David Herter

David Herter is an American author. His first novel was Ceres Storm in 2000, which was chosen as one of the top 10 science fiction books of 2000 by Amazon.com, followed by Evening's Empire in 2002.

In 2004 he spent a month in the Czech Repubic, an experience that led to his Czech trilogy,On the Overgrown Path (2006), The Luminous Depths (2008), and One Who Disappeared (2012). Says Stephen Baxter, "[Herter's trilogy] has a richness of prose and a density of allusion and ideas reminiscent of authors like Aldiss and Wolfe -- and, incidentally, it is a page-turning cracker of a horror story. Outside his homeland, Karel Capek may be remembered primarily through his legacy of the term "Robot". It is Herter's achievement in this novella to lead us through the narrow window of that single chthonic word to a rich evocation of a fragile, doomed period of Central European history"

October Dark (2011) is a fantasia on Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes, telling a secret history of the fantastic film, centering on special-effects wizard Willis O'Brien's 1931 encounter with a magician whose career stretches back to the birth of the phantasmagoria in Post-Revolutionary France.

Library Journal, in their starred review, called October Dark "a delight." Macabre Republic chose it as their #1 Halloween Vector in 2011, saying "Herter's genius here lies in never becoming merely derivative while paying serious homage to Something Wicked. He gifts readers with original riffs on iconic Bradbury scenes, from the attack by a witch in a black balloon to a perilous descent beneath the city streets by Will and Jim. A paean to the childlike sense of wonder, October Dark is itself wonderfully imaginative."

Herter lives in Seattle, Washington.

Early in 2012 the epic conclusion to his Czech trilogy, One Who Disappeared, was published. Says Brian Stableford, "David Herter’s trilogy, to which One Who Disappeared provides a spectacular and moving conclusion, does not fall; on the contrary, it remains perfectly suspended, sturdy and elegant — and by virtue of its topography, it does not, like more myopic literary projects, taper off into soothing closure, but opens wide to an even vaster and more glorious universe of possibility.”