About

There are no short stories…

James Hoare is a freelance writer and editor with a taste for war, witchcraft and weirdness. He is based in the North East of England and is always looking for new and exciting projects.

Seeped in history and myth from birth, James grew up in windswept rural North Lincolnshire on the site of a Medieval priory, hearing tall tales of ghostly bell ringers and secret tunnels. A mile from the nearest town, his best friends were Bad Religion, Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends, 2000 AD, Fighting Fantasy, and Doctor Who.

As a child James charted paranormal activity on a map of local area, stocked an improvised shelter for the forthcoming nuclear war, and received a typed report from the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act on their psychic “remote viewing” experiment, Project Grillflame.

Discovering a giddy thrill of digging up stories and sharing them with others, James studied Journalism at the University of Central Lancashire – then the only course in the UK rated “excellent” by the National Council for the Training of Journalists – and graduated with honours and NCTJ certificates in media law, sub editing, news writing, and public administration.

Alongside establishing himself as an entertainment writer, James interviewed a Hell’s Angel-turned-mercenary veteran of the Rhodesian Bush War, a belligerent BNP spokesman later convicted for driving around with his car boot filled with weaponry, and local vicar waging a one-man war against occult forces. For his work on the university newspaper, Pluto, James was awarded two UCLan Media Awards and nominated for an NUS Student Media Award.

Upon graduation, James worked for long-running extreme metal magazine Terrorizer as Assistant Editor, News Editor and then Deputy Editor. His achievements included running a Periodical Publishers Association award-winning email marketing campaign, curating a UK Death Feast compilation of homegrown death metal with exclusive tracks from Benediction, Extreme Noise Terror and Warhammer, and editing the bookazine, Terrorizer’s Secret History of Death Metal, with exclusive cover artwork from Cannibal Corpse collaborator and comic book artist Vincent Locke. Nearly a decade on, he’s still waiting on payment for the Secret History of Death Metal.

He also feuded with Nazis to the point that a major advertiser attempted to get him sacked and an Italian record label with a sketchy roster sent him a bottle of Mussolini wine as a fruity threat. James can be heard doing backing vocals on ‘Nekropunk’ by US grindcore band Total Fucking Destruction and posing as a member of Swedish occult metal band Ghost BC in an early photo shoot. His music writing also appeared in Kerrang!, Metal Hammer, Decibel, and Bizarre magazines, and he was interviewed by the Guardian newspaper on the history of the blastbeat.

Picked to helm the sci-fi, fantasy and horror entertainment magazine SciFiNow, James increased the website’s unique traffic by 500% year-on-year with exclusive interviews and breaking news, launched a short-lived digital magazine devoted to cult comics, and interviewed the likes of Hugh Jackman, Daniel Radcliffe, James McAvoy, and the late Sir Terry Pratchett. He ended his run as Editor with an Issue 100 spectacular, guest edited by Academy Award-winning director of Pan’s Labyrinth, Hellboy and The Shape of the Water, Guillermo del Toro.

Having worked with All About History since the very first issue as a writer, James was promoted to Editor in Chief to oversee the brand and relaunch History of War, which was acquired from another publisher, establishing it as the clear second in a very established field. James then launched three magazines from scratch: the heritage travel magazine Explore History, the Waitrose-friendly History of Royals, and the stomach-turning word-of-mouth success, Real Crime.

James has experience working with national museums and galleries, record labels, book publishers Hollywood studios and TV networks, and is at ease interviewing military veterans as he is movie stars. Currently, he is Editor of The Companion, commissioning original analyses and interviews as a vital corrective to clickbait. His proudest project to date was helping to save Heugh Battery Museum, the UK’s only First World War battlefield from closure.