Kate Horsley Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Anthologies

Kate Horsley is a horror and mystery fiction author from Richmond Virginia. She was born in Virginia and credits her love for reading to her mother Alice Horsley Parker. As the youngest of five children, reading was something that she loved to do, which is perhaps why she decided to write her novels using her mother’s maiden name. Her mother then believed that women were to be passionate, refined and educated. Horsley went to Virginia during the 1960s from where she was part of a protest against the Vietnam War. After working with the Civil Rights movement for a few years, she proceeded to college and then summer school in Paris. Almost every event in her life was something that moved her closer to becoming a fiction author. After she read Alan Watts, she flirted with Zen Buddhism too for a while. She also read several works by Native Americans but it was her masters thesis that had a much more significant influence in her storytelling. Horsley got her doctorate from the University of New Mexico focusing on American West and the women who lived there. “The Monster’s Wife,” one of her most popular novels, was published in 2014 and she has never looked back since. She also has a day job and has been a college tutor for more than three decades.

Horsley was born to a bunch of eccentrics and grew up in a haunted house and as such making things up was something she learned from a very young age. As a teenager, she went to Oxford from where she graduated with a bachelors in arts before she moved to the US, where she lived in Boston for more than ten years. During this time, she did all manner of jobs for lecturer and researcher at Harvard, box assembler to babysitter even as she pursued her doctorate degree. Ever since she went back to the United Kingdom, she got jobs at Chester and Lancaster Universities, where she is a Creative Writing tutor. She has also been a Chester writing fellow before she went on to teach creative writing at Hull University. “The Monster’s Wife” her debut novel was published under Barbican Press and made the shortlist for Scottish First Book of the Year Award. Some of her novels have also been translated into Korean while her short stories and poems have been featured in anthologies and magazines. She currently makes her home with John, her artist husband, their child and pets in Manchester.
Outside of her writing endeavors, Kate Hiorsley runs crimeculture.com, a crime fiction review site as editor. She was drawn to the world of crime fiction ever since she was a child. Growing up in a house rumored to be haunted by a woman that had been the previous resident, she was obsessed with anything that gave her the creeps. The red room which was the nickname of the room she died in had red wallpaper and she used to wonder how she met her death and imagined that she saw her face in the bizarre wallpaper patterns. Since her mother dreamed of becoming an author, the house was also filled with all manner of books that inspired her love for storytelling. Apart from the Scottish First Book of the Year Award she has also won awards from Adoption Matters Northwest and Sentinel Literary Quarterly. She has also made the shortlist for the Ravenglass Poetry Press Prize and the short fiction award from Asham.

Kate Horsley’s “The American Girl” is a noirish nove about Quinn Perkins, a seventeen year old American exchange student. At the start of the story, she just stumbled into a medieval like French village barefoot and bloodied. She is taken in by a good Samaritan but immediately goes into a coma only to wake up with amnesia. She does not remember anything about her circumstances, her family or her life. Molly Swift, an obscure journalist from Boston, gets interested in the story with the full backing of her superior. The Blavettes who are the family Quinn had been staying with have gone missing leaving him a victim, witness and suspect in a mysterious crime. Law enforcement has not been able to find any leads and they turn to Quinn for help. They believe that if she can get her memory back, maybe they can reconstruct a more coherent version of events that led to the disappearance of her benefactors. But it is not going to be easy though she slowly gets some of her memories back including from her pre event blog and diary entries from her smartphone. She also remembers bits and pieces from her social media apps and accounts. Combined with some lies, secrets,a few sociopaths and a stereotypical police detective, the stage is set for an interesting mystery.

“The Monster’s Wife” by Kate Horsley is a story set at the tail end of the nineteenth century on a small Scotish island. It is a small settlement and most of the people depend on the sea and the land for everything. But then a European visitor comes to visit and everything changes. Suddenly, the natives have to deal with biblical proportion plagues that batter the populace and infrastructure of the small island. Nature seems to have become too restless as they discover strange happenings on the beach such as dead dolphins smiling upon the rocks. All over the island, livestock are found torn to pieces even as they discover Napoleon has several hundred ships moored just off the island. The citizens are fully convinced that God is angry with them and resort to prayer at the small chapel on the island. It is not long before Victor Frankenstein, the newcomer from the continent, comes under suspicion. He works with Oona the guide who possesses rare determination and strength despite her physical frailty. She demonstrates unwavering loyalty to May, her best friend who is planning to leave and go get married to a twin from the village. But it is the loyalty she has for May is what first attracts Oona into the mysterious world of Frankenstein.