Both his parents were from the west of Ireland; his father was from a remote area, and had spoken only the Irish language until he was about twelve.
As a result, Coyne grew up with bedtime stories of Ireland, on which he would later draw for his Dungeons & Dragons-influenced novel Hobgoblin.
He followed this with a number of other horror novels, including bestsellers such as The Legacy and Hobgoblin, before cutting back on genre writing in the mid-1980s.
[7] The Caddie Who Knew Ben Hogan, was published in 2006 and is a literary exploration of golf and everyday life.
[8] Norman Rush praised the novel, saying, "John Coyne has managed to employ golf as a lens through which aspects of Midwestern daily life in the 1940s, of thwarted love, of social class, are revealed with stark and unsettling clarity.