About Me

Christopher Ransom was born and raised in Boulder, Colorado, but he doesn’t eat hamburgers made of vegetables or drive an SUV with a Save the Planet bumper sticker.

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 recently published by the Sphere imprint of Little, Brown, in the UK, and will be released by St. Martin's Press in the US on August 4, 2009.

On January 25th, The Birthing House landed at #6 on the London Times list of fiction paperback best-sellers.

Among his heroes and influences, Christopher Ransom counts authors of genre-bending dark literature such as Dan Simmons, Stephen King, Clive Barker, and Jack Ketchum, as well as masters of urban and suburban noir such as Peter Blauner, Colin Harrison, Tom Perrotta, James Salter, and Pete Dexter.

He has a 7-foot long olive python from New Guinea, named Olivia.  Olivia resides in a large terrarium in front of the author's desk, and can often be seen sunning herself or yawning in anticipation of her bi-weekly meal. 

Chris is currently working full-time on his second novel.

Feel free to say hello by dropping a word to author@ransomesque.com