Rocky Wood (19 October 1959 – 1 December 2014) was a New Zealand-born Australian writer and researcher best known for his books about horror author Stephen King.
His writing career began at university, where he wrote a national newspaper column in New Zealand on extra-terrestrial life and UFO-related phenomena and published other articles about the phenomenon worldwide, in the course of which research he met such figures as Erich von Däniken and J. Allen Hynek;[2][3] and had articles on the security industry published in the US, Canada, the UK, New Zealand and South Africa.
[12] King said in the Author's Note to Doctor Sleep: "Rocky Wood was my go-to guy for all things Shining, providing me with names and dates I had either forgotten or plain got wrong.
[16][17][18] In his research, Wood rediscovered previously unknown King stories,[19][20] including two written in his high school years, of which even the author did not have a copy.
Great Tales of Fear and Their Creators (McFarland, 2010), a re-imagining of events in 19th century horror, illustrated by Glenn Chadbourne.
It is co-written by Lisa Morton and illustrated by Greg Chapman and won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement on a Graphic Novel in 2012.
Wood made many media appearances on TV, radio, and in the press, and has spoken at conferences in the US,[30] Canada, UK, Switzerland, Yugoslavia, Australia, and New Zealand.
Wood was keynote speaker at the 2003 Stephen King (SKEMER) Conference held in Estes Park, Colorado at the site of the hotel that featured in The Shining (2003).
He spoke at Continuum 3 (2005), Continuum 4 (2006) and Continuum 5 (2009) in Melbourne, Australia; Conflux in Canberra, Australia (2006); at the Stephen King film festival (Dollar Baby Film Festival) held in King's hometown of Bangor, Maine in October 2005; at the World Horror Convention in Salt Lake City (2008); at the 68th World Science Fiction Convention in Melbourne (2010); at the World Horror Convention in Austin, Texas (2011) and the Horror Writers Association's Bram Stoker Weekends in Burbank (2009), on Long Island, New York (2011) and in New Orleans, Louisiana (2013).