Stefano Fantelli
Stefano Fantelli, also known by the pseudonym El Brujo, despite being told repeatedly as a child not to invent things, wanted to become one who tells stories by profession.
His eventful biography before he can devote himself to writing full-time is a long wild path that includes the professions of coffin polisher, sparring partner for boxers, boxer himself, night porter, knife thrower and mineral water transporter. All professions that have enriched him with anecdotes and characters.
Writer, editor and screenwriter, Active Member of the Horror Writers Association, is considered one of the main and most original contemporary Italian authors of the goth, dark and new weird genre.
He has published twenty books including novels, collections of short stories and graphic novels with different publishers and more than a hundred short stories in magazines and anthologies.
Creator of the El Brujo series, co-creator (with Rossano Piccioni) of the splatterpunk comic series The Cannibal Family and Blood Brothers, he has collaborated on several newspapers, including Splatter, The Intrepid, The Hyena, Molotov, Smoke of China and Zora the Vampire – New Series.
Among his works: Dark Circus, El Brujo Grand Hotel, Strange Wounds, I am the Brujo, Mutations (with Michael Laimo), At the end of the night, Zombie Paradise, Thanks for the zombies, Fear of brujo: Diary of a fairy hunter, Sex and the zombie, Alfredo and the Night of the Living Dead, Brigitte, The Girl with the Glass Eye and Stuck.
In English, with Alessandro Manzetti, he signed the collection of short stories Stockholm Syndrome (2015), while his short story The Captain was published in the anthology The Beauty of Death (2016) along with short stories by Ramsey Campbell, Peter Straub, John Skipp, Poppy Z. Brite and other world-renowned masters of horror literature.
Recently, together with some of the best international authors (including Joe Lansdale, Richard C. Matheson, Richard Laymon and David J. Schow) he participated in the anthology Children of the Dark (2022), published by Independent Legions Publishing.
His play Death and 9 euros and 20, a macabre and irreverent comedy, was staged in Rome directed by Katia La Galante.
He currently writes screenplays for Zagor (Sergio Bonelli Editore).
Nothing is known about what he keeps buried in the garden.
