Christopher Ransom was born and raised in Boulder, Colorado. He wrote his first short story at age 13, a science fiction tale for his Earth Science class at Centennial Junior High School, for which his assistant teacher Mr. Fender gave him 55 out of a possible 50 points. He developed professional aspirations, among other afflictions, at age 19.
After studying literature at Colorado State University, he won citations for outstanding customer service at the world famous McGuckin Hardware, and later managed Bushmaster Reptiles, an international wholesale importer of exotic species. There he learned to handle, feed, and medicate pythons, boas, vipers, cobras, monitor lizards, and hundreds of other fauna native to Indonesia, Africa, China, and the Americas.
At the age of 25, Chris and his soon-to-be wife Pia moved to New York City for two years, where he worked as an ad sales assistant at Entertainment Weekly, and later as a sales executive for Screaming Media. Approximately six months prior to the firm going public, he made the brilliant financial decision to move to Los Angeles to pursue a screenwriting career. There he sold not a single screenplay, but continued to ride the dot-com wave, managed a Barnes & Noble store, freelanced as a copywriter, and ate a lot of tacos at Baja Fresh.
In 2004, with their three rescued pound mutts—Cowboy, Nacho, and Tater-Tot—in tow, Chris and his wife relocated to a 140-year-old former birthing house in Mineral Point, Wisconsin. Working as a copywriter for Famous Footwear in Madison, Chris spent the next three years conceiving and delivering his first novel, The Birthing House, which was published by Little, Brown, in the UK, Ullstein in Germany, and St. Martin's Press in the US.
In January 2009, The Birthing House reached #6 on the London Times list of fiction paperback best-sellers, and was later translated into German and Italian.
Christopher's second novel, The Haunting of James Hastings, was released in the UK in 2010, translated into German and Dutch, and in the US by Cemetery Dance as a limited edition under the title Killing Ghost, with a new afterword by the author.
The People Next Door, which is set in Boulder, was released in the UK in summer of 2011 and was a Top 25 fiction bestseller. Cemetery Dance will also release a hardcover limited edition in late 2013. The Fading was released in the UK in 2012, and 2013 will see the release of The Orphan.
When he is not writing, Chris likes to collect and restore vintage BMX bikes, eat Vietnamese food, and consume as many good books, rock songs, and tasty ales as possible. He lives in Colorado, on the fringes of Boulder County.
Feel free to say hello by dropping a word to author@ransomesque.com