Author: Mandy Webster

Amanda L. Webster is the author of If You Didn't See It Coming, One Bad Cat, Demons of the Night, DIY High, Valley of the Bees, and F-ing Freddy Fisher. She is also a writing teacher who lives part-time in a sorority house.
Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

The Jellyfish Problem by Tessa Yang is a haunting debut about grief, isolation, and the strange pull of belonging

Mandy Webster

Some novels hook readers with plot. Others cast a quieter spell, slowly wrapping themselves around your imagination until you realize you’ve been completely pulled under. The Jellyfish Problem blends magical realism, sea monster folklore, grief narrative, and literary mystery into an ambitious debut that will strongly appeal to readers who enjoy atmospheric, character-driven speculative fiction.

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Dr. Jo Ness is a marine biologist who has spent the last seven months barely existing after the death of her closest friend and collaborator, Aldo. Hidden away at a struggling aquarium, she immerses herself in jellyfish research and the unfinished field guide the two of them had been writing together. Aldo still exists in the margins of those pages through handwritten notes and observations, and Jo clings to them because she doesn’t know how to move forward without him. When Nadia—a woman Jo once loved during college—contacts her with stories about a giant glowing jellyfish off the coast of Maine, Jo seizes on the opportunity. Officially, she goes because of the creature. Emotionally, she goes because Nadia gives her a reason to leave her grief-stricken isolation behind, even if only temporarily.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Our Sister’s Keeper by Jasmine Holmes is a haunting Southern Gothic that demands to be felt

Mandy Webster

Some horror novels rely on monsters lurking in the shadows. Others understand that the most terrifying things are the systems people willingly protect. Our Sister’s Keeper by Jasmine Holmes, releasing June 9, 2026, is a Southern Gothic horror novel that understands this completely. Beneath its ghostly atmosphere and supernatural elements lies a brutal examination of generational trauma, misogyny, power, and the impossible expectations placed upon women to absorb suffering quietly so that everyone else can remain comfortable.

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Recently, I’ve seen discussions online asking readers to name books they’ve loved that were written by authors of color. Inevitably, there are always people who respond with things like, “I don’t pay attention to the race of the authors I read,” as though being “colorblind” is somehow the ideal approach to literature. But stories like Our Sister’s Keeper are exactly why intentionally seeking out voices different from our own matters. This is a novel that forces readers to confront lived experiences they may never have otherwise considered. It explores generational trauma, gendered expectations, institutional abuse, and the long shadow of racism in ways that feel both deeply personal and horrifyingly systemic. It’s impossible to walk away from this novel unchanged if you are willing to truly engage with what it is saying.

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Writers on Writing

If You Didn’t See It Coming: A psychological novel about family violence and the warning signs we ignore

Mandy Webster

A powerful psychological novel about domestic violence, generational trauma, and the warning signs we ignore. Amanda L. Webster shares the personal experiences behind If You Didn’t See It Coming and why fiction can reveal what statistics cannot.

If You Didn’t See It Coming is a psychological novel that explores domestic abuse, generational trauma, and the quiet warning signs that too often go unnoticed until it’s too late. Told through three interconnected perspectives, the story builds tension around a single, haunting certainty: someone is going to die. This isn’t a traditional mystery. It’s not about who did it. It’s about who will—and why.

Graphic that includes the book cover and a list of the following tropes: Multi-generational story, Domestic violence, Coercive Control, talks about the red flags we ignore. "You know someone is going to die-- you just don't know who-- or why."

The novel follows three generations of women—Marilou, Carrie, and Emma—each navigating her own version of control, fear, and survival. Marilou appears to have built the perfect life, but behind the façade is a marriage that has slowly eroded her sense of self. Carrie, her daughter, is doing everything she can to hold her life together after escaping an abusive relationship, only to have her ex forced back into her life through the legal system. And Emma, Carrie’s thirteen-year-old daughter, is caught in the middle—trying to make sense of attention, danger, and the complicated legacy she’s inheriting.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Hunger and Thirst by Claire Fuller: A haunting story about the ache to belong

Mandy Webster

Some hungers have nothing to do with food. Some thirsts cannot be quenched. In Hunger and Thirst, Claire Fuller builds a quietly unsettling novel about loneliness, guilt, and the dangerous places people wander when they want love badly enough.

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Claire Fuller has long excelled at writing stories that feel atmospheric without sacrificing emotional complexity. Readers familiar with Our Endless Numbered Days (one of my all-time favorites!), Swimming Lessons, or Bitter Orange will recognize her gift for creating settings that feel slightly unsteady, places where human relationships become as unsettling as any ghost story. Hunger and Thirst, releasing June 2, 2026, continues that tradition while leaning more openly into gothic territory.

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Author Interview

Inside The Girl with a Thousand Faces: Sunyi Dean on Gothic horror, Chinese folklore, and morally complex characters

Mandy Webster

From the haunted corridors of Kowloon Walled City to the restless spirits woven through Chinese folklore, Sunyi Dean writes horror that unsettles as much as it mesmerizes. In this interview, Dean discusses the cultural history behind The Girl with a Thousand Faces, the challenges of balancing myth with historical inspiration, and why morally complicated characters fascinate her as a writer. She also reflects on grief, forgiveness, experimental narrative structure, and the Gothic and speculative authors who helped shape her distinct voice in contemporary horror fiction.

Sunyi Dean discusses Chinese folklore, Gothic horror, and the layered themes behind her haunting new novel, The Girl with a Thousand Faces.

Q: The Girl with a Thousand Faces blends Gothic horror with Chinese mythology and the real history of Kowloon Walled City. What drew you to that setting, and how did you approach balancing historical inspiration with the supernatural elements of the story?
A: Hong Kong is the place I grew up and learned Cantonese in (though I’ve since lost that language.) I have a complicated relationship with both the city itself, and my family ties there. It is a place of contrasts and contradictions, of extreme modernity and old traditions. I loved portraying it, and tried to keep the ‘important’ aspects of history as true as possible. A lot of trial and error was involved, and many rounds of edits. Whether the balance is right I will leave to the reader to decide!

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

Man of My Dreams by Olivia Worley is a twisty thriller that may frustrate romance readers—but thriller fans looking for chaos and curveballs will probably have a blast

Mandy Webster

There’s a very specific kind of thriller setup that immediately hooks me: an intense romantic connection that feels just a little too perfect to trust. Man of My Dreams by Olivia Worley initially seemed poised to deliver exactly that kind of story. Ivy Harcourt, a bestselling romance author unlucky in love, meets Liam—an attractive British architect who eerily resembles the male lead from the novel she’s currently writing. What follows at first feels like the beginning of a glossy psychological thriller in the vein of the 1995 film Never Talk to Strangers, with mounting suspicion, romantic tension, and the creeping sense that something underneath the fantasy is deeply wrong. Then the book swerves hard.

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About a third of the way through, Man of My Dreams reveals what kind of story it actually wants to be, and that pivot will likely determine whether readers end up loving or hating the novel. For me, the transition didn’t entirely work. I didn’t feel like there was enough groundwork laid to support the shift, and several developments later in the novel left me questioning the internal logic of the narrative. By the end, there were enough loose ends dangling that I found myself more distracted than shocked.

Continue reading “Man of My Dreams by Olivia Worley is a twisty thriller that may frustrate romance readers—but thriller fans looking for chaos and curveballs will probably have a blast” →
Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

The Children by Melissa Albert is a haunting story about the danger of becoming someone else’s myth

Mandy Webster

There’s something deeply unsettling about the idea of growing up inside a story that never really belonged to you. In The Children by Melissa Albert, releasing June 2, 2026, childhood becomes both a performance and a prison as two siblings struggle to survive the legacy their mother built from their lives. The result is a darkly hypnotic literary fantasy that feels as though it’s flickering between reality and nightmare the entire time you’re reading it.

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Guinevere and Ennis Sharpe grew up as the unwilling inspirations for their mother Edith’s wildly beloved Ninth City fantasy novels. To the world, they were magical children adventuring through an enchanted realm. In reality, they were neglected kids growing up isolated in rural Vermont, half-feral and largely abandoned while their mother disappeared into the mythology she was creating around them. Albert builds both timelines—the children’s traumatic upbringing and adult Guin’s unraveling in the present day—with a sense of inevitable catastrophe. Every chapter feels like a countdown toward something terrible waiting just beyond the firelight.

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Essays

Choosing a writing style guide for independent writing: How to build consistency on your own terms

Mandy Webster

One of the underrated freedoms of being an independent writer is that no one is standing over your shoulder enforcing a style guide. You don’t have to follow a publisher’s house rules or argue with an editor about commas or capitalization conventions. You get to decide what your writing looks like. That freedom is also where things can quietly get messy.

Square graphic about choosing a writing style guide for independent writers, showing a notebook, pen, coffee, and desk setup alongside text about sentence case, the Oxford comma, and formatting book titles, emphasizing consistency and personal style choices in writing.
Choosing a writing style guide for independent writers: a reminder that consistency matters more than rigid rules, and every writer gets to define their own system.

Once you’re writing novels, blog posts, website copy, newsletters, and maybe even social media captions, consistency starts to matter more than most people expect. Readers notice it when formatting shifts. Search engines don’t care, but your credibility as a careful, intentional writer often depends on the subtle signals your text sends. The solution isn’t to give up your independence. It’s to choose your structure on purpose.

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Book Reviews, Find Your Next Read

A Dark and Wild Wood by Sarah Nicole Lemon is a haunting gothic fantasy about the illusion of male power

Mandy Webster

In A Dark and Wild Wood, women survive by making themselves smaller for men who were never as powerful as they seemed in the first place. Inspired by the Bluebeard fairy tale, A Dark and Wild Wood is a lush, gothic historical fantasy drenched in ghostly visions, dark magic, and decaying beauty. The novel follows Salomé, a young woman cursed—or perhaps gifted—with the ability to see spirits. After witnessing her foster mother burned as a witch, she and her beloved sister Rochelle are sent to live in a convent, where silence, obedience, and repression become the conditions of survival. But the convent is only the first prison Salomé inhabits.

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When Rochelle vanishes, Salomé eventually escapes and spends five years working in a brothel, surviving at the whims of the men around her while continuing to hide her supernatural abilities for fear of suffering the same fate as her foster mother. The novel smartly presents the convent and the brothel as two versions of the same confinement. One is built around religious authority, the other around male desire, but both demand submission and self-erasure from women in exchange for survival.

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Author Interview

Author interview: Kathy Hess on Beautiful and Terrifying, “First Drink,” and writing across fiction and poetry

Mandy Webster

In this contributor interview, Kathy Hess discusses her short story “First Drink” and her poetry featured in Beautiful and Terrifying: Tales and Visions from the Edge of the Uncanny, along with the influences and writing practices that shape her work.

Kathy Hess writes with a sense of devotion to both story and craft, weaving together fiction and poetry that linger in memory long after they’re read. Her short story “First Drink” and three accompanying poems in Beautiful and Terrifying reflect her fascination with the supernatural, the emotional depth of relationships, and the quiet rituals that shape a creative life. In this interview, she shares the literary works that first sparked her imagination, the discipline behind her daily writing practice, and the ways in which memory, family, and imagination continue to guide her work across forms.

Kathy Hess is the author of “First Drink” and three poems featured in Beautiful and Terrifying. Her work blends the supernatural with deeply human moments.

Q: What/who were your early literary influences, and how do you think their writing has shaped you as a storyteller today?
A: One early literary influence that has stuck with me was when I read Les Misérables in high school. It was the summer project, and I loved it. I bought a copy myself and read it so much the following years that the cover broke off and the binding split in half. I would keep the two halves of the book tied up with a ribbon. I have other copies of the book now, but I still have the crumpled, warped, coverless version with the pink ribbon holding it together.

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