It’s the birthday of bestselling author and comic book writer Joe Hill (b. 1972), whose horror fiction has won him a handful of Bram Stoker Awards, British Fantasy Awards, and one Ray Bradbury Fellowship.

Joseph Hillstrom King was born in Hermon, Maine, to Tabitha and Stephen King (yes, that Stephen King). Growing up, Hill and his siblings Owen and Naomi were pressed into service reading out loud to record books that their father wanted to hear on tape but couldn’t find elsewhere. The kids recorded everything from a Dean Koontz novel to Anna Karenina; Hill remembers reading The Carpetbaggers. Owen also grew up to be a novelist, Owen’s wife is a novelist, and Tabitha is a novelist, so the King family is a big ol’ sprawling family dynasty of writers.

Hill started writing daily at the age of 11 and grew up worrying about writing in his father’s shadow; he kept his identity a secret from readers and had an agent for years who didn’t know who he really was. When he did readings, people sometimes noticed his strong resemblance to Stephen King, and at one point he considered hiring actors to do readings for him.

All this time Hill was publishing stories, and his collection 20th Century Ghosts (2005) won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Fiction Collection, but his first novels were continually rejected. Hill finally had a novel published in 2007, Heart-Shaped Box, which immediately hit the bestseller list, and that same year Hill publicly confirmed his real identity. (He’d already been outed.) Other novels include Horns (2010); NOS4A2 (2013), about a woman trying to save her son from a child abductor with the license plate NOS4A2; and The Fireman (2016), about an international outbreak of plague that results in spontaneous combustion. Hill’s latest book is the collection Strange Weather (2017). His comic book series Locke & Key ran for five years and is illustrated by Gabriel Rodriguez.

Fun and super timely fact: Hill has (or had) a corgi named McMurtry, named after yesterday’s featured author Larry McMurtry.

Hill is divorced, has three children, studied at Vassar, and takes a low dose of meds to take the edge off a tendency toward paranoia. And he takes writing advice from his mother. (Good boy.)

Have a day devoid of any actual horror and stay scrupulously honest to the data.