Todd Grimson (Seattle, 1952) is a poet and writer. At the age of 22, after having been through all kinds of dead-end jobs, he found work in the intensive care unit of the Veterans Hospital in Portland, Oregon, where they have lived since childhood. He later went on to work in the emergency department of the Legacy Emanuel Hospital Center, where most of the city's victims of violent crime are treated, an intense experience that led to his first novel, Within Normal Limits, the which he wrote under the tutelage of Paul Bowles, with whom he studied during a summer writing workshop in Tangier. Released on the prestigious Vintage Contemporaries label, Within Normal Limits not only had a good critical reception, but also won the Oregon Book Award in 1988.
Vintage Contemporaries, Within Normal Limits not only had a good critical reception but also won the Oregon Book Award in 1988.
Shortly before the publication of this first novel, Grimson was first diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, an incurable degenerative disease, the symptoms of which, however, temporarily subsided, only to reappear in 1991. Suddenly grieving, incapacitated, and forced to confine himself at home , Grimson began to experience increasingly vivid and surreal dreams, which would later be the origin and main inspiration for his next novel, Brand New Cherry Flavor, which mixes this dreamlike and ghostly landscape with the innovation of cinematographic realism (in the words of the author : "A concept evidently related to magical realism, which we could describe in a basic way as life + special effects"). Grimson refined this highly personal mix in his next and most celebrated novel, Acero (Es Pop Ediciones, 2010), a vampiric, black and urban narrative, set in Los Angeles in the late nineties and still considered today one of the best and most groundbreaking horror novels ever written.
However, his growing problems with sclerosis forced Grimson to completely withdraw from writing for a long time, until recently he began to publish in various magazines a series of short stories signed with the literary alias "Innocente Fontana", compiled in 2012 in the volume Stabs at Happiness.