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Jeffrey Konvitz is an American author of horror and suspense, best known for his 1974 novel The Sentinel, which hit #2 on the New York Times bestseller list in the wake of Catholic horror blockbuster The Exorcist. The stepback art for his first novel was probably one of the first in a long line of novels featuring the soon-to-be overused blurb “Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, The Other, and now….”
Konvitz’s debut propelled him, and his follow-up novel The Guardian, to the top of the lists. Around the same time, he co-produced with Lloyd Kaufman of Troma fame the horror film Silent Night, Bloody Night, which appears to have set him up to write the screenplay for and produce the 1977 film adaptation of The Sentinel. He only wrote a couple more novels — Apocalypse (1979) and Monster (1981), which was published as The Beast in the UK. He continued to produce films through 2007.
Konvitz is a native New Yorker, and was educated at Cornell and the Columbia University School of Law. Biographical information in the back of The Guardian says “he began his career in 1969 working for a Hollywood talent agency.” He went on to become general counsel to a theater chain, and then a production executive at MGM studios. He currently works as an entertainment finance attorney in Los Angeles.
To browse the list of his titles currently available on Amazon, click here.
These cover scans are from the library of author Christopher Fulbright.
