Ryan La Sala Books in Order

Ryan La Sala grew up in Connecticut and later moved to Boston for college, where he studied anthropology and neuroscience at Northeastern University. He has joked that he was only in Connecticut physically, because so much of his childhood happened in the worlds of Sailor Moon and Xena: Warrior Princess. That love of transformation, spectacle, and feeling bigger than ordinary life still runs through his fiction.

Stories came to him early, even when reading itself was hard.

In interviews, La Sala has talked about struggling to read as a kid and leaning first on drawing. He made up characters, then worlds for those characters to live in, and then whole dramas around them. Theater, dance, and visual art fed the same instinct, which was to build something bright, strange, and emotionally true.

He started writing Reverie in high school because he wanted the kind of queer YA fantasy he was not finding on the shelf. Instead of another straight chosen one, he wanted a gay lead at the center of the magic. He kept returning to that story for years, slowly reshaping it until it finally became his debut.

The road to publication was long and very regular-life in the middle. After college, he moved back to Connecticut for a stretch, picked up shifts at a Ben & Jerry's, and used that time to finish the first real draft of Reverie. He later worked outside publishing, including in tech and project management, while learning how to keep writing alongside work, health, and everything else.

He stuck with it.

When Reverie arrived in 2019, readers met Kane Montgomery, a teen pulled into dangerous dream worlds spilling into real life. La Sala followed it with Be Dazzled, a warm, funny novel about cosplay, ambition, and first love. The books are very different on the surface, but both care about identity, self-invention, and the risk of letting other people really see you.

Then he leaned harder into horror. The Honeys sends Mars to an elite summer camp to investigate their twin sister's death, mixing grief, beauty, and menace in one sunlit nightmare. Beholder shifts to New York City and follows Athan, a young man who can read the past in mirrors, into a murder mystery tangled up with art, beauty, and obsession. The Dead of Summer brings eco-horror to Anchor's Mercy, an island community where friendship and queer found family matter just as much as the monsters.

That emotional center is a big part of what makes his books feel like Ryan La Sala books. Again and again, he returns to transformation, chosen family, performance, memory, and the danger of private fears becoming public. He writes from New York City now, does plenty of arts and crafts, hosts the Bad Author Book Club Podcast, and lives under the watch of his cat, Haunted Little Girl.