Kay Chronister Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

Publication Order of Short Story Collections

Publication Order of Anthologies

Kay Chronister is a horror fiction novelist who is best known for her speculative/weird fiction novels.

She would make her name with the publishing of “Desert Creatures,” which she first published in 2022. This is a post-apocalyptic work Western fiction work that would become a bestseller immediately after it was published.
While this was the novel that would make her reputation, this was not her first rodeo, as she had been publishing for eight years before that.

She began writing with the publishing of “Thin Places,” a short story collection that was a Shirley Jackson Award nominee. This was the same collection that included the World Fantasy Award-nominated short story “The Women Who Sing for Sklep.”
Her short stories have also been published in the likes of “The Dark,” “Strange Horizons,” “Beneath Ceaseless Skies,” “Clarkesworld,” and elsewhere.

Outside of her writing, she went to the University of Arizona where she got her doctoral degree in English.

Before that, she lived in Phnom Penh in Cambodia where she taught at a children’s home. While she is originally from Washington, she spent about half a dozen years in Tucson, Arizona and now makes her home in Philadelphia.
She currently is employed at Widener University where she teaches English. When she is not teaching or writing, she can usually be found hiking, riding horses, and listening to history podcasts.

Chronister’s “Desert Creature” is a work set in a desiccated and treacherous world.

The lead is Magdala who is a woman used to fighting to survive. When she was nine years old, she and Xavier her father had been exiled from their home and traveled across the Sonoran Desert in search of refuge.
As they were pursued by violence, they joined a band of survivors heading to the holy city of Las Vegas on pilgrimage. It is the city bright with neon power that is the home of vigilante saints.

Magdala who had been born with clubfoot is hopeful that she will be healed. But facing the horrors of the Sonoran, the pilgrims start falling ill with a hideous sickness and suddenly Magdala finds herself having to fend for herself.
She spends seven years all alone and soon grows tired of waiting for her miracle. Recruiting Elam an exiled Las Vegas priest as her guide, Magdala once again resumes her journey toward the city determined to make it this time.
She forms a fragile alliance with the priest as they navigate the strangest and darkest reaches of the desert. But the journey takes her ever further from being saved the more she comes closer to Las Vegas.
With poetic precision and ferocious imagination, this is a story of the limits of human endurance in the face of redemption.

“Thin Places” by Kay Chronister is a brilliant collection with a chameleonic quality from story to story.

From “Life Cycles,” which has the doom-besotted young man, to “White Throat Holler” with its rebellious teenage girl, and then there is “Your Body a Grave, Your Clothes a Sepulcher,” which is told in the voice of a highly literate child.
Chronister is exceptional at mimicking different character tropes, even as she takes her readers to far-flung places.

This is evident, particularly in the last three stories of the collection such as “The Lights We Carried Home,” “Russula’s Wake,” and “Thin Places,” in which she takes her readers to Branaugh, the exceedingly strange world.
In “The Fifth Gable,” “Too Wild and Too Lonely,” she wondrously unleashes the theme of pregnancy. “The Fifth Gable” is fascinating in how it showcases four alternative childbirth methodologies.

Chronister shows that she is familiar with post-apocalyptic tales in “Roiling and Without Form,” and also presents a unique view of the afterlife in the story “The Warriors, the Mothers, the Drowned.”
Nonetheless, for all its variety, “Thin Places” showcases an author who has a unique voice and a consistent style so that you can easily follow from story to story without impediment.

Kay Chronister’s novel “Supernatural Horror Stories” is her latest collection that crawls with the chilling sensations of otherworldly presences, the dark fingers of terror and horror in the stories of horror.
The work reads like something of a “Twilight Zone” marathon and has everything from cursed objects, witches, vampires, vengeful spirits, mourning lovers delving into the occult, and suicide as a siren.

The best thing about the work is that it also gives us a taste of brand-new horror fiction authors in addition to the many authors whose works we have been reading all along.

Some of the new notable authors include Angela Sylvaine, E.E.E. Christman, Matthew Gorman, Morgan Elektra, Oliver Smith, Damien Angelica Waters, and Mariah Southworth among others.
Among the classic authors include the likes of Bram Stoker, E.F. Benson, M.R. James, F. Elizabeth Gaskell, and Marion Crawford.