Joseph Armstead (born February 2, 1956) is a horror-suspense fiction author best known for his loosely-connected series of stories and novels about the MOON-CHOSEN vampires, a series of genre-bending vampire noir/cybergoth novels which generally feature the immortal, somewhat sinister vampire hunter, the anti-hero Montgomery Quinn. The novels in the series are Nocturnes and Neon, published 2000, Bleeding Twilight, published 2001, Darkness Fears, published 2003, The Demogorgon Agenda, published as an eBook in 2004, and Endless Nocturnes, published in 2007. Darkness Fears and The Demogorgon Agenda feature supporting characters from Nocturnes and Neon as their main protagonists, although both novels do contain passing references to Quinn from Nocturnes and Neon.  He continued the exploration of his complex Moon-Chosen vampire mythology with publication of the novel Nightflesh, the first volume in a proposed trilogy he calls The Porphyrricon.  The Porphyrricon does not feature Quinn nor any of the other regular cast of characters in the Nocturnes series, but remains set in the fictional northern California cities of "West Sussex" and "New Barrington" in mythical Borrego Bay.  Mr. Armstead's novels generally center on the themes of personal and societal alienation, xenophobia and interspecies racism, dark conspiracies, criminal violence and renegade scientific technologies. Armstead is also the creator of "The Infernals", evil alien demigods that he features in his Book of Dark Memory series, a darkly violent, psycho-sexual science fiction series, of which the novel Painmaker is the first volume.  The novel Red Benediction was the next follow-up in the series in 2007. Additionally, he authored a dark sci-fi thriller entitled The Screaming Season which saw small press publication in 2003.

He was born in Peru, Indiana, United States, but spent much of his formative years in Europe, principally southern Italy, as a dependent of a father in the U.S. Air Force and he eventually spent his adolescence in New Hampshire. He currently lives in northern California and is a computer technologist. He is also known as an essayist, a postmodernist poet and is frequently published in various literary publications.  Mr. Armstead is also a member of the American Mathematical Society.