Jeff Horton was born in North Dakota, the youngest son of a career Air Force master sergeant, where he spent the first four years of his life before moving to North Carolina. A voracious reader growing up, he enjoyed reading everything from comic books to The Bible, including stories by many popular authors such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Michael Crichton, Tom Clancy, C.S. Lewis, and J.R.R. Tolkien.