Twelve year old Victoria Thompson has always felt like an outsider. While other girls her age are spending time gossiping about boys and reading teen magazines, she's more interested in spooky stories and drawing monsters in the margins of her notebook.

With no friends to speak of, Victoria doesn't mind when her family has to move to a small town in Upstate New York. If anything, she's looking forward to a fresh start at a new school, and hoping to meet someone who shares her interest in the odd and unusual.

But Victoria is about to make some new friends who are odder and more unusual than anything she could have imagined...

The Night Folk.

"Matthew Dow Smith is one of my favorite writers. Soon he'll be one of yours as well." - Daniel Waters, author of the GENERATION DEAD series

Hi. My name is Matthew Dow Smith. For 18 years now, I've been drawing comic books for everyone from DC and Marvel to IDW and Top Cow. And while I've gotten to work with some of the best writers in the comic book industry, I've always had stories of my own that I wanted to tell. Now, with your donation, I can tell one of them.

NIGHT FOLK is a Dark Fantasy novel about a young girl who discovers a group of strange creatures called the Night Folk, an ancient race who inspired all of our tales of monsters and ghouls. They lived among us for centuries, but when humanity turned against them, the Night Folk fled our world and created their own kingdom on the borders of reality -- the Night World, a strange and magical place where it's always midnight and monsters walk the streets.

"Matthew Dow Smith is a phenomenal artist.  Look no further than his body of work for proof.  But he's also an amazing writer and one I've been encouraging to move forward for a long time.  Everything I've read of his has been a treat" - James A. Moore, author of the Serenity Falls trilogy, BLOOD RED, and UNDER THE OVERTREE

Geared towards young readers as well as adults, NIGHT FOLK will be a prose novel with illustrations, written and drawn by myself. The finished product will be self-published as an ebook through the Amazon Kindle and Apple's iBooks stores. There will also be a limited edition print version available only to Kickstarter backers who donate $100 and above.

Your donation will help cover my expenses so I can take time away from my comic book work to finish the novel, draw the illustrations, and have the manuscript professionally edited, formatted and converted, and published. It will also help pay to have the various rewards printed and shipped, including a special promotional poster for the project colored by my long-time collaborator, Charlie Kirchoff, which is available to backers who donate $50 and above.

As a backer, you will receive regular updates, sneak peeks at the work in progress, and a look at design sketches and illustrations for the book, while backers who donate $75 and above will also receive an exclusive Night Folk short story.

Each and every backer will be thanked in a special section in the back of the book.

"Matthew Dow Smith is not just a superb artist, he's a talented writer as well, and I've been after him for years to leave the drawing board and expend more time and energy on his writing. I hope this project affords him the time to get this novel done." - F. Paul Wilson, New York Times Bestselling Author

NIGHT FOLK is the kind of story I've always wanted to tell. A story about people who feel like they don't belong finding a place for themselves and becoming their own kind of hero. It's the first piece in a much larger story I've been developing for nearly 20 years.

Not only will you be helping me finish and publish NIGHT FOLK, but you'll also be helping me pave the way for more writing projects in the future, including a Young Adult novel novel I've been working on for the last two years featuring my character Evan Fade.

Victoria and the Night Folk have a part to play in Fade's story as well, but first they have to face the mysterious Mr. Balloon, and stop a war that could destroy us all.

To read two sample chapters, click HERE.

For more information about me, visit my website, www.matthewdowsmith.com, where you'll find some of my previous work as an artist and as a writer, including a short prose story you can download as a PDF.

And to find out more about the NIGHT FOLK project, click on the Updates tab near the top of this page for a sneak peek at parts of the first chapter, and some of the illustrations I've already done for the project.

"I have been a fan of Matthew Dow Smith's art for more than fifteen years, since I first saw it in the pages of DC's Starman, but I've only recently become aware of his talents as a writer, as well. And as much as I love his art, I think that Smith might be as good at writing as he is at drawing, or even better. The bits of prose I've read so far, fragments of larger works in progress, are tantalizing good, hinting at great secrets and an enthralling world gradually unfolding before the reader's eyes. I for one think it would be a damned shame if these stories were to remain merely fragments, and if small contributions through Kickstarter mean that readers will have a chance to see the completed work some day, I think that it would be WELL worth the investment." - Chris Roberson, writer and publisher