Sean Patrick Carlin (he/him) is an author, essayist, and screenwriter, as well as an environmental activist with the Climate Reality Project.

Photo credit: Ellen P. Carlin

He grew up in the Bronx, not far from the site Edgar Allen Poe called home in 1846, later a city park where Bob Kane conceived Batman in 1939.  Inspired by the witching influence of his hometown along the Hudson, Carlin wrote his first horror story in the fifth grade, “Turn the Streetlights Out,” about a demonically possessed shadow that kills any unlucky bastard who happens to cast it, earning him one of the few As to grace his otherwise dubious academic record.

While in high school, he studied sequential illustration under the late, great Batman artist/editor Carmine Infantino at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, then got seduced by screenwriting/filmmaking when he and his pals made an amateur sequel to The Lost Boys, one of his formative creative influences.

Carlin majored in English literature and cinema studies at CUNY; upon graduation, he interned on Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead and secured his first literary manager, moving to Hollywood soon thereafter to pursue a screenwriting career.

Crawling out of his creative cocoon to finally do something about his other great passion, environmental activism, Carlin trained in 2018 under former U.S. Vice President Al Gore to be a Climate Reality Leader, helping to spread awareness of and inspire action on climate change.  Subsequently, he worked directly with the L.A. Board of Supervisors to bring Los Angeles into the County Climate Coalition, a nationwide alliance of jurisdictions committed to upholding the standards of the Paris Accord, and has given public presentations in support of federal climate legislation.  Additionally, he serves on the leadership team for the San Fernando Valley Chapter of the Climate Reality Project as a mentor to his fellow activists.

After 20 years in L.A., Carlin returned home to the Bronx for good in 2021.

In 2023, his debut novel, The Dogcatcher, was published by DarkWinter Press.  An occult horror/dark comedy in the spirit of Shaun of the Dead, it’s about a municipal animal-control officer whose Upstate New York community is being terrorized by a cryptid in the woods:

The Dogcatcher is available in paperback and Kindle formats from Amazon.  For a (spoiler-free) behind-the-scenes account of the project’s creative inception and development, please read Carlin’s essay “The Dogcatcher Unleashed:  The Story behind My Debut Novel.”

His deep-dive blog posts explore the notion of moral creativity—the power and responsibility our storytellers have in shaping the culture, for good and for ill.  To get you started, he’s curated links to his highest-value essays here, subdivided into four categories:  Narrative Craft, Socially Conscious Storytelling, Commercial Adolescence, and Personal Essays.

“Enter freely of your own will—and leave some of the happiness you bring!”