Kassandra Montag Books in Order

Kassandra Montag grew up in rural Nebraska, outside Kearney, where books, weather, and the natural world were part of daily life. She has talked about climbing an apple tree with a book to dodge chores, watching a river rise and fall through the seasons, and spending long hours at the public library. Those details matter because they still show up in her fiction, wide landscapes, uneasy weather, and people trying to hold on when the world shifts under them.

She started early.

At seven, she made a picture book series about a man and his dog surviving alone in the wilderness, which now feels like a neat preview of the stories she would later tell. Writing stayed with her as she grew up, but her time at Creighton University became a real turning point. She has said that her master's work helped her take herself seriously as a writer and gave her mentors and workshop partners who pushed her forward.

Before her novels reached a wide audience, Montag was publishing poetry and short fiction. Her work appeared in journals and anthologies such as Prairie Schooner, Midwestern Gothic, Nebraska Poetry, and Mystery Weekly Magazine. She has also worked as a freelance medical journalist. In 2021, she received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Nebraska Arts Council.

Her first novel, After the Flood, brought many of her interests together in one story, climate anxiety, motherhood, survival, and the pull of home. The book imagines a drowned future America and follows Myra, a mother traveling by boat with her young daughter while searching for the older daughter taken from her years before. Readers tend to remember the scale of the setting, but also the harder moral questions underneath it, who we protect, what we owe other people, and how far love can carry us.

Nothing comes easy in her books.

Her second novel, Those Who Return, moves from speculative fiction into psychological suspense, but it still feels like the work of the same writer. Set in rural Nebraska, it centers on Dr. Lore Webber, a former FBI psychiatrist at a remote treatment facility called Hatchery House. The novel leans into isolation, buried family history, and the eerie sense that a place can hold on to old damage. Readers who liked the danger of After the Flood often find a different kind of pressure here, slower, darker, and tied to memory and guilt.

There is a poet's eye behind all of this. Montag is also the author of the poetry collection Chorus of the Underground Sea, and even in her thrillers and dystopian fiction she pays close attention to landscape, rhythm, and the strange beauty of difficult places. Again and again, she returns to characters, especially women, who are forced to make hard choices in environments that do not forgive much.

She still lives in Omaha with her husband and their two sons. Her work has been translated widely and optioned for screen adaptation, but the local roots are still easy to see. Nebraska, in her books, is never just a backdrop. It is weather, memory, fear, shelter, and sometimes the whole reason the story exists.