Stories take great journeys sometimes before they end up on the printed page. Today my new novel “Snowball” is released from Flame Tree Press. This was a long journey.

What originally began as two separate tales, finally converged into the novel I hope you will be holding in your hands. I began thinking about writing a winter story back in the 1980s, not long after graduating from the University of New Hampshire. By that time I had several ideas for novels I planned to write, including the ones that became “Jokers Club” in 2011 and “Loonies” in 2015.

But living in New Hampshire and enduring the misery of winter, I often thought about how much I’d like to write a tale that captured what it was like to endure that insufferable season. During the Blizzard of ’78, when I was a freshman in college, my family home lost power and we had to head over to my grandparents’ house where they still had electricity. My father stayed behind at our house for several days to keep the two fireplaces stoked and make sure the pipes didn’t freeze. There were many great stories in the news from places all over New England that suffered greatly from that horrendous storm.

Winter can be very cruel and unforgiving, and I wanted to convey that in a novel. My original thought was something along the lines of Ray Bradbury’s “Dandelion Wine,” except set in winter instead of summer. Like that book, I wanted to capture different stories of winter through the eyes of various people who experienced its misery. But a common thread of the specter of death would run through all the unconnected tales.

But I also had an idea for what I thought would be a creepy novella about some motorists stranded on a highway during a Christmas Eve blizzard and being attacked by some mysterious supernatural entity.

Both of those ideas stayed with me for many years, germinating and expanding as I nurtured them. Eventually, as I began to get closer to deciding to write my winter tale, I ended up choosing to merge both ideas. From there the tale grew and expanded, much like a snowball rolling down a hill. I had thought about this book for years, and as I sat down to write it, the story became something more than even I had expected. That’s part of the magic of writing. A lot of what happened in the story were things I had planned and mapped out. But even more surprises grew out of the tale as I moved my characters through the scenario I set up for them. Unexpected things were always popping up.

I don’t outline when I write, but I do take a lot of notes and scenes that I hope will play out. But when I begin the tale, I pick a starting point and set my characters free to progress through the situation they find themselves in. The story changes as it goes along, and that is always for the better. I didn’t know where any of these characters were going to end up, and most of their journeys left me with a shocked but satisfying smile.

I hope you check out my winter horror tale. Maybe curl up by a warm fire and read it by the light of a lamp while the wind blows outside and the power is still on.

Welcome my friends, family, fellow authors and faithful readers to the debut of my website: “The Dark Imagination of Gregory Bastianelli”.

Why have I been drawn to dark things? That's not an easy question to answer. I'm a normal, happy nice person. But as long as I can remember, horror has been calling me. It started with watching movies as a young child. Even some of my earliest memories as far back as 5 and 6 years old, I remember always enjoying watching horror movies on television. The classic Universal monster movies played every Halloween week, and every Saturday afternoon was the Creature Double Feature on the local television station out of Boston. Those were my introductions to the world of horror.

Later, at my local public library, I became enchanted with the stories of Ray Bradbury and others. And then something happened that sparked my desire to be a writer. It was a class assignment in sixth grade. We were split into several groups of five and given an opening paragraph and then had to write a story based on that beginning. The paragraph depicted a group of archeologists digging at a site, and the ground opens up beneath them.

The classmates in my group could not come to an agreement on the direction the story should take, and after much frustration, we went to the teacher and asked if we could split up as a group. The teacher agreed and so two students went their separate way, and so did another pair, leaving me all by myself.

And that's how I preferred it. I wanted to tell my story, my way, and I ended up with a tale involving an underground world with rivers of lava, carnivorous dinosaurs and a tribe of underground natives. It was something straight out of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Jules Verne.

Our stories were given to another classroom to judge, and mine won a ribbon. My first short story and it was already an award winner. From that moment on, I knew what I wanted to be: a writer. And not just any kind of writer, but a writer of tales of horror, monsters and trips to unknown worlds. Dark tales.

Three pivotal books that fueled my imagination were Ray Bradbury's “Something Wicked This Way Comes”, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's “The Lost World” and Bram Stoker's “Dracula”, all of which I read in junior high school.

My love of horror and tales of the imagination drew me to authors such as H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, Stephen King, Peter Straub and Ramsey Campbell. I owe my formative years of learning the craft of horror writing to these creators and many others.

In my debut novel, “Jokers Club”, the narrator is a struggling writer. In his mind he created a dark space, an attic room whose only resident was a Joker from a deck of playing cards: his muse. In the attic room, all kinds of dark and horrific things thrive and seep from the walls, and the Joker whispers those morbid thoughts to the writer.

Do I have a dark attic in my mind? Is that where all those aberrations come from that feed my tales? Who knows for sure?

All I know is that I've always been drawn to the dark side, to tales of horror and terror. My imagination wanders down dark lanes at night where dangerous things lurk.

Come with me to that attic room, open the door, and peer inside the dark imagination of Gregory Bastianelli.