John Everson is the Bram Stoker Award-winning author of the novels Covenant, Sacrifice and The 13th. He shares a deep purple den in Naperville, Illinois with a cockatoo and cockatiel, a disparate collection of skulls, twisted skeletal fairies, and a large stuffed Eeyore. There's also a mounted Chinese fowling spider named Stoker, an ever-growing shelf of custom mix CDs and an acoustic guitar that he can't really play but that his son likes to hear him beat on anyway. Sometimes his wife is surprised to find him shuffling through more public areas of the house, but it's usually only to brew anot...