Ken Levine

Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, I currently reside in Bergen County, New Jersey with my wife and three children. Growing up in Brooklyn in the 1970s has provided rich material for my novels with its disparate neighborhoods with characters that literally spill out of its Irish bars, Italian restaurants, bowling alleys, sprawling apartment complexes, gritty public schools, and mom and pop shops. Conflict was never far away with working class white neighborhoods abutting minority enclaves as people tried to figure out how to move forward after the tumult of the 1960s. I’ve always loved telling stories and wanted to be an author ever since I was a child. As an English major, I wrote short stories and poetry into my twenties but didn’t take novel writing seriously until the last decade. In the last seven years I have had a burst of creativity and have now penned six novels, three of which have been published. Anyone reading my work can see my background as a short story writer. My novels are thinly veiled collections of stories that weave back and forth in time to paint a portrait of the lives of my characters. Clearly, I love playing with time and memory as some of my novels (like The Widow Verses) stretch back and forth across as much as thirty or more years. Additionally, anyone who has read my novels can tell that I am fascinated by how single events can impact a series of lives and has a cascading effect on anyone touched by the event. Before It Gets Dark is an exploration of that principle. The positive feedback from readers and from book reviewers like Kirkus provide me with sustenance to continue to create more stories for readers to enjoy.