Dark Contemporary Fantasy

"There was a whole sprawling world underneath us, filled with ugly, vicious, beautiful people. The line between the two places was thin, hardly a separation, and both ran on pain and blood and fear and death and joy and music."

~ Brenna Yovanoff, The Replacement

That Brenna Yovanoff quote? Change it to present tense and you have exactly what I love to write about.

There's devastating, destructive beauty in the world. Sometimes you have to look up from the bottom of a little ugliness to see it, or view it through a veil of fear and danger. Beauty comes alive in that sweet spot where you are vulnerable and stripped of all security. Maybe, too, human truth is easier to see when we meet it in the faeries, gods, genies, kelpies, and magical practitioners of myth and folk lore. We're conditioned to be afraid of the monsters, and they are strange enough that we look beneath the surface. Sometimes, they have more humanity than we do. Often, they show us the best in ourselves.

I write contemporary fantasy thrillers because that's what I love to read. I adore the work of Nancy Werlin, Holly Black, Cassandra Clare, Libba Bray, M. T. Anderson, Francesca Lia Block, Melissa Marr, Brenna Yovanoff, Emma Bull, and other writers who dare to combine the slightly twisted ordinary with the extraordinary and fantastic. I also adore chase novels, thrillers, crime novels and anything that moves at a breathtaking pace. I love tales of magic and fantasy from Garth Nix, Kristin Cashore, Gail Carson Levine, Lloyd Alexander, Charles de Lint, E. Nesbitt, Natalie Babbitt, Eleanor Cameron, Ursula Le Guin, and so many, many more I can't begin to name them all. Their worlds inform and expand my own, in life and on my pages.