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Wayne Mallows Celebrity Guest Appearance 

May 7th - 9th 2010

Canadian Haunters Convention!

Born in Toronto, Ontario Canada in 1963, I have lived in and around the Toronto area my entire life. I currently reside in Niagara Falls, Ontario, with my girlfriend and one son.

I have been writing since I was in high school, some twenty years ago, and enjoy storytelling, especially when expressed through the written word, public speaking and drama.

I was published through most of the 1990’s when I had my own column, ‘Sonics Workshop’, in The Canadian Motorcycle Guide. The magazine was published once a month and in it I wrote about the funnier side of motorcycle mechanics. Readers could contact me through email with their questions and I had quite a fan base. Some of those readers still contact me now through my home email. The Canadian Motorcycle Guide can now be accessed on line at: www.cmgonline.com and my stories are still available in the archived pages. I have also written four mechanical training courses for motorcycle repair while I was teaching at Centennial College in Ontario, Canada, early in 2000 through 2004, all of which are still currently in use.

Even though I enjoyed my time creating these educational and non-fiction works I always had a strong desire to write a fictional story, one that would have elements of historic reality worked in for realism. 

The story Whitechapel Road, or more accurately, the main character Aremis Eilbeck, was originally a creation for a theatrical idea.

I had starting telling the tale of Aremis sometime in 1992 when I needed to create a believable vampire character for a business called Scream Works, a haunted house complete with grounds, for Halloween. This was very successful and I quickly expanded that idea into a web based business called Scary Man Productions.

It was over the following ten years that I was able to polish this character into such a believable creation that I thought I would write a book based on his life and how he came into being.

I have been working on this project for the last 3 plus years. In that time I not only wrote the fiction that I had created, but I had also researched the murders committed by Jack the Ripper so that I would be able to effectively build the fiction around the facts. I have spent literally dozens of hours spanning several months going over police reports, autopsies, vintage maps, the routes taken by the constables on duty those nights and have read the over 200 letters alleged to have been written by the serial killer. There was, and still is, much controversy over the case and the handling of it, and to be frank, I found much of the evidence could easily point the finger of guilt towards a mentally unstable female and not that of a man. It wasn’t a far stretch for me to then have that person be a vampire.

In addition to writing I have also been involved in special effects make-up both for theatre and film, my speciality being that of graphic looking wounds.

I was brought in to consult on a film, Blood Bank, a short film created for the California Film Festival in 2002. I worked with the writer and producer to create realistic vampire bites rather than the familiar two holes that has become the trademark of Hollywood-style vampire bite.

In 2004 I was asked to provide assistance to a Cedar Fair theme park, Canada’s Wonderland, in the creation of Fear Fest/Halloween Haunt. This quickly turned into an annual commitment, creating the vampire host that became the famous attraction at the parks front gate during the month of October.

I have always had a fondness for vampires and a love of history, combining the two has allowed me to tell a story about one of the most famous, and yet unknown, vampires in history.

 

Aremis and Stef