Born May 30, 1956 in Cincinnati, Ohio, Lucas began writing professionally at the age of 15, when his first reviews were accepted by the influential fantasy film review Cinefantastique. He served as one of the magazine's midwestern bureaus for the next ten years.

In 1985, Lucas edited and co-authored a series of twelve paperback video guides for Video Times magazine, where he started a monthly column entitled Video Watchdog, investigating the changes made to various films (usually horror, cult and fantastic) when they appeared on video. With the dissolution of Video Times in 1986, the column resurfaced in the pages of the Fangoria spin-off Gorezone, where it regularly appeared from 1988 to 1992. In 1990, Lucas and his wife Donna launched Video Watchdog as a separate magazine with a focus on extremely detailed articles that made it a key source of serious film criticism. His early Watchdog columns were collected with other relevant material in The Video Watchdog Book (1992, ISBN 0963375601).

Today, Lucas supplements his editorial duties with NoZone, a DVD column for the British monthly Sight and Sound, and he is also a frequent contributor of liner notes, audio commentaries and archival materials to DVD releases. His work has been included in literature and film references as Modern Critical Views: Anthony Burgess (edited by Harold Bloom), Horror: Another 100 Best Books (edited by Stephen Jones and Kim Newman), The BFI Companion to Horror (edited by Kim Newman), The Shape of Rage: The Films of David Cronenberg (edited by Piers Handling), and Obsession: The Films of Jess Franco. His critical biography Mario Bava: All the Colors of the Dark is scheduled tentatively for publication in the Fall of 2006 after 30 years of preparation and delays so numerous and extensive that Lucas began a special Bava Book Update blog just to document progress and setbacks.

Lucas has also published two novels to date. Throat Sprockets (1994, ISBN 0385312903), the fulfillment of an uncompleted graphic novel serialized in Stephen R. Bissette's Taboo, is about a man whose life is altered by a chance encounter with an erotic and disturbing film of mysterious origin. It was singled out as the year's best first novel in Terri Windling and Ellen Datlow's The Year's Best Fantasy & Horror, and was chosen by novelist Tananarive Due for inclusion in Horror: Another 100 Best Books (2005, ISBN 0786715774). After completing work on his Bava magnum opus, Lucas ended his decade-long hiatus from fiction with The Book of Renfield: A Gospel of Dracula (2005, ISBN 0743243544), a fairly well-received complement to Bram Stoker's Dracula that moves the Count's fly-and-spider-eating pawn to center stage.