Emily A Duncan Books in Order

Emily A. Duncan was born and raised in Ohio, and that grounded Midwest life sits next to a very ungrounded imagination on the page. By day, they have worked as a youth services librarian. By night, they built one of YA fantasy's colder, stranger worlds in the Something Dark and Holy trilogy.

They came to writing the nerdy way.

Duncan has said they were making up stories for as long as they can remember, but around age twelve those stories started looking more like actual projects. The early version was Star Wars fanfiction, which feels like a very honest origin story for a fantasy writer. Long before publication entered the picture, they were already drawn to big feelings, big mythologies, and characters under pressure.

The book that changed everything started with a video game. While they were a junior English major at Malone University, Duncan was playing Skyrim and got hooked by its mood, forests, villages, and looming cities. That atmosphere sparked the first version of what would become Wicked Saints. They tried writing the book more than once during college, stalled out both times, and eventually set it aside.

The real turning point came at Kent State University. Duncan enrolled in the master's program in library science, worked at the reference desk, and started ordering obscure Slavic folklore texts through interlibrary loan. That research helped the story lock into place, especially its Russian and Polish folklore influences. Once the setting felt solid, the characters followed. Duncan wrote the full draft in 2015, finished the degree in 2016, and signed with an agent and sold the book in 2017.

That long road matters because the debut was not an overnight leap. Before Wicked Saints, Duncan had spent years working on an earlier manuscript that never sold, and they have talked openly about how many rejections came before the right book found the right moment. When Wicked Saints finally arrived in 2019, readers latched onto its frozen holy war, dangerous alliances, and trio of central characters, Nadya, Serefin, and Malachiasz.

From there, Duncan kept pushing the series deeper into darker territory. Ruthless Gods leans harder into horror, splintered loyalties, and unsettling magic, while Blessed Monsters opens the story out to a bigger, stranger endgame. Readers who click with Duncan's work usually like the mix of blood-soaked atmosphere and very personal emotional stakes. The books are full of saints, monsters, romance, politics, and people making terrible choices for reasons that still feel painfully human.

Young adult fantasy suits Duncan especially well because their stories live in that moment when a worldview breaks open. Faith, nation, friendship, even the self, all of it gets tested. The scale is epic, but the pressure is intimate. That combination is a big part of what gives the trilogy its bite.

They like questions more than easy answers.

Off the page, a few details show up again and again: Ohio, libraries, video games, and a lot of Dungeons & Dragons. Duncan has said they want writing to stay fun, even when publishing gets stressful, and that spirit shows up in the work. There is research behind the worldbuilding, but there is also clear delight in monsters, drama, and atmosphere. They still live in Ohio, and that mix of librarian discipline and unapologetic fandom seems to suit them just fine.