David J. Bell (born November 17, 1969) is an American writer and university professor of English.
His most recent novel is She's Gone, his first young adult novel and a New York Times bestseller.[1] Bell's next adult novel, Try Not To Breathe, will be published in June 2023.
Bell began publishing stories in 2002, and they appeared in numerous
journals including Cemetery Dance, Rain Crow, Black Petals, The Edge, Shadow Regions, Shock Totem, Western Humanities Review, and Backwards City Review.[5] He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize five times.[10] His first two novels—The Condemned (2008) and The Girl in the Woods (2009)—were released in hardcover and trade paperback by
Delirium Books, under the name David Jack Bell.
Bell's next novel, Cemetery Girl (2011), was released by New American Library, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group in 2011.[11]Publishers Weekly called Cemetery Girl "disquieting and suspenseful"[12] and Suspense Magazine called it "brilliantly engaging, and a must-read for thriller fans."[13] In 2013, Cemetery Girl was a finalist for the Kentucky Literary Award[14] and won le Prix Polar International de Cognac.[15][16] The novel also received the most write-in votes when The New York Times asked readers what book should have won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction.[17]
Since Cemetery Girl, Penguin Random House has published thirteen more of Bell's adult suspense novels with their New American Library and Berkley imprints, including Try Not To Breathe,[18] which is forthcoming in June 2023.
Somebody's Daughter received a Library Journal starred review in 2018, and Kill All Your Darlings was nominated for an Edgar Award in 2022.[19]
In 2021, Bell signed a three-book contract with Sourcebooks, one of the fastest growing publishers in the world,[20] to write young adult novels for the Sourcebooks Fire imprint. Bell's first young adult suspense novel, She’s Gone, was published in November 2022 and appeared on the New York Times young adult paperback bestseller list in December 2022 and again in January 2023.
Bell co-edited two anthologies of short fiction with Molly McCaffrey: Commutability: Stories about the Journey from Here to There (2010) and Stuck in the Middle: Writing That Holds You in Suspense (2016), featuring work by a group of diverse writers including Sarah Domet, Kelcey Ervick, Ed Gorman, Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis, Thomas F. Monteleone, Faye Moskowitz, Norman Prentiss, James Reiss, and Sandra Scofield with cover art by award-winning painter C. David Jones.[28] Both anthologies were published by Main Street Rag publishing.[29]
