Who am I Really?
By night I am the Undead Rat, your guide to finding the next good horror book to read.
By day I am Greg Fisher – husband, father, and a librarian assistant in a mid-sized suburban library. I have a Bachelors degree in history and religious studies. I don’t have a Masters Degree in Library Science and probably never will. Still, I have over 15 years of library experience so that counts for something.
My current passion is this website, dedicated to helping people find new horror novels, collections, anthologies, graphic novels, and other horrific material. Besides that, I love to read and listen to stories that scare me.
I am married to a beautiful, intelligent, and creative woman who is launching her own small press called Drollerie Press. I’m a stepfather to a grown young man and father to two children. The oldest is a girl in kindergarten who is scarily smart, loves dinosaurs and tells a story about a pretty vampire who destroyed New York City. The boy is a year younger and he is both an albino and autistic. He loves buses, trucks, and especially loves trains.
Why the Name Undead Rat?
I belong to a team of librarians who have spent years studying readers’ advisory services. We study genres, hone our skills at finding books people will enjoy reading, publish informative bookmarks and pamphlets, and several of us specialize in one or more genres. Collectively we are the RATS (Readers Advisory Team Services) and after a while we were given or selected nicknames based on the word rat. Thus, with my love of horror, I became the Undead Rat.
The nickname stuck.
When I decided I wanted to make this website, calling myself the Undead Rat just seemed natural and it seemed a name more likely to stick in the minds of gentle readers than Greg Fisher, but I don’t want to hide behind Undead Rat. That wouldn’t inspire trust.
Call me Undead Rat. Call me Greg. I answer to both.
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Howdy! This is Jessica from Blogging for a Good Book (http://bfgb.wordpress.com), where you’ve been leaving some excellent comments. (“Excellent,” I say, because you’ve been agreeing with me. Hooray!)
So listen, you sound like the perfect person to help me. I love to read Horror. It might be my favorite genre. I love to be scared, and I love to be horrified.
Unfortunately, I’ve been neither scared nor horrified for about fifteen years. Am I too cynical? Am I beyond hope? Can you recommend anything for me? (Exhaustive details on my reading history and preferences on request, if you’re interested in taking on this assignment.)
Hey Jessica,
I’m game. Let’s see if I can find a good book to scare you.
Send me a copy of your reading history and preferences. If possible, could you tell me about the last book you read that sacred you and how old you were?
Fear not, I went through a ten or twelve year drought before I read “City of Masks” by Daniel Hecht which broke the dry spell and scared me. There is still plenty of hope that you’ll get the scare back.
–Greg
We “met” through Susan Pfeffer, who thought I was you. I’m also a librarian who loves horror, and, in fact, work next to another like us. I do some proofing and also manage my library’s horror reading collection (Western Carolina University).
I’m enjoying your sites and am looking forward, when I have time, to examining your book selections more closely. Feel free to email, to start a discussion….