SA Barnes Books in Order

If you want the best first taste of her horror: Dead Silence
If you like abandoned planet mysteries: Ghost Station
If you want another isolated-ship nightmare: Cold Eternity
If you're curious about her earlier YA work as Stacey Kade: The Ghost and the Goth → Queen of the Dead → Body & Soul

S.A. Barnes is the horror pen name of Stacey Kade, a Chicago-area writer whose books have wandered from paranormal comedy and YA science fiction to adult suspense and deep-space terror. She grew up in a family shaped by music and ministry, the daughter of a music teacher and a minister, and she has said she spent part of her younger reading life sneaking romance novels in the basement.

Before fiction became the day job, Kade worked as an award-winning copywriter for several Fortune 500 companies. That background helps explain some of what readers notice right away in her novels: the brisk pace, the sharp sense of workplace pressure, and the way institutions in her books often look polished on the surface and rotten underneath.

Under the Stacey Kade name, she first built a following with The Ghost and the Goth, Queen of the Dead, and Body & Soul, a ghost-filled trilogy that mixes high school drama, romance, and comedy. She followed that with the Project Paper Doll books, beginning with The Rules, which push more directly into science fiction. Even that early, she was drawn to outsiders, secrets, and characters trying to figure out who they can trust.

She does not stay in one lane for long.

Later Stacey Kade books such as 738 Days, For This Life Only, and Finding Felicity show how comfortable she is moving between suspense, grief, first love, and coming-of-age stories. What links them is not genre so much as character. Her leads tend to be bruised, funny, a little awkward, and forced to keep going when the story would be much easier if they simply hid.

As S.A. Barnes, she turned that character-first approach toward adult horror. Dead Silence, released in 2022, traps a repair crew aboard a long-lost luxury space liner and turns a salvage opportunity into something far worse, and it also became a Goodreads Choice finalist. Readers who click with Barnes usually come for the creepy setup, but stay for the women at the center of the books, people who are scared, stubborn, and painfully aware that the system around them is not built to keep them safe.

Space was probably inevitable.

In interviews, Barnes has said space is both terrifying and fascinating to her because even without a monster, the setting itself can kill you. She has also pointed to watching the Challenger disaster live in a classroom as part of what fixed the danger of space travel in her mind. That mix of awe and dread runs through Ghost Station and Cold Eternity, standalones that keep returning to isolation, corporate greed, damaged trust, and the unnerving question of whether the danger is outside the door or already inside someone's head.

These days she works in a high school library in Illinois, recommending books, talking with students, and occasionally pulling forgotten snacks out of returned copies. She has said books mattered a lot to her as a shy, awkward kid, and that helping a young reader connect with a story is one of the best parts of the job. She still lives in Illinois with her husband, plus more dogs and books than she thinks is sensible, which feels exactly right for a writer who knows how to make loneliness, claustrophobia, and ordinary human messiness feel very real.