Courtney Gould Books in Order

Courtney Gould grew up in Salem, Oregon, and the Pacific Northwest still shows up in the landscapes of her fiction. Her books are young adult horror stories, but the scares are usually tied to something personal: grief, family history, isolation, and the hard work of deciding who you want to be.

She studied Creative Writing, Publishing, and Marketing at Pacific Lutheran University, graduating in 2016. That background led into a career built around the kinds of stories she clearly enjoys telling: queer girls at the center, uneasy places at the edge of the map, and supernatural trouble that cannot be ignored.

She likes ghosts, but people are usually the bigger problem.

Gould's debut, The Dead and the Dark, arrived in 2021. It follows Logan Ortiz-Woodley when she and her television ghost-hunter dads return to Snakebite, Oregon, where missing teens, old resentments, and a growing darkness put the town on edge. Logan's connection with Ashley Barton gives the mystery a warm, human center. The novel received the Leslie Bradshaw Award for Young Adult Fiction.

With Where Echoes Die, published in 2023, Gould moved from an Oregon small town to the Arizona desert. Sisters Beck and Riley go to Backravel after their mother's death, following clues that make the town feel less like a refuge than a trap. It is a story about loss and sisters, but it also makes room for a strange new romance and questions about the past's pull.

Her settings can feel wide open. They are never simple to escape.

What the Woods Took takes the fear into Idaho's wilderness. Devin Green is sent against her will to an experimental wilderness therapy program alongside other teens, then the group's counselors disappear and something in the forest starts closing in. The book shifts toward survival horror, while keeping Gould's interest in young people who have been underestimated, labeled, or pushed aside. Devin's reluctant alliances, especially with sharp-tongued Sheridan, give the danger emotional weight.

Her fourth novel, Until the Last Light Goes Out, heads to Florida, where the children of survivors of a long-ago school massacre are drawn back to the abandoned Kaleidoscope Key resort. Paige Keller is looking for her missing former best friend, KJ, and finds herself confronting the secrets that adults have kept buried for twenty-five years. It is another enclosed, haunted setting, this time lit by neon and surrounded by water.

Across these books, Gould returns to friendships that turn into trust, families carrying unfinished pain, and places where a local story has become something much darker. The horror may be supernatural, but her characters are also dealing with real loneliness, bad decisions, and the fear of being left behind.

Gould now lives in Salem, Oregon. From there, she continues to write about haunted places, complicated girls, and the uneasy feeling that something is waiting just past the last streetlight.