Mick Farren was born in Cheltenham, England on a wet night at the end of World War II. In the 1960s, he was a member of the psychedelic, proto-punk band The Deviants. His fiction received attention in the late punk seventies with The DNA Cowboys cult trilogy. Through the 1980s and 1990s, he tempered cyberpunk with his own post-Burroughs, post-Lovecraft strangeness, while at the same time functioning as a columnist, critic, and recording artist, teaching a science fiction and horror course at UCLA, publishing a number of non-fiction works on popular culture, including a best-selling biography of Elvis Presley's manager, Colonel Tom Parker, and the bizarre-fashion history The Black Leather, and also providing Rock & Roll lyrics for bands like Metallica, Motorhead, Brother Wayne Kramer, and others. With Kramer, he created the off-Broadway musical The Last Words of Dutch Schultz, and he scripted a number of TV documentaries. He entered the 21st century with the critically acclaimed and suitably unorthodox vampire saga The Renquist Quartet, and the alternate world epic Flame of Evil. Farren died in London in July 2013.