Ally Wilkes Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Anthologies

Ally Wilkes is a horror fiction author from the United Kingdom that is best known for his debut novel “All the White Spaces” that he published in 2022.

The author has said that he grew up in a succession of haunted and isolated boarding schools and country houses. Wilkes went to Oxford where she studied law and after that, she would become a criminal barrister for eleven years.

It was while she was working as a barrister that she learned that sometimes the best in us can be brought out by extreme situations.

Ally has a particular fascination with Polar stories and loves to explore Gothic works, even though he suffers from a loathing of the cold and seasickness.

Before she published her debut novel, she started out writing short fiction that was published in “Three Crows Magazine” and “Nightmare Magazine.”

Apart from her writing, Wilkes also works for the British horror website “Horrified,” where she is the Book Reviews Editor.

Ally currently makes her home in the London suburb of Greenwich, in a house full of all manner of books about Polar exploration and an anatomical human skeleton in the corner.

Just like many authors, Ally Wilkes began writing when she was very young. During her teenage years, she used to pen all manner of graphic novels, novels, and short stories.

But once she began working as a criminal barrister she found she did not have the headspace or time to work on anything not related to her legal work.

It was very frustrating not being able to write but ultimately, she started to find ways to sneak into her life the odd writing challenge.

She still remembers how she once took a week off to do NaNoWriMo, which is when she penned the first draft of her debut novel.

She has now left the legal profession but her writing is still influenced by pressure cooker environments. Most of them are all about feeling under siege, living up to expectations, overcoming despair and disillusionment.

Wilkes grew up loving horror and used to love watching “The X-Files,” when it began airing in the United Kingdom. She would thus combine her love for horror fiction to work through many of her difficult life experiences.

She gravitated toward horror fiction as it provided a lot of possibilities for terror and thrills, and insights into worlds we cannot yet fully understand or see such as dimensions of hell, ghosts, or more cosmic things.

Ally Wilkes began penning the manuscript for her debut novel “All the White Spaces” as a diary during 2015’s NaNoWriMo.

She initially intended to pen 30 diary entries and spent a lot of time researching the work and reading the journals of real-life Polar explorers.

She used to love the authentic tone of Polar explorers but found the detailed nature of epistolary fiction writing was not that easy.

Things were not made any easier by the fact that she had no writing training and putting the ramblings of a teenager in a tent or bunk with frozen fingers and no privacy was no mean task.

Ultimately, the head of Curtis Browen Creative who was Anna Davis told her that maybe she should try another method of storytelling.

Once she let go of that method of storytelling, things started moving fast again. For some reason, “All the Whoite Spaces” did not fall into the category of unfinished manuscripts that she had.

Once she was done with the first draft, she dove right back in looking for flaws and areas that could be improved by making use of the content of a writing course she had taken.

After several rounds of writing, rewriting, and editing, she finally found an agent and published her debut work “All the White Spaces” in 2022.

“All the White Spaces” by Ally Wilkes is a novel set following the end of World War I.

The lead is a man named Jonathan Morgan who hides as a stowaway on an Antarctic expedition looking to find his place among men. Aboard the ship is James Randall nicknamed “Australis,” the world-famous explorer who is also his hero.
Jonathan may live as his true gender and his true self and finally get to have the many adventures that have been denied him.

However, things are not as smooth as he had hoped as the recently ended war is casting its long shadow over the expeditionists. They all have to deal with mistrust, guilt, and grief, which make the expedition even more complicated.
When they arrive at the frozen Weddell Sea in Antarctica, the men will have to land and spend the winter somewhere which immediately seems both wrong and eerie.

The place they are to spend the winter is unmarked and they have to find it on a vast white continent. Completely isolated, the expedition can no longer contact the outside world and there is no rescue party coming for them.

Out in the dark and on extremely cold Polar nights with auroras overhead, there is something very dangerous waiting for the explorers. As the freezing winter descends on the Antarctic, the paranormal force may just pick them off one by one.

Ally Wilkes’s work “Where the Dead Wait” is an atmospheric and eerie Polar Gothic fiction work. The novel follows a Victorian explorer on the quest for his own redemption and his lost shipmate.

William Day ought to be an Arctic explorer of much acclaim but following a disastrous expedition in which the members of the expedition only got out by feeding on their dead colleagues, he had to come back in disgrace.

Thirteen years later, Jesse Stevens his second in command goes missing in the Arctic. William thinks this is the chance for him to regain his tarnished image by rescuing Stevens back home.

However, the rescue mission turns hairy as it evokes his past and he is forced to confront things he believed he had left in the past including cannibalism, betrayal, and abandonment.

Aboard the ship, William also has to deal with unwanted passengers. He has to contend with a spirit medium who is Stepehen’s wife whose seances frighten and fascinate and a reporter who is obsessed with the first expedition.

Following a trail of old bones, gaunt bodies, and cryptic messages their search becomes increasingly unnerving. It soon becomes evident that the events of the past will come back to haunt William Day and his colleagues.