Kass Morgan Books

Kass Morgan is the pen name of Mallory Kass, who has spent her whole career on both sides of the manuscript. She studied English and history at Brown, took a master's in nineteenth-century literature at Oxford, then went into publishing in New York, where she rose to executive editor at Scholastic Press, editing other people's books by day. Her debut, The 100 (2013), about a hundred juvenile delinquents dropped from a dying space station onto a possibly lethal Earth, was developed alongside the CW television series that ran for seven seasons and turned the title into a household name for a certain generation of viewers. Not many authors can say they were being adapted for television before their first book even hit shelves; the show was in development as the manuscript sold, and book and series grew up side by side as fairly different creatures.

Morgan is a concept-and-momentum writer. Her books open with a hook you can pitch in one sentence, rotate through multiple points of view, and structure themselves like television, with cliffhangers placed at act breaks. Romance always matters in her stories, usually several romances at once, tangled across loyalties. It is commercial storytelling in the best sense, built by someone who edits commercial fiction for a living and knows exactly where the pressure points go. Co-writing suits her for the same reason; The Ravens splits its two leads between two authors' sensibilities and still reads seamless.

The 100 grew into a four-book series, followed by the Light Years duology, space opera set at a military academy. For fantasy readers the key entry is The Ravens (2020), co-written with Dorothy Must Die author Danielle Paige: at Westerly College, Kappa Rho Nu is the top sorority on campus and secretly a coven, and the story alternates between scholarship freshman Vivi and golden-girl president Scarlett as a dark magic debt comes due. The sequel, The Monarchs (2022), completes the duology. In April 2026 she published Save the Date, her adult debut, under her real name, Mallory Kass. The co-writing partnership works because Paige brings the witchy maximalism and Morgan brings the structural discipline, and the seams never show.

On our spice scale Morgan sits at a 1: plenty of kissing, plenty of longing, nothing explicit on the page. The Ravens leans into witch sisterhood and campus intrigue more than romance, though both leads get love interests with real complications. Think glossy CW pacing in book form, which is either a warning or a sales pitch depending on your taste. We mean it as a sales pitch. Readers who need their romance front and center should know it shares space with friendship drama, rush-week politics, and coven secrets rather than dominating the page.

Morgan is honestly adjacent to romantasy rather than inside it, and that is exactly her value. The Ravens scratches the dark academia itch, sororities and seances and secrets, for readers between big fantasy commitments, and it hands well to CW-generation readers who want their nostalgia in coven form. Her books are also fast; you can clear the duology in a weekend without homework. It is also simply fun, in a way the genre sometimes forgets to be; nobody in these books is carrying a thousand-year prophecy, just a pledge class and a curse.

Start with The Ravens and The Monarchs if witchy campus fantasy is the draw, and only backtrack to The 100 if dystopian science fiction appeals or the show left you curious about the very different books. Save the Date is the pick if you want to see what she does with adult romance under her own name.