Erin A Craig Books in Order

Erin A. Craig writes dark fantasy that feels a little like stepping backstage at a haunted opera house, beautiful sets, strange shadows, and the sense that something dramatic is about to happen. After earning her BFA in Theatre Design and Production from the University of Michigan, she spent years stage managing operas full of hunchbacks, séances, and murderous clowns, then decided books might be an even better home for all that eerie energy.

Stories were there long before publication. Craig has said she grew up hooked on fairy tales, Grimm stories, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, and Goosebumps, which helps explain why her novels so often mix folklore, suspense, romance, and the uneasy feeling that something is waiting just outside the lamplight. Old tales were never just old tales to her. They were raw material.

She was writing all along.

During college she worked on small projects and fan fiction, but for a long time fiction had to fit around theatre work. She spent about a decade at Opera Memphis, eventually serving as director of production, and that job helped shape both her taste and her discipline. It also led her to her husband. After they welcomed their daughter, Craig realized the stage manager schedule and a newborn were not an easy match, and a stretch at home pushed her to take writing much more seriously.

That shift was not instantly smooth. Craig has spoken about querying an earlier novel and collecting around 180 rejections in six months before setting it aside. Then she returned to an idea that mixed Edgar Allan Poe with The Twelve Dancing Princesses. A childhood photo of herself in a Girl Scout performance of that tale helped the book click into place, and the result was House of Salt And Sorrows, her 2019 debut. After that, her career moved fast, and she eventually became a #1 New York Times bestselling author.

That book changed everything.

From there she kept building a bibliography that plays with fairy-tale bones in different directions. Small Favors turns a bargain-and-wish setup into isolated-town folk horror, with Ellerie Downing trying to protect her family in Amity Falls. House of Roots and Ruin revisits the cursed Thaumas family through Verity's story and leans hard into romance, ghosts, and a house full of secrets. The Thirteenth Child follows Hazel, a healer promised to Death, and opens Craig's work into a broader court fantasy filled with gods, impossible choices, and the cost of love. Readers who come for the atmosphere usually find strong character tension waiting underneath it.

Part of Craig's appeal is how clearly her interests line up on the page. She likes the familiar shape of a fairy tale, but she also likes twisting it until it becomes stranger, darker, and more emotionally messy. She has said that opera audiences return to the same classic stories again and again, just told in new ways, and her books work in much the same spirit. They tend to feature girls boxed in by family, duty, grief, or place, who still try to push back and choose their own futures.

In 2025 she published A Land So Wide, her adult debut, a dark romantic fantasy set around the settlement of Mistaken in the Canadian wilderness. She also turned toward another famous gothic story with Our Strange Duet, a reimagining of The Phantom of the Opera centered on Christine Daaé. Craig now lives in West Michigan with her husband and daughter, and she has described herself as an avid reader, a quilter, a basketball fan, and a collector of typewriters, brass figurines, and sparkly shoes. It all feels pretty on brand.