I'm happy to be here on Medium writing mainly about books and authors - focusing mostly on my favorite reading experiences.

I’m an author of several novels and short stories, most featuring gay protagonists. This includes vampire novel Out for Blood, crime thrillers Torsos and The Chimney Sweeper, and private eye novels The Rape of Ganymede and The Fall of Lucifer. My web site is at johnpeytoncooke.com.

I grew up reading a lot of genre fiction - horror, fantasy, science fiction, mystery, suspense, etc. As I've grown older, I tend to read more "great literature" - which I'd define as whatever I say it is. (Some great literature can still be found in genre fiction, but I read less and less genre stuff these days.)

I started writing quite young, and my first novel The Lake was published in 1989, when I was 22. I've since published eight novels in total (including one under a pseudonym), and I've put several covers up on my profile. Many of them are currently out of print, but you can find my gay vampire novel Out for Blood (1991) in a new edition published by Valancourt Books in 2019. I self-published my private eye novels The Rape of Ganymede and The Fall of Lucifer, and these are available at Amazon or B&N. You can find used copies of my books on AbeBooks.

I've also published short stories, most of them with gay protagonists, in various periodicals and anthologies. I've put a few of them (including some juvenalia) into a self-published collection, After You've Gone. I've published more short fiction since then, and hope to pull those together in a future collection. These are mostly genre tales - horror, fantasy, suspense.