Matthew Hollis Damon

NERD ICARUS. HOMELESS BUSKER BREATHING FIRE. AUTHOR ARTIST CREATIVE JUNKIE

Growing up as a "really repressed nerd playing Dungeons and Dragons and running around in the woods with wooden swords and an overinflated sense of heroism," it was probably inevitable that Damon would end up a storyteller with a flair for adventure and an outsider perspective.

Damon came of age "in a childhood timewarp" that he believes left him disconnected from his peers, then obtained an associate degree in Radio and Television, attended Skidmore College where he studied psychology and creative writing, then moved out to San Francisco—like Kerouac, Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti before him—to forge his path as a writer, in one way or another.

During a stint in a bookstore working in undercover loss prevention, he was hit hard by two revelations. First, turning writing into a viable career was proving to be harder than he imagined. Second, a homeless guy in front of the store begging for change made about 300% more money than Damon did at his job—a "free market" lesson he wouldn't forget.

Determined to walk away from "wage slavery," see the world on his own terms and become a writer the old-fashioned way (living as a Bohemian and scrawling notes as he went along), he wandered as a homeless busker for the next five years. Beginning his drug-addled, sex-crazed, inspired and ultimately enlightening journey in Europe, he describes this period as, "the most crucial, life-changing event in my life, when I really started coming into my own and figuring out who I am."

Upon the birth of his first child, he spent a few years as a newspaper reporter and editor, and wrote a children’s book and two nonlinear ‘choose your own adventure style’ gamebooks.

Destiny Nowhere was his take on the zombie apocalypse, and also his first traditionally published novel, sold to a leading independent horror publisher (Severed Press) where he achieved significant acclaim with his hilariously acerbic, unreliable narrator stuck in the midst of civilization collapse. Since then, Damon has sold numerous stories and novellas in different horror and speculative fiction markets. The Fear House published his next four novels: Agent Orange, a thriller about a contractor who gets dragged behind the scenes of political corruption and decides to take justice into his own hand; A Monster's Moon, where three teenagers sneak into a traveling monster show to discover whether or not werewolves are real; Liberty and Justice for None and A Preamble to Treason (The Freedom Files series) bring the reader into a society collapsing into civil war as the left and right become too polarized to tolerate one another. Damon’s final release of 2024, We Never Left, took off quickly and stayed in the charts, earning him new attention for his grizzly story about six high school ghost hunters who spend the night in a haunted mansion and record everything that happens.

Damon lives in Syracuse, NY with his children and a cat named Ghost, pursuing writing, painting, and occasional filmmaking.