Susan Ee Books in Order

If you want the big post-apocalyptic series: Angelfall → World After → End of Days
If you want dark fairy-tale fantasy: Cinder & the Prince of Midnight → Ruby & the Huntsman of Midnight → Briar & the Dreamers of Midnight
If you want a stand-alone Midnight book first: Briar & the Dreamers of Midnight
If you want a shorter sampler of her early work: Under the Needle's Eye

Susan Ee did not come to fantasy through a neat, straight path. Before novels took over, she worked as a lawyer, and that mix of discipline and imagination still seems to sit at the center of her fiction. Her books move fast, but they are carefully built. Even when the worlds turn wild, the story never feels loose.

She also put real time into learning the craft. She studied creative writing at Stanford and attended Clarion West, the well-known speculative fiction workshop. Before novels became her main focus, she wrote short fiction and made short films, including Tooth Fairy and Psychopath. That film background makes sense once you start reading her work. She has a knack for scenes you can picture right away, especially when the danger arrives.

She has said that she loves science fiction, fantasy, and horror, especially when there is a touch of romance in the mix.

Most readers first found her through Angelfall, the opening novel in the Penryn & the End of Days trilogy. The setup is simple and sharp: angels have wrecked the modern world, and a seventeen-year-old girl named Penryn is trying to save her sister in the middle of the collapse. The book became the one many people still associate with her name, and it is easy to see why. It is quick, dark, visual, and full of tension between survival, family loyalty, and a very bad alliance with the wrong kind of angel.

She followed that book with World After and End of Days, turning the story into a full trilogy without losing the human scale that made the first book work. Penryn's bond with her sister Paige, her worry over her mother, and her uneasy connection with Raffe keep the series grounded even when the stakes become enormous. Readers tend to come for the apocalyptic hook, then stay for the stubborn, practical heroine at the center of it.

After Penryn came a different kind of dark fantasy. In Midnight Tales, Susan Ee moved into twisted fairy-tale territory with Cinder & the Prince of Midnight, Ruby & the Huntsman of Midnight, and Briar & the Dreamers of Midnight. These books keep the familiar shapes of old stories, but they rough them up. Castles, hunts, cruel fairies, monsters, dream worlds, and dangerous bargains all come into play. If the Penryn books show her love of end-of-the-world fantasy, the Midnight books show how much fun she has turning fairy tales into something stranger and sharper.

She seems especially drawn to characters under pressure.

That runs through nearly everything she writes. Again and again, her protagonists are young women who are underestimated, cornered, or asked to survive situations that should crush them. She returns to family bonds, uneasy partnerships, looming violence, and the question of what hope looks like when the world has already gone sideways. Even the small personal details attached to her author bios fit that restless energy: she has eaten mezze in the old city of Jerusalem, surfed in the warm waters of Costa Rica, and talked about loving board games and movies.

Her books have been translated into dozens of languages, and Angelfall later landed on Time's list of the 100 best fantasy books. She continues to write the kind of fantasy that gives readers an escape hatch into somewhere darker, stranger, and a lot less safe than ordinary life. Whether she is writing fallen angels or fierce fairy tales, Susan Ee usually comes back to the same thing: people who keep going when the world gives them every reason to quit.