Erica Waters

Erica Waters is a lifelong Southerner who recently moved to Salem, Massachusetts. She writes dark fantasy and horror for young adults. Her second novel, The River Has Teeth, won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Young Adult Novel and was also an Indie Next pick and a Kirkus Best Young Adult Book of 2021. Waters’s other works include Ghost Wood Song and The Restless Dark. She is also a contributor to the bestselling folk horror anthology The Gathering Dark.

Her new novel is All That Consumes Us.

Recently I asked Waters about what she was reading. Her reply:

I read a lot of YA horror and dark fantasy that I am asked to blurb. I’m always delighted when one is truly excellent, like the one I just finished: A Place for Vanishing by Ann Fraistat, a YA haunted house story that truly surprised me. It’s filled with masks and bugs and seances, which aren’t things I would have ever thought to put together. I loved the immersive, atmospheric setting and how vividly I could picture everything. Fraistat is particularly good at pacing, setting, and family relationships, especially between siblings. It made for a great spooky season read!

Right now I’m reading Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life by Ruth Franklin, a biography of one of my favorite writers. I love getting an up-close look at a writer’s growth and evolution, and so far this book seems particularly good at showing how Jackson slowly became the brilliant writer we all adore. Getting to see her humanness and the development of her craft close up is fascinating, though I know there are some rough life scenes ahead. But as a writer, getting a glimpse into the interior life of an author I admire takes some of the loneliness out of the craft. Even the greats had to go through the process, same as the rest of us.

I just started reading Starling House by Alix E. Harrow, an author I haven’t read before. Because my own books are Southern Gothic-ish, this one has been recommended to me a lot. Set in the South and featuring an unsettling house and a low-income protagonist, it is certainly right up my alley. I am only a handful of chapters in, but I’m already loving the format, with its footnotes, Wikipedia entries, and sense of the unreliability of storytelling.

Visit Erica Waters's website.

Q&A with Erica Waters.

--Marshal Zeringue