Tori Bovalino Books in Order

Tori Bovalino grew up near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a place that still turns up in the shadows and small-town edges of her work. She now lives in the United Kingdom with her partner, a very loud cat, and a puppy.

Her route to writing ran through classrooms as much as bookshelves. At the University of Pittsburgh, she studied English fiction writing and anthropology, with a minor in German. She then moved to London for an MA in Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London, and later completed a PhD in English.

Folklore has stayed close to the center of her interests. Her doctoral research examined the relationship between young adult fantasy and Russian folklore, and it helps explain why old stories, uneasy bargains, and creatures from the woods feel at home in her fiction.

She had started much earlier, though. Bovalino wrote her first short novel at eleven and began taking part in National Novel Writing Month in 2009. She has been frank about the fact that years of practice also left her with a large stash of drafts best left unseen.

A summer job in a campus library gave her debut its starting spark. Working quiet shifts in the stacks, she kept imagining something waiting just out of sight. That nervous feeling, along with folklore she encountered in class, grew into The Devil Makes Three, a 2021 novel about Tess and Eliot, two students who unleash a demon from a hidden book.

Bovalino's books use horror to put pressure on real fears: loneliness, family expectations, grief, desire, and the sense that a town or tradition has already decided who you are. The scares matter, but so do the young people trying to make choices inside them.

Not Good for Maidens moves through York and a dangerous hidden market, drawing on Christina Rossetti's "Goblin Market" as Lou uncovers secrets in her family's past. In My Throat an Open Grave, Leah enters the woods around her Pennsylvania town after her baby brother disappears. I, in the Shadows follows Drew, a teen who can see ghosts, and Liam, the spirit haunting her new room. Each story brings supernatural trouble close to ordinary teenage worries.

There is usually a piece of folklore behind the door, and something personal at stake once it opens.

Alongside novels, Bovalino has written short fiction and poetry, and she edited the folk-horror anthology The Gathering Dark. She still dabbles in academia, and keeps the interests that shaped her work close by: scary stories, obscure book facts, travel, embroidery, and reading.

Her books are a good fit for readers who want ghostly libraries, unsettling woods, hard choices, and characters who can't simply walk away from the past.