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Facts About Dark Regions Press and Publisher Chris Morey

Hey guys, I thought it would be fun to share some facts about Dark Regions Press and its history. Thank you for reading!

Facts About Dark Regions Press and Publisher Chris Morey

Dark Regions Press was created in 1985 by my father, Joe Morey, and it started as a magazine.

Issue #1 of Dark Regions was released in Summer 1986 and is extremely hard to find with less than 250 copies ever being printed.

Dark Regions & Horror Magazine became one of the top distributed horror magazines in the United States by the year 2000.  

In the early years Dark Regions Press also published chapbooks of selected poetry and stories as well as standalone books, most of these chapbooks had print runs of 250 copies or less and are very hard to find. We are currently trying to build a full back catalog collection of every Dark Regions Press publication in existence but have 20+ more publications to acquire. If you own any Dark Regions Press publications which were published prior to the year 2000 please get in touch with us.

Since its inception in 1985 Dark Regions Press has created over 200 different publications including books, chapbooks and magazine issues. We even paid artists like Frank Walls to create sculptures based on some Dark Regions Press titles and those sculptures were usually included with deluxe editions. Examples are Wolf Hunt by Jeff Strand deluxe edition and The Fall of Hades by Jeffrey Thomas deluxe edition.

Until around 2005 Joe Morey was printing and binding most Dark Regions Press publications himself. Many times as a child I walked into the shop to speak with my dad while he worked.

In 2006 Joe invited me his son Chris to help redesign the Dark Regions Press website and from there I became increasingly involved with the business including marketing and customer service.

In 2012 my dad handed over the reigns of Dark Regions Press to yours truly and helped the business along the way until 2014.

Since 2014 I've been running Dark Regions Press myself and my dad stepped back from the business entirely to work on his own imprints. During my tenure running Dark Regions Press we have paid over $350,000 to authors and artists in the forms of royalty payments, advances, story/art payments, writing contests and fundraisers. As a small press I'm proud of the amount of support we've been able to provide for the writing and art communities. We've always paid and communicated well with our authors and artists during my tenure and will continue to do so.

I wanted to pursue projects with my literary heroes like Jack Ketchum, Clive Barker, Joyce Carol Oates and others and successfully struck deals with almost all of them. If Jack Ketchum were here today he would tell you that we had a blast working on his special edition books with Dark Regions Press and we even hung out a couple times at different events. Dallas and I had a good working relationship, and many authors who have been with us for years from Jeff Strand to Joe R. Lansdale to Elizabeth Massie to Ramsey Campbell will tell you that while I'm not perfect, I'm honest, polite and always work with good intentions. For example: when it was revealed that Tom Piccirilli was sick we started a fundraiser for him that raised over $1,000 for his medical bills. We also paid his wife royalties multiple times after Tom sadly passed away in 2015. You can read about that on my blog here.  

The Dark Regions Press mission is to continue to publish new creative projects in collaboration with talented writers and artists and expand the industry as a whole. We have exciting plans and ideas for future years and are happy to have many of you join us for the ride.

Thanks for reading guys. I thought it would be fun to provide some interesting factoids about the press. Of course there is a lot more that happened throughout the years from winning awards to publishing smash hits like Bird Box Special Edition by Josh Malerman. Dark Regions Press will continue to work to build up the writing and art communities and I thank everyone who has shown support to us over the years. Best wishes to all of you. Be safe!

Sincerely,

Chris Morey