me that knowing smile and say, "I know where you got that from!" And it's true, they do. But while they know of the event in question, they aren't privy to the process I go through... ...of how I have to come to grips with choosing a specific event, often one that holds some trauma (see that gas station example above), deciding to incorporate that into my fiction, then while determining how to do so, holding that bleeding, gore-soaked abomination of a memory up to the light, and then examining it from all the angles until it's both more and less of a memory, until it becomes a bit of a therapy session for me. Because, for example, if I write about the time my father threw my mother down a hill, or the time he abandoned me at four years old at the Canadian National Exhibition to go and get drunk (the first in a story called Monster, the second in a story called Fight or Flight), I don't just relate those events. To adequately fictionalize them, as well as adequately relate them, I have to understand them from all the angles. I know my own reactions, but what about, as in the cases above, my father? What was going on in his broken, twisted, sociopathic, booze-addled mind? So, it's not just writing about myself. Or the situation. It's about digging into the monster, digging into the fear. Digging deep into the trauma. For a short period of time, I don't just write about the monsters...I become them, if only in that lonely office, staring at the screen, bleeding my pain into the keyboard. If what I'm writing doesn't hurt, then I'm not digging deep enough. Because that's where the real horrors live. So, the other thing I get from horror is to re-examine old pain and to stare into the void of evil and, as it stares back into me, gain perhaps a small understanding of why some of the monsters are the way they are. It's not easy. But it's illuminating. Horror allows me to shed some light on the darkness.

We can't thank Tobin enough for giving us the opportunity to reach out to him and have this amazing experience. For more information about Tobin's work, you can find everything here, including where to find his Books, audiobooks, other Interviews, ways to reach out to him and his collaborators, news, signings, and more! 

If you are interested in learning more about this blog and other Ontario horror authors, we recommend you follow this blog closely for more interviews to come and new announcements for the Dread Con convention in 2026, where many authors will be featured, with panels, book launches, more than 50 vendors, and this year will be the first two-day edition! We look forward to seeing you there. This was Dualia, and I thank you for joining me on this journey. I wish you all a good night.

 #HorrorWriter  #AuthorInterview #BookCommunity #HorrorFiction#BookRecommendations #DreadCon #TobinElliott #OntarioHorror #CanadianAuthors #SinisterCupcakes