Alys Arden Books in Order

Alys Arden was raised in New Orleans's French Quarter, surrounded by street performers, tea-leaf readers, and glittering drag queens. That lively mix of local history, folklore, nightlife, and offbeat people runs through her work, especially the supernatural stories set in her hometown.

She later spent time in New York and worked in places around the world. But New Orleans remains the place her fiction keeps returning to, with its damaged beauty, crowded cemeteries, old buildings, and long memory.

Her route into writing began on a dreary day in London. Missing home and looking for a creative outlet, Arden started building the story that would become The Casquette Girls, a young adult fantasy about a teen returning to a storm-ravaged New Orleans and finding magic, vampires, and family secrets waiting for her.

A New Year's resolution helped turn that idea into a real project. Arden enrolled in a Gotham Writers Workshop class because she wanted structure around a demanding work schedule. After the class ended, she worried she would lose the momentum of regular deadlines, so she began posting the novel online in real time and used readers' anticipation to keep herself writing.

It worked.

The early draft of The Casquette Girls drew more than a million online reads before it was acquired in a two-book publishing deal. What began as a personal writing exercise became the start of a larger series, one shaped by the streets, storms, legends, and tangled history of New Orleans.

The series follows Adele Le Moyne, a teenager whose return home after a catastrophic storm opens the door to inherited magic and a centuries-old curse. In The Romeo Catchers, The Cities of Dead, and The Gates of Guinée, Arden expands Adele's world with witches, vampires, ghostly threats, old journals, dangerous loyalties, and the pressure of trying to protect a city while growing up inside it.

Arden also moved into comics with Zatanna: The Jewel of Gravesend, a young adult graphic novel illustrated by Jacquelin de Leon. The book places a teen version of the famous magician in Coney Island, where a vanished circus and strange mirror-writing lead Zatanna toward the truth about her family and her own powers.

Place matters as much as the magic.

Across Arden's books, characters are pulled between ordinary teenage problems and secrets that stretch back generations. Friends become coven members, romance is rarely simple, and the past has a habit of showing up in diaries, family stories, forgotten rooms, and old curses. Her fantasy is full of supernatural danger, but it stays grounded in young people trying to decide whom they can trust.

Arden's path from a writing class to an online serial and then to published novels gives her work a practical, personal starting point. She writes stories with room for messy friendships, local myths, romance, and big supernatural stakes, while keeping one foot firmly planted in the neighborhoods and history that first inspired her.