Erin A. Craig Books

Erin A. Craig came to novels through the theatre. She took a BFA in Theatre Design and Production from the University of Michigan and spent years stage-managing operas full of hunchbacks, séances and murderous clowns, then concluded she would rather write books with the same atmosphere. That background is visible in every one of her novels. Craig blocks scenes like a stage manager: she knows exactly where every character is standing, what the light is doing, and when to bring something on from the wings. She lives in West Michigan with her husband and daughter, collects typewriters, brass figurines and sparkly shoes, and quilts.

House of Salt and Sorrows, her 2019 debut, remains her signature book. It takes the Twelve Dancing Princesses and turns it into a gothic horror story: twelve sisters on an isolated island estate, a family under a rumoured curse, and sisters dying one by one in ways that may or may not be accidents. Annaleigh, one of the surviving sisters, has to work out whether the house is haunted, whether her family is cursed, or whether she is losing her grip. The book was a commercial breakout and it established the shape Craig has worked in since: a fairy tale skeleton, a genuinely unsettling atmosphere, and an unreliable relationship between the heroine and her own perception.

Small Favors followed in 2021, a Rumpelstiltskin retelling set in a claustrophobic frontier town called Amity Falls, where monsters may be in the trees and the townspeople's private wants are curdling into something worse. House of Roots and Ruin arrived in 2023, returning to the Thaumas sisters from her debut with Verity, the youngest, now turning eighteen and leaving the island. It is billed as a standalone within the Sisters of the Salt setting and hit number one on the New York Times list. The Thirteenth Child, published September 2024, is drawn from the Grimm tale Godfather Death: Hazel Trépas is a thirteenth child promised to a god, and her godfather Merrick, the Dreaded End, grants her the ability to see exactly what will cure any patient, along with the obligation to end the ones Death has already claimed.

What defines her writing is dread rather than shock. Craig builds atmosphere slowly and rarely resolves the ambiguity as fast as a reader wants. Her heroines are practical people in impossible situations, and her endings tend to cost something. The gothic machinery is authentic rather than aesthetic: decaying houses, unreliable narration, family secrets that turn out to be worse than the supernatural explanation.

On heat, be clear before you start. Craig writes young adult, and on our spice scale her books sit at 0 to 1 with romance running as a strong subplot rather than the engine. The Thirteenth Child has the most developed romance of the four, with Leo, a rakish prince, and it still closes the door. Readers arriving from adult romantasy should come for the atmosphere and treat the romance as a bonus.

Why she matters to romantasy readers: the dark fairytale mode that runs underneath a large slice of the current genre was rebuilt in the young adult space in the late 2010s, and Craig is one of the authors who did it. If you like the eerie register of House of Salt and Sorrows and want it at an adult heat level, that is a well-populated shelf. She is also an excellent October author, which is not a small thing.

Where to start: House of Salt and Sorrows, always, then Small Favors if you want more of the same unease in a different setting, then House of Roots and Ruin if you want to go back to the Thaumas family. The Thirteenth Child works as a standalone entry point if the death-god premise appeals more than the drowning one.