When J Trevor was young, he received a well-worn stack of mystery and horror novels from his older brother, and it instilled in him a lifelong desire to be an author. Heavily influenced by Stephen King’s scares, Jim Butcher’s action scenes, and the larger-than-life characters in Ayn Rand’s books, he blended those influences with classic literature and pulp horror to write his Immortal Works debut THE MUMMY OF MONTE CRISTO.
He has also self-published a young-adult horror novel THE GOOD FIGHT, and was published in the Amazon #1 bestselling horror anthology SECRET STAIRS as the sole romance story in the collection.
He lives in Toronto Canada keeping the redhead gene alive; he and his wife welcomed their first daughter on Friday the 13th 2019.
How you came up with the idea(s) for your book(s)?
Ideas come from all over the place, and I find they come very organically. When I decided I wanted to write a horror adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo, a book I’ve loved since I was a teenager, I knew that the first step was deciding what monster I would change the count himself into. Zombies and vampires and werewolves didn’t fit, and I played with the idea of him becoming a blob creature or some really obscure French folklore character. Finally I realized that in a story with such a focus on treasure and revenge, a mummy had to be the right pick, and my latest novel The Mummy of Monte Cristo grew from there!
A lot of the time, I’ll get tiny pieces of an idea as I just go about my day, and it’s not until later that something clicks to connect them together. For example, I’ve got a short story coming out soon called CLAWS in a collection titled The Whisker Rebellion, which is all about a cat that isn’t quite what it seems. That started off as simply as seeing an old man carrying a cat bundled in a towel on my walk to work one morning. It was maybe a week later that something else got me thinking that there might be something unusual about the man, or even about the cat, and what if he had seen me and just given me the cat and run away?
What you love about being an author?
One of the best parts has to be when I write a line or a scene that makes me laugh or gives me chills, and imagine all my readers reaching that point in the story and having the same reaction. It’s not always the big action or horror pieces, either. Sometimes it’s the little moments where I focus in and develop a character and their relationship to the world around them. An example is a particular scene midway through The Mummy of Monte Cristo with Max, a veteran who recently came home to his sister and is trying to adjust to normal life again. One minute he’s enjoying his morning and thinking about his new friends and a particular girl he’s planning to see at a cafe. Then his trauma just comes crashing back to him and it’s this really bittersweet scene that’s still got a note of hope to it. I love the idea that other people will read that, smile right along with Max while things are going well, and then root for him to find a way to make things work when he starts to struggle again.