Mr. Garrick David Pattenden

About Garrick Pattenden

The story of Garrick David Pattenden

Garrick David Pattenden is a Canadian author, historian, researcher, and creator of the Chills in the Night series, a teen horror-thriller collection rooted in Windsor, Essex County, Southwestern Ontario, and the communities surrounding the Great Lakes. His fiction combines supernatural horror, local history, family loyalty, dark humour, street-level dialogue, and characters who fight back when something ugly comes crawling out of the dark.

Who Am I?

#1

First Things First

First Things First

I didn’t originally set out to become an author. I started by digging for answers. For years, I researched my own family history, worked through records and archives, followed names across generations, and learned very quickly that history is rarely as simple as the version somebody prints in a paragraph and calls finished. That research eventually became books, and the books kept coming.

History taught me something else: if you don’t do the digging yourself, bullshit has a habit of becoming accepted fact. That stayed with me when I moved deeper into fiction. I still research the places I write about. I want to know the roads, cemeteries, waterways, old settlements, buildings, disasters, diseases, local stories, and the things people who actually lived there remember. Then I build the horror around the real ground instead of pretending the ground doesn’t matter.

#2

My Book Writing

What I Write

Today, my main fiction work is Chills in the Night, a Canadian teen horror-thriller series following the Dalene family and the ghostly children who stand beside them. The stories begin in Windsor and Essex County, Ontario, but the world is growing outward through the communities, shorelines, towns, forests, cemeteries, waterways, and forgotten corners of Ontario.

These aren’t sanitized little ghost stories where everybody whispers politely and waits for the supernatural to disappear. My characters talk like people. They swear. They argue. They laugh at terrible moments. They protect one another fiercely, and when something comes after their family, they fight back.

The monsters are fiction. The geography isn’t. Whenever possible, the history underneath the story is researched before I start throwing ghosts, ghouls, curses, lake creatures, and other nasty bastards across it.

#3

Why I Write like I Do

No Cardboard Characters

I don’t write characters to behave like somebody’s idea of what young people are supposed to sound like. I write them as people with personalities, tempers, humour, loyalty, fear, courage, and mouths of their own. The Dalene family can fight something horrible in the middle of the night, swear their heads off doing it, and still come home afterward, sit around the kitchen table, hug one another, eat breakfast, and act like a family.

That matters to me more than making everything neat and polite.

I also don’t believe horror has to live only in invented American towns or someplace conveniently far away. Ontario has more than enough history, wilderness, old settlements, waterways, cemeteries, wrecks, legends, and forgotten places to keep me writing for a very long time. Chills in the Night is my way of taking that real Canadian landscape and asking one simple question:

What happens when the things that go bump in the night decide to hit back?