About Katie Marie

About Katie Marie

I’m Katie Marie, a horror writer, researcher, and lifelong enthusiast of all things strange, shadowy, and slightly unsettling.

Right now, I’m deep in a creative-critical PhD, unpicking how Lovecraftian horror shows the disabled body. In other words, I spend my days asking what happens when cosmic dread meets lived experience and how we might rewrite those stories to centre disabled voices, agency, and nuance instead of tentacles and terror alone.

That fascination spills straight into my fiction. I write horror that refuses to look away, stories that give voice to characters who’ve been sidelined, silenced, or spectacularly misunderstood, set against worlds that shimmer with awe, dread, and occasionally a bit of goo.

My lifelong obsession with horror began when my mum (possibly recklessly) read me Clive Barker’s The Thief of Always as a kid. It was all downhill (or uphill, depending on your perspective) from there.

Since then, my short stories have crept into various magazines and anthologies. Brigid’s Gate Press published my first novella A Man in Winter, a chilly tale of grief, guilt, and the ghosts that won’t stay quiet.

When I’m not writing, I wear a few other hats, I’m a trustee for Equal Lives (a disability rights charity), an events volunteer at the National Centre for Writing in Norwich (a.k.a. the City of Stories), and occasional interviewee for Authority Magazine, where I talk about writing, horror, and representation, and why the monsters are often the most interesting ones in the room.

When I do step away from the desk (rare, but it happens), you’ll find me playing horror games, watching creepy films, or wandering through Norfolk, daydreaming about what might be lurking just out of sight. (It’s usually just a pigeon. But you never know.)

Publishing History

My publishing history comprises one novella, A Man in Winter, published by Brigid’s Gate Press in July 2022; this novella was a finalist in the Eric Hoffer Awards.

I have had several short stories published in magazines and anthologies, including ‘Scratching’ in The Horrorzines Book of Ghost Stories, which came out in July 2020 and was reviewed by Own King and won Best Anthology in the 23rd Annual Critters Readers’ Poll. In Aug 2021, my story ‘There’s Something in the Water’ was published in the anthology Water: Selkies, Sirens and Sea Monsters, which won the Douglas Barbour Award in September 2022. The Horrorzine published my short story, ‘The Chest’, in their Fall 2022 issue in July 2022. Inkd Publishers recently published my short story ‘They Came from Below’ in the Behind the Shadows II anthology (Sept 24).

PhD

In October 2023, I began a Creative Writing PhD that combines my love of storytelling with my passion for exploring new perspectives in horror.

My project brings together a collection of short stories and a critical thesis, all centred on how disabled bodies and voices are represented in Lovecraftian fiction.

Through this work, I’m asking an important question: Can we create authentic, nuanced portrayals of characters with physical and mental disabilities (portrayals that are honest and unexaggerated) while still embracing everything that makes cosmic horror so strange, unsettling, and awe-inspiring?

It’s a challenge that pushes me to look at the genre I love from a fresh angle, finding space for fear and wonder without falling back on tired stereotypes.