A.J Spectre (or Anf to his friends) is a Melbourne-based aspiring writer hoping to fulfil the only dream he’d had since he was 13 years old.

“I went to a pretty prestigious school – the kids around me knew what they were going to do after high school (doctors, lawyers, dad’s business and what have you) but being raised by a single mother who spoke little to no English and living in a house filled with nothing but girls made it very hard to figure out what to do.

“I figured that if I didn’t have any mentor in my life to show me what I could eventually become, then I’d just have to make one up and aspire to be him instead.

“I created many personalities to suit my needs and usually presented these to my friends in the form of uncles or cousins that didn’t exist. ‘Uncle A was actually a hunter who lived in America and taught me how to shoot’ or ‘Cousin F was actually a high-paid lawyer doing charity work in Saigon’. The list was endless and the stories were thick with false truths.

“It was then that I realised that was what I wanted to do in life: create stories.”

Currently, under his mantle, A.J Spectre has two projects in the works.

The first being made free to the public is his gothic short story series: Con-Trax.

Taken from the view of the Devils’ Contractor, a lawyer and enforcer for the Black Princes of Hell, Con-Trax challenges the concepts of religion, morality and sacrifice.

After all:

“What is worth the price of your soul?”

His second project is a hidden manuscript called Angelius, which he aspires to have published one day.