Rena Mason Books in Order

Rena Mason was born in Nakhon Sawan, Thailand, and grew up between Sacramento, California, and Plattsburgh, New York. She has described a childhood with two sisters, books, movies, and a strong early pull toward anything eerie or unsettling.

Scary stories got there early. She has spoken about loving Godzilla and Where the Wild Things Are as a kid, then later finding a deeper home in writers like Shirley Jackson and Edgar Allan Poe.

That mix of the everyday and the unnerving still runs through her work.

Before publishing fiction, Mason trained in nursing through SUNY and built a long medical career. She worked in oncology and home health, then spent years in the operating room, including more than a decade in Denver. That experience gave her a close view of bodies, fear, pain, and crisis, and you can feel that practical knowledge in the physical details of her horror.

She came to writing later than many authors do. Mason has said she began seriously writing around 2009 after reading novels that felt too neatly boxed into one genre. She wanted stories with everyday life at the center, but with science fiction, mystery, history, and horror all allowed into the room. A first manuscript drew dozens of rejections, but it also taught her what she needed to learn.

Then came The Evolutionist, her debut novel and breakout book. It follows Stacy Troy, a Las Vegas woman whose nightmares, nosebleeds, and strange encounters with a psychiatrist slowly wreck her sense of what is real, and it won the Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel. Readers who connect with Mason often like that exact pressure point: ordinary routines first, then dread leaking into every corner.

She didn't stay in one lane.

East End Girls moves to Victorian Whitechapel and uses the shadow of Jack the Ripper to tell a dark historical story about medicine, ambition, and moral rot. Her award-winning short fiction shows another side of her range. "Ruminations" ties a tired hotel housekeeper to a younger version of herself in a war-torn world, while "The Devil's Throat" turns an underwater rescue into tight, claustrophobic terror. Together, those works helped make her a three-time Bram Stoker Award winner.

She also co-edited Other Terrors, an anthology that became a finalist for the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards. That project fits her broader interests well. As a Thai-Chinese American writer, she has spoken about inclusion in the genre, and her own work often mixes the personal with the uncanny, letting identity, memory, family strain, and survival sit right beside monsters and dread.

Just as important, she has been active in the writing community itself, with service recognized by the Horror Writers Association through awards including the Silver Hammer and the Richard Laymon President's Award.

These days Mason is a retired RN, an avid scuba diver, and a traveler who folds lived experience into her stories. After years in Reno, she now lives in the Pacific Northwest. It feels like a good fit for a writer drawn to dark water, uneasy landscapes, and the sense that something strange is waiting just out of sight.