About Chet Day: The Long Road to Literary Resurrection
The Early Years (Or: How I Accidentally Became a Horror Writer)
I’ve been a professional writer for over five decades – from sports columns to natural health articles to horror novels that Grady Hendrix later called “forgotten classics.” I’m what you might call curious about all things interesting or weird, a trait that probably explains both my diverse writing career and my tendency to fall backwards in office chairs when beautiful women walk into the room.
That last part is a true story, by the way. It’s how I met my wife Ellen in graduate school at Colorado State University in 1971. She winked at me after I tipped my chair over. We were married for 47 years until her death in 2019.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The Horror Years (1980s: When Paperbacks Ruled the Earth)
Back in the 1980s, during what’s now fondly remembered as the golden age of paperback horror, I wrote three novels for Pocket Books. Two of them, Halo (1987) and The Hacker (1989), appeared, had their moment on drugstore spinner racks, and then vanished into the great publishing void. The third, Cordova’s Girl, got killed one month before its print date.
Halo was the story of Billy Halo, an 18-year-old All-State linebacker who also happened to be a psychopath. Not exactly feel-good fiction, but honest about the kind of evil that hides behind a golden boy facade — institutional corruption, class privilege, and the terrible things people will overlook when the perpetrator looks perfect on paper.
I figured that was it for my horror career. Two books (almost three), a brief moment in the sun, move on to the next thing.
Turns out I was wrong.
The Lost Years (1990s-2010s: Life Gets in the Way)
After the horror novels, life took over. I taught high school English for 24 years. Built and ran a successful natural health website (the original chetday.com). Wrote hundreds of articles. Learned about organic internet marketing back when “going viral” meant something entirely different.
Ellen and I lived a good life. Not a bestseller-list life, but a real one filled with work we cared about, places we wanted to explore, and each other’s company.
Sometimes that’s enough.
Then Ellen got sick, and everything changed.
I spent five years after she died writing a memoir about our life together. Hardest work I ever did, and I don’t regret a minute of the angst and tears it took to find the right words. Ellen always wanted me to write something serious, so I did that for her memory.
The Resurrection (2017-Present: Grady Hendrix Changes Everything)
In 2017, horror scholar and bestselling author Grady Hendrix published Paperbacks from Hell: The Twisted History of ’70s and ’80s Horror Fiction. It’s become the definitive guide to that era’s overlooked gems, and for reasons I still don’t fully understand, he featured Halo as one of those forgotten classics worth rediscovering.
Suddenly, horror readers who’d never heard of Chet Day were hunting down paperback copies of a book I figured had been permanently lost to history. They started saying things like “Halo is a stunning novel of institutional evil” and “Chet Day was definitely among the better writers of paperback originals during the 80s horror boom.”
Who knew?
The Comeback (Age 78: Better Late Than Never)
So here I am, a 78-year-old widower in rural North Carolina who’s finally come to terms with losing his wife and figures it’s time to get back to work, to pound away at the keyboard while I still have the time and energy to do it.
That means finishing what I started with horror. Halo‘s prequel, Counselor, is done. And Cordova’s Girl finally got self-published, thirty-five years after Pocket Books changed its mind — dated, creepy, probably too much for some readers, and a blast to write. It means Ellen: A Memoir of Love, Life, and Grief, which shows there’s more to this old horror writer than monsters and mayhem. And it means CasaDay Press, where I’m running an open experiment in transparent human-AI collaboration with the Lost Pages series and whatever comes after it. Either the future of literature or an old man’s interesting folly. Maybe both.
Ellen used to say I was cute and that I made her laugh. I’m not as cute as I used to be, but if I can still make readers laugh while also scaring them, moving them, or making them think, this late-career resurrection will have been worth every keystroke.
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