V A L E R I O V E N T U R A
Valerio Ventura is a multi-award-winning writer and artist, and a 2014 Prime-Time Emmy Award recipient with more than thirty years of experience in the film industry.
Born in Rome, Italy, Valerio grew up being inspired by his mother’s love for horror. meanwhile master of Italian horror, Dario Argento was creating his horrifying films a few blocks away from where Valerio grew up.
As a teen, Valerio dreamed of coming to the US. After moving to California and becoming a US citizen, he devoted himself to art directing animated shows, and writing and directing television commercials and music videos. Now he’s decided to write and publish his own books.
Last year Valerio published is first novel, Killher, exploring the world of assassins with razor-sharp action, hyperviolence, sex, and dark humor.
In his first horror novella Pale Witch, he reunites creatively with his partner G.A. Lawrence to tell a horrific contemporary tale based onon a blend of terrifying villains, real locations, and historical facts that span over centuries.
G.A. Lawrence grew up in Mamaroneck, New York. After moving to California and receiving her B.A. in theater, she started her professional career as a designer in the animation industry in the mid-eighties.
After working in many animated feature films inspired by Edward Gorey and writers like Edgar Allan Poe, G.A. Lawrence created a series of creatures of the supernatural she called: Zomvoos. In 2009 and 2010, her work of Zomvoos: Recycle Your Souls was displayed at Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival as part of the TRASHedcampaign, a yearlong trash education program where she took first place twice in a row.
G.A. Lawrence’s book Ghostly Trees is her first collection of haunting drawings and bittersweet, horrifying poems published in 2023.
Her collaboration with Valerio in Pale Witch is a culmination of a terrifying concept they had first created three decades earlier and just last year the duo decided to turn it into a novella.
KILLHER a novel by Valerio Ventura
Los Angeles in the late 1990s. Wilshire is a shadowy private security company with clients at the very heart of the establishment, whose secrets are diabolical enough to kill for. And there’s no line it won’t cross.
Akira is one of Wilshire’s deadliest assassins—relentless, mad as hell, and mean with a katana. But when a hit on a target doesn’t go according to plan, it’s her who ends up on the kill list.
A plan to use the depravity she’s uncovered as a bargaining chip backfires, and The Butcher is dispatched—a vicious adversary who will test Akira to her limits.
Now she must battle to protect herself and those she loves. And to survive, she’ll need to face her past and forge some unlikely alliances.
One thing’s for sure ...
BLOOD WILL FLOW.
PALE WITCH a horror novella by G.A. Lawrence and Valerio Ventura
Vincent ‘Snake’ Gray is not a killer, but in a last effort to escape the death chamber, Snake makes a deadly pact with; Streka, a powerful witch ostracized by society in 1931, North Salem, New York. But Streka has her mind set on revenge and the spell she’s cast on Snake is botched and backfires turning Streka into the target of her own curse.
After a quantum leap over one-hundred years into the past, but he fails to kill Streka and finds himself propelled by the curse into the future, where he meets Gina, a woman who shares Streka’s DNA, but he fails to kill her and the curse pushes him again into another future.
The curse forces Snake to track Gina again, but he fails and vanishes into another time—until Gina and her friends unravel the deadly spell, and find themselves face to face with a monster who’s facing an ominous and impossible truth…
It's 1985 in Los Angeles and a monster from the past is not supposed to breath the same air we breathe, but in spite of the law's of nature, he’s here. But this time …
SHE'S READY.
WE ZOIX! by Valerio Ventura
Multi-award-winning artist Valerio Ventura is an art director with over thirty years of experience in the animation industry. Throughout his career working in film and animation, Ventura has developed ZO!X; creatures used as vehicles to juxtapose the shock and humor regarding the human condition and issues our society faces on a daily basis. His second art book, We ZO!X, represents three decades of work and art galleries exhibits in the US and abroad including; Walt Disney Hammersmith, London, WD Tokyo, Japan and WD Milan, Italy, and the Los Angeles area. Ventura has expressed his passion through fine art inspired by one painting: "Untitled" 1982, by Keith Haring. In the painting Ventura saw Mickey Mouse speaking through a TV set, and that's all it took to spark his quest to create ZO!X.
All design, photography, graffiti and art is by the author.
