Maria Romasco Moore Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Anthologies

Maria Romasco-Moore
Maria Romasco-Moore has her MFA from Southern Illinois University and is a graduate of the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop. She teaches writing at Columbus College of Art and Design.

Her stories have appeared in publications like DIAGRAM, Lightspeed, Interfictions, Hobart, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Kaleidotrope, and Women Destroy Science Fiction (an anthology).

Maria enjoys playing board games. Whether it’s the good clean moving little wooden people around a map fun of Concordia or the surreal art murder mystery ghost séance delights of the game Mysterium, she is there. Maria finds herself being fascinated by the way that newer games are incorporating narrative into the gameplay.

She suspects that the majority of her writing is a slightly more austere iteration of the games she would playing during childhood, sitting by herself with tiny modelling-clay people, acting out her tragicomic and epic sagas.

Her story “Self-Storage” came together off a typo. During a summer workshop/potluck, she was reading through an early draft of a friend’s novel chapter. Her character worked as a security guard at a storage unit and she meant, Maria thinks, to write about how he enjoyed the “loneliness of storage” but dropped the “of”.

She loved loneliness storage immediately. Maria circled it with great enthusiasm. She finds that even her friend’s mistakes are rather genius. She wrote a horrible and quick draft of it, summer workshop critiqued it, and the story then went through the slow journey of slow accretion which her stories do all the time. Periods of long abandonment interspersed with some feverish revision.

Maria’s favorite part of the writing process is making herself laugh. She always wants to write funny. Even if she is trying to write some horror story, she tries to look for moments of absurdity or humor. This contrast is one of her favorite things. She deeply admires those writers that can pull off horrifying/funny or funny/sad. She aspires to this balance.

In a similar way, Maria just loves contrasting the odd with the mundane. She had a ton of fun thinking up the storage requirements for different emotions, and then the DIY workarounds that the main character ends up using to store them.

The form for “Ghostographs” did come first. For a long time, she wanted to write something inspired by the photos she had collected. Flash vignettes made the most sense to her, since each of the pictures already seemed to be a small window into a self-contained world. The themes and story lines flowed out from there.

“Ghostographs” was a finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year in Short Stories and for the Shirley Jackson Award.

Maria’s debut novel, called “Some Kind of Animal”, was released in the year 2020, and was published by Delacorte Press. Her work is from the young adult fiction genre. Her interconnected collection of flash fiction inspired by some vintage photographs, called “Ghostographs”, was published by Rose Metal Press.

“Ghostographs” is the first stand alone novella and was released in the year 2018. Every old photo album features a multitude of mysteries of the people that came before. This book isn’t any exception. Crystalline and brief stories combine with some vintage photos to illuminate the hidden terrain of childhood as well as the pain of growing up, all in a tiny town right at the edge of an abyss where the narrator comes of age among friends, family, and phantoms.

It is a place that is populated with some charming and unforgettable characters, where the housewives send off for mail-order babies and young girls glow right on front porches during hot summer nights. The men get into staring competitions with lamps and the great aunts live in their castles and collect their haunted dogs.

Games of hide and seek just refuse to end, and it is a town filled with secrets, where adulthood’s hardships threaten to invade the magical and wild domain of kids.

This book is evocative and haunting, strange and funny, the world in this one might be a memory or it could only be a trick of the light. Fans found the stories in this to be its own ghost: uncanny, startling, then gone. Each one will rattle its chains, smiles its horrific smile, and gestures towards some others.

“Some Kind of Animal” is the first stand alone novel and was released in the year 2020. A story about two girls that have a secret nobody would believe. And the desperate and wild lengths they are willing to go to in order to protect one another from the outside world.

Jo lives in the exact same Appalachian town where her mom vanished fifteen years previously.. everybody knows what happened to her mom. She was wild, and bad things tend to happen to girls like that.

Now folks are beginning to talk about Jo. She is barely passing her classes and she falls asleep at her desk each day. She is following in her mother’s footsteps. Jo does have a secret she is keeping. It isn’t what people believe, however. Not a drug habit or a boy. She has a twin sister, named Lee.

Jo’s sister is not like a lot of people. She lives out in the woods, catching rabbits with her bare hands and then eats them raw. Each night, Jo slips out of her bedroom window and meets up with her sister in the trees. Together, the pair runs. Fearlessly.

Truth is, nobody’s ever actually seen Jo’s sister. When her twin attacks a boy in town, everybody assumes it was Jo that did it. Jo must decide, then, does she tell the entire world about her sister? Or does she go and run?

This novel is an unconventional, surprising, haunting, interesting supernatural thriller. The story on how Lee ends up in the woods is interesting and Jo is a conflicted and strong main character that struggles to find herself within the grim legacies of both her parents. Some readers flew right through this one, just wanting to see if Lee was real or not. Fans found this one to be unyielding and sharp, and they loved each and every single page of it.