His father was in the army and so he moved around a lot as a child and lived in Wales. He was an avid reader of American comics as a child, and when he was eight or nine, and living in Gibraltar, he won a prize in a newspaper story-writing competition. He decided then “that my ambition was to write and illustrate my own book”.
He spent his teens in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, before moving to Manchester, London and then Norfolk. He now lives in Cambridge with his wife and son where he writes, draws, paints, dreams and doodles (not necessarily in that order). Chris worked as an illustrator and cartoonist for twenty years, working mainly for magazines & newspapers (these include The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Economist and the Wall Street Journal) before becoming a writer. He currently has a weekly strip cartoon called Paynes Grey in the New Statesman.

Chris has been a published author since 2000. He has written several books for children & young-adults, both fiction and non-fiction, and
has been nominated for many awards including the Edgar Awards, the UKLA Childrens Book Award and the Carnegie Medal. In recent years he has predominantly been writing horror.
Ever since he was a teenager Chris has loved unsettling and creepy stories, with fond memories of buying comics like Strange Tales and House of Mystery, watching classic BBC TV adaptations of M R James ghost stories every Christmas and reading assorted weirdness by everyone from Edgar Allen Poe to Ray Bradbury. He hopes Uncle Montagues Tales of Terror will haunt his readers in the way those writers have haunted him.