Van Eekhout's parents are of
Indo (Dutch-Indonesian) extraction. His last name (meaning "of Oakwood") is pronounced, in his own explanation, "like this: Van, as in the kind of thing you drive, eek, as in, 'Eek, killer robots are stomping the rutabagas!' and 'hout', like 'out' with an h in front of it. The emphasis is on the Eek." He grew up in
Los Angeles and attended
UCLA, where he received a Bachelor's in English. He earned a Master's in Educational Media and Computers at
Arizona State, and worked for a time at ASU designing
multimedia. He attended the writing workshop
Viable Paradise in 1999. His first professionally published story, "Wolves Till the World Goes Down," (2001) appeared in the
anthology Starlight 3 and was later reprinted in
Fantasy: The Best of 2001. His story "In the Late December" (2003) was nominated for
Nebula Award for
Best Short Story. His work has also appeared in a number of other places, including ''
Asimov's Science Fiction, Realms of Fantasy, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Strange Horizons''. His first novel,
Norse Code, an adult
urban fantasy, was published by
Bantam Books in May 2009. His second novel, a
middle-grade fantasy titled
Kid Vs. Squid, was released by
Bloomsbury Children's USA on May 11, 2010.
The Boy at the End of the World, also a middle-grade fantasy, was released in June 2011 by Bloomsbury Children's USA. His fourth novel,
California Bones, was published by
Tor Books on June 10, 2014. It is the first in a planned trilogy based on his 2006 short story "The Osteomancer’s Son", anthologized in
Year’s Best Fantasy 7 and
Best Fantasy of the Year: 2007. The second in the series,
Pacific Fire, was published on January 27, 2015. He currently lives in
San Diego, California. ==Bibliography==