Daisy Pearce Books in Order

If you want the best first taste of her suspense: The Silence → The Missing
If you want folk horror and eerie village lore: Something in the Walls → Dark Is When the Devil Comes
If you like women under pressure and unraveling secrets: The Silence → Something in the Walls
If you want the newest Daisy Pearce first: Dark Is When the Devil Comes

Daisy Pearce was born in Cornwall and grew up on a smallholding surrounded by hippies. That background feels close to the bone in her fiction. Sea air, old beliefs, lonely houses, and the sense that something odd might be waiting just out of sight all keep turning up in her books.

Ghosts got there early.

Pearce has said she read The Hamlyn Book of Horror far too young, and that Stephen King's Cujo hit her at about eight years old and lit the fuse. From then on, fear and suspense were not just things she liked to read, they became the kind of stories she wanted to make herself.

She started writing short stories as a teenager. Her first published story, The Black Prince, appeared in One Eye Grey magazine, and another, The Brook Witch, was later performed at the Small Story Cabaret in Lewes. She also wrote about mental health online, which helps explain why even her darkest books pay such close attention to panic, grief, obsession, and the ways people can be pushed off balance.

Getting from short fiction to novels took time. In 2015, The Silence won a bursary with The Literary Consultancy, and Pearce has described the writing process as long, slow, and full of rewriting and resubmitting. That mix of stubbornness and nerve matters with her work, because her stories often feel as if they are tightening one careful turn at a time.

The Silence, her debut, arrived in 2020. It follows former child star Stella Wiseman into a relationship that turns into something controlling and frightening. That same year Pearce published The Missing, a suspense novel about a vanished girl and the women still living with the damage years later. The second novel was longlisted for the Mslexia Novel Award, and Pearce also won the Chindi Authors Short Story Competition for her story Worm Food.

Her later books lean harder into folklore and horror without losing the human mess underneath. Something in the Walls sends a young psychologist into a remote village where a thirteen-year-old girl says a witch is haunting her. Dark Is When the Devil Comes moves through restless woods, family strain, and the kind of homecoming that makes everything worse before it makes anything clear. Readers who like Pearce usually come for the dread, then stay for the way she keeps the supernatural just close enough to feel possible.

There are patterns across her work. She writes women who are isolated, doubted, or stuck in rooms and relationships that no longer feel safe. She likes rural settings, local legends, uneasy families, and the slippery space between psychological fear and something that may be truly otherworldly. Even when the setup is strange, the pain inside it is ordinary and recognizable.

That is what keeps the books grounded.

Pearce now lives in Sussex and works in a library. Her official bios also mention ghosts, poltergeists, and the perfect red lipstick as specialist subjects, which tells you a lot about the mix she brings to the page. She writes creepy books, yes, but also intimate ones, full of bruised people trying to work out whether the danger is inside the house, outside it, or already under their skin.