Randall James Boyll

Background

Randall Boyll was born in 1962, in the United States.

Career

Randall Boyll's first novel "After Sundown" was written in 1989. The novel concerns two families, the Pruetts and the Butlers, who rent a cabin on Spike Mountain, east of Salt Lake City, and soon find themselves snowbound and out of touch with civilization. Boyll was chosen to write movie novelizations soon thereafter, and more than half of his subsequent novels were of that type, including a series based on the Darkman comic books and films that was written in 1990. Boyll's "Darkman" novels have been praised as contemporary extensions of the pulp hero tradition that echo the exploits of Batman, and especially the Shadow, a conspicuous example of another extra-literary creation who achieved notoriety as the hero of a fiction series.

Boyll's five horror thrillers featuring the character Darkman are based on characters and ideas found in Sam Raimi's 1990 film of the same name. Darkman introduces Peyton Westlake, a research scientist who is attempting to create synthetic skin when his laboratory is torched by criminals.

His second original novel “Mongster” that was written in 1991, was a somewhat confusing blend of humor and horror. An abused child learns of the existence of a hidden treasure and raises the dead to protect himself from his enemies. His third original novel “Chiller” which appeared in 1992, is a very unsettling story and easily Boyll’s best book. A grieving father steals the body of his daughter from an experimental laboratory where she is being studied because, although dead and rotting, she is still conscious. Their flight from the FBI and other pursuers is a sequence of bizarre and sometimes disturbing scenes.

Boyll has also turned in novelizations for screenplays of movies such as "The Long Kiss Goodnight" and "Mission: Impossible" in 1996 and, early in his writing career "Wes Craven's Shocker" in 1990.

As horror became more difficult to sell, Boyll moved increasingly toward novelizations and mundane suspense. “Katastrophe” in 2000 does have some supernatural content. Under hypnosis, a man claims to be the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler, which precipitates a world crisis, but the tone is very different from that that made his earlier horror novels so emotionally gripping.

Achievements

• Boyll’s writing has appeared in a number of publications, among them Library Journal, Locus, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Mystery Scene and Publishers Weekly.
  
  He was nominated for a Locus Award for Best First Novel.

Works

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  • The Gods of Hell

    (When the niece of his former fiance becomes one of the vi...)

    1994
  • Chiller

    (Made a guinea pig in an unscrupulous doctor's sick experi...)

    1992
  • In the Face of Death

    (Challenging a rogue CIA agent who wants to use Darkman te...)

    1995
  • Katastrophe

    (On an ordinary night deep in the heartland of America, tw...)

    1998
  • Shocker

    (With mass murderer Horace Pinker on the loose, the citize...)

    1990
  • The Long Kiss Goodnight

    (Samanatha Caine, who can't remember any of her life prior...)

    1996
  • The Price of Fear

    (Intent on foiling a plot to take control of the exclusive...)

    1994
  • Tales from the Crypt: Demon Knight

    (Brayer, a mysterious boarder at the Mission Hotel in Worm...)

    1995
  • Darkman

    (Dr. Peyton Westlake, a synthetic skin researcher, is hide...)

    1990
  • After Sundown 1989