VES Pullen Books in Order

If you want the clearest entry point: Book of the Dead: AESLI-00
If you want Salem's secrets and escape build-up: Book of the Dead: AESLI-00 → Book of the Damned: A-E5L1-01-00
If you want the full Azzie arc so far: Book of the Dead: AESLI-00 → Book of the Damned: A-E5L1-01-00 → Book of the Lost: AAV-07d25-11

VES Pullen keeps a lot of the personal stuff offstage, which feels fitting for a writer whose fiction is full of secrets, hidden systems, and people who know more than they say. The public facts are brief but memorable: she describes herself as a believer in truth, sheepsquatch, and the Oxford comma, and she lives in southeast Michigan with her husband, three cats, and a dog. She also mentions a liking for warlocks and creepy dolls, which tells you something about the sense of humor.

She keeps the public bio short.

Most readers find her through Book of the Dead, the opening novel in The JAK2 Cycle. That book introduces Azzie Vokaty, a teenager with a rare blood disorder who thinks she is stuck in an ordinary Midwestern town, only to learn that the place around her is something else entirely. Right away, Pullen mixes post-pandemic science fiction, conspiracy, survival drama, and romance in a way that feels tense rather than tidy.

That mix became her lane fast.

She followed with Book of the Damned and Book of the Lost, keeping the same story moving instead of resetting the board each time. Readers who click with her books usually seem to respond to the same things: Azzie's sharp voice, the slow build of trust, the anger under the humor, and the sense that the romance never floats free of the danger around it. Even when the books widen the world, they stay personal.

Pullen has also given small but useful glimpses into how she works. In one reader Q and A, she explained that she started The JAK2 Cycle with a firm five-book plan, then split later material when the story grew too long to hold in a single volume. That tracks with the books themselves. They read like one expanding arc, with each installment uncovering more of the system built around Azzie and pushing her farther from the life she was told to accept.

The themes running through her fiction are pretty clear. She writes about control, bodily pain, survival, found family, and the ugly bargains powerful people make when they decide some lives are tools. But she also likes friction. Her characters argue, doubt each other, hold grudges, and still keep moving, which keeps the emotional side of the story from turning soft or easy.

What makes Pullen interesting is that the books never sound like they were built from category labels first. Yes, there is adult why-choose romance. Yes, there is a wrecked world, medical mystery, bunker tension, and a heroine who notices every lie in the room. But the voice is what does the lasting work. It is dry, prickly, suspicious, and often funny at exactly the wrong moment, which is a hard balance to fake. Her best-known work so far is centered on The JAK2 Cycle, and if that blend works for you, it gives a pretty good sense of what she does best.

From the little she shares, she still sounds like someone happiest at home in Michigan, with family nearby and the next complicated scene waiting to be written.