Elizabeth Black Books in Order

Elizabeth Black is the romance and erotica pen name most closely associated with writer Trish Wilson. She lives on the Massachusetts coast with her husband and cats, and that seaside setting shows up again and again in her fiction, along with lonely houses, strange nights, and people whose desires get them into trouble.

She started writing young. In elementary school she was already making up stories, and a parish priest who published poetry encouraged her to keep going. Later, a creative writing class in junior high gave that impulse another push. By her own telling, she never really stopped wanting to write.

She didn't come to fiction in a straight line.

Before she focused on books, Wilson worked in theatre and entertainment. She was a union stagehand and worked in lighting, scenic art, and makeup effects. Her credits included the films 12 Monkeys and Die Hard with a Vengeance, plus makeup work on Homicide: Life on the Street. That background matters. Even now, her fiction often has the feel of entrances, reveals, and a spotlight snapping on at exactly the right moment.

After moving to Massachusetts from Maryland and stepping away from that life, she put her energy into writing. Her first published break came in 2007, when a sexy Cinderella retelling landed in a U.K. magazine. She also wrote copy for a British sex toy company and nonfiction about sex and relationships, which helps explain the direct, amused, and unembarrassed tone of much of her romance work. While working in erotic fiction, she also came up with The Oily, her first published horror story, and that opened a second lane she never really left.

A lot of readers begin with The Unexpected Guest, a paranormal erotic romance inspired by her stay in a haunted bed and breakfast on Maryland's Eastern Shore. From there the range opens up fast. Climbing Her Tower turns Rapunzel into a sensual escape story, Trouble In Thigh High Boots gives Puss in Boots a shapeshifting heroine, When The Veil Is Thin plays with dreams and magic, and Full Moon Fever mixes shifters with the world of backstage theatre work. Readers who like her fairy tale side usually end up at Happily Ever After, a later collection of erotic retellings.

She's a genre-hopper, but not a random one.

Whether she is writing romance, erotica, or horror, the same interests keep resurfacing: haunted places, fairy tale logic, offbeat humor, outsiders, and characters whose wants refuse to stay neat or respectable. She has written horror under E. A. Black and later under her real name, Trish Wilson, and she has interviewed a long list of horror writers through her work as Media Director for The Horror Zine. She has also said that weird news, movies, television, and the places she lives are constant sources of ideas, which makes sense once you see how often real life and the bizarre rub against each other in her stories.

One quick note, because bibliographies under this name can be confusing. The 2013 Gothic suspense novel The Drowning House was published under Elizabeth Black by Elizabeth Tiggy Garrett, a Houston writer who grew up in Providence, Rhode Island. That shared byline is one reason some online Elizabeth Black lists look broader and stranger than the work of one writer alone.

These days, Wilson still seems happiest near the water, with movies, television, horror talk, and new writing projects all in the mix. After a period of burnout, she has spoken about getting back to writing and interviews. It suits her. Her books often feel like they were written by someone who likes the creepy and the playful in equal measure.