Cody Raines spent six summers as a counselor at a real lakeside camp in the north woods of Wisconsin, which is where he learned the two things his books are built on: how genuinely dark it gets between the cabins when the generator cuts out, and how fast a tight crew of counselors becomes a family you’d do anything to protect. He has been reopening that camp, on paper, ever since — usually with much worse outcomes.

Raised in Wausau, Wisconsin, on a steady diet of VHS slashers rented from a gas station that shouldn’t have rented them to a twelve-year-old, Cody grew up loving the exact genre most people rolled their eyes at, and grew up to argue — in a decade of horror-podcast episodes and a film-studies degree he swears he uses daily — that the summer-camp slasher is America’s great campfire folk form. His fiction is the case for the defense: retro in flavor, modern in craft, and serious about the one thing the movies often forgot, which is making you care about the kids before the treeline takes them.

His Camp Blackpine Horrors series drops a new crew into a cursed camp every book and lets the buried past come back for its roll call. Readers can expect fast, atmospheric dread, inventive kills that stop short of torture-porn, a fair-play mystery of who’s holding the knife, and — always — a survivor smart enough to have been paying attention. It’s the campfire story you begged to hear again, told by someone who actually loves it.

Cody lives in Madison, Wisconsin, with his partner, Steph, a horror-loving veterinary tech who fact-checks his injuries, a wall of VHS tapes he can no longer play, and a black cat named Voorhees who is exactly as ominous as that implies. He still won’t swim in a lake at night, and he still thinks that’s the correct response.