PC Hodgell Books in Order

Best starting point: God Stalk → Dark of the Moon → Seeker's Mask → Blood and Ivory.
For Jame at military school: To Ride a Rathorn → Bound in Blood → Honor's Paradox.
For the wider war and late-series arc: The Sea of Time → The Gates of Tagmeth → By Demons Possessed → Deathless Gods.
If you only try one book first: God Stalk.

P.C. Hodgell was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1951, and came from a family where making things was normal work: both of her parents were professional artists. Public biographical notes are much clearer about her later Midwest life than about a childhood hometown, but the pattern is easy to see. Books, art, and invented worlds were there early.

The bug bit early.

As a young reader, Hodgell fell hard for science fiction and fantasy. One favorite was David Starr: Space Ranger, published under Isaac Asimov's Paul French name. She later recalled being so taken with it that she started copying the library book by hand, frontispiece and all. That says a lot about the kind of reader she was: curious, intense, and already thinking in pictures.

After college, reading the stuff was no longer enough. She began trying to write it, and the first attempts were not magic on demand. The turning point came when she was invited to the Clarion Writer's Workshop, where she found other people who cared about story in the same deep, odd way. She also went through the Milford Writers' Workshop, and made her first professional sale a couple of years after Clarion.

Academia ran alongside the fiction for a long time. Hodgell earned a master's degree in English literature and a doctorate from the University of Minnesota, writing her dissertation on Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe. She completed that Ph.D. between the publication of her first two fantasy novels, God Stalk and Dark of the Moon. She later taught modern British literature and composition at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh.

God Stalk, published in 1982, introduced Jamethiel Priest's-Bane, usually called Jame, a half-amnesiac Kencyr woman who walks out of the Haunted Lands into the god-crowded city of Tai-tastigon. Readers often come for Jame's quick wits and stay for the odd mix of danger, jokes, theology, thieves, old family damage, and living myth. Dark of the Moon widens the story around Jame's twin brother, Torisen, while Seeker's Mask pushes Jame into the tight rules of Kencyr society.

Hodgell likes worlds with corners.

That shows in the later Kencyrath books too. To Ride a Rathorn, Bound in Blood, and Honor's Paradox turn a military college into a nest of politics, monsters, and tests of nerve. The Sea of Time, The Gates of Tagmeth, By Demons Possessed, and Deathless Gods keep expanding the war with Perimal Darkling while staying close to Jame, Tori, Kindrie, and the hard question of what duty costs.

Her work has had some bumpy publishing history, including earlier publishers closing, but the Kencyrath books found new life through later reissues and new volumes. Hodgell retired from full-time university teaching in 2006 to focus more on writing. She lives in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, in a nineteenth-century family house, and her public bios also mention conventions, knitting, embroidery, yarn, cats, and a long-running fondness for anything that stirs the imagination.