The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own

Release Date: April 14, 2026 • preordered copies will be signed by the author

Celebrated author Gwendolyn Kiste cordially invites you to explore The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own. Enter a world possessed by recriminations from bygone eras, where the regrets and malice of years past still reverberate and shape our doom. Here, morally complex women and queer antiheroines swim against the current of a social structure that serves as a spectral prison in these layered stories of the weird and the Other.

Known for crafting bold metafictional narratives that grapple with challenging social issues, Kiste’s unwavering voice deftly weaves a siren’s song of resilience and survival. Included among the short stories in this collection are the Bram Stoker Award-winning “The Eight People Who Murdered Me (Excerpt From Lucy Westenra’s Diary),” “The Girls From the Horror Movie,” “The Sea Witch of the World’s Fair,” and other riveting new gothic tales of body horror, the supernatural, and unapologetic resistance.

What They’re Saying

“The stories in this collection run the entire horror gamut, but two words can describe each of them: unsettling and divine. As ever, Gwendolyn Kiste brings her blend of searing insight and sharp prose to create a book so haunting and so smart you’ll want to read it over and over again. Not just a must-read: a treasure.” — Wendy N. Wagner, author of Girl in the Creek

“Delightfully strange, unapologetically fierce, these stories are sharp enough to draw blood. Kiste weaves stories full of wrath and regret that will leave bite marks in your psyche, and you WILL thank her for it.” – Nino Cipri, author of Dead Girls Don’t Dream

“Kiste cracks open the walls built to contain women and lets the spirits inside roar. A haunting, a liberation, and a searing testament to the women we tried to bury and the homes that still remember them.” –Lindy Ryan, author of Bless Your Heart and Dollface

“Ethereal and feminist, Gwendolyn Kiste’s fiction is a beautiful monstrosity pressed under the glass of mesmeric prose and razor-sharp wit. The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own is at once both celebratory and sorrowful, the kind of horror that follows you home, slides next to you in bed, and entangles itself about you all night.” – Rebecca Rowland, author of Eminence Front and Unsettled Score

“The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own isn’t just a collection of stories, it’s a catharsis. This is a book that screams not in fear, but in rage, and turns the darkness back on itself. Gwendolyn Kiste is a true master of horror that both hurts and heals. Sharp and bloody in the best of ways.” – A.C. Wise, author of Wendy, Darling and Ballad of the Bone Road

“In Gwendolyn Kiste’s The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own abominations, nuclear disasters, ghosts, murderers and women sick of silence conduct an intricate dance. This collection pries open the cracks in the pavement to show stars that breathe in between. A space where monsters and the monstrous-adjacent might find a home. Kiste’s latest is excellent, bold and eclectic.” – Angela  “A.G.” Slatter, award-winning author of The Cold House