Jonathan Sims Books in Order

Jonathan Sims is a horror writer, performer, and games designer whose work often starts with an everyday setting, then finds the thing lurking underneath it. A London flat, a crowded train, a badly organised archive, or a job clearing a dead person's house can all become places where fear has room to grow.

He is best known as the creator, head writer, and narrator of The Magnus Archives, the horror audio drama that launched in 2016. At Rusty Quill, founder Alexander J. Newall asked Sims what he wanted to write. Sims's answer was simple: a horror anthology.

That answer became a five-season story about supernatural statements, troubled investigators, and an archive that is much more dangerous than it first appears.

Sims also performed the role of the new Head Archivist, Jonathan Sims, a choice that has led to more than a little name confusion over the years. The show begins with apparently separate accounts of strange events, but gradually reveals links between them. Listeners who enjoy the series often come for the standalone scares, then stay for the slow build of its bigger mystery and the people caught in it.

Then came prose.

His first novel, Thirteen Storeys, takes readers inside a luxury London development where residents from very different walks of life have each faced something disturbing. Their stories lead toward an uneasy gathering hosted by the building's billionaire owner. It has the connected-story structure that made The Magnus Archives work so well, while putting class, housing, and private grief right at the centre of the horror.

In Family Business, Sims shifts to a smaller and more intimate kind of dread. Diya Burman takes a job with a family firm that clears the homes of people who have died, hoping for a fresh start after the death of her best friend. The work leaves her surrounded by the belongings of strangers, unresolved loss, and signs that the Slough family may be hiding something far worse than a difficult past.

His later fiction keeps London close. The Burn Line follows five people who witness a terrible event on the Underground during a brutal heatwave, while From the Library of Jurgen Leitner, written with Premee Mohamed, returns to the world of The Magnus Archives. Both draw on Sims's interest in enclosed spaces, unequal power, and groups of ordinary people forced to face things they cannot explain.

Sims's work has never been limited to one format. He was the head writer and frontman for the storytelling musical group The Mechanisms, which mixed myth, folk tunes, science fiction, and space pirates. He also runs MacGuffin & Co. with Sasha Sienna, creating narrative tabletop games and other analogue storytelling projects.

Across novels, podcasts, music, and games, Sims returns to a familiar question: what happens when people notice that the world they rely on is stranger, crueler, and less stable than they thought? His stories make room for fear, but they also make room for people trying to understand it together.