Author Spotlight: Priya Sharma – The Alchemist of Quiet Horror ✨🖋️
- Cailynn Brawffe
- Jun 17, 2025
- 2 min read
Where myths rot beautifully, transformation comes with teeth, and family heirlooms include curses you cannot return.
There are authors who tell stories.
And then there’s Priya Sharma—who conjures them.
Reader, beware: these tales don’t knock. They slip beneath the door, curl up beside you, and begin whispering.
A master of modern gothic, Sharma crafts horror like it’s been simmering for centuries—steeped in folklore, bloodline trauma, and the unsettling truths we inherit like antique silver. Her prose? As precise as a scalpel. Her themes? Unapologetically haunted.
Reading her is less like turning pages and more like agreeing to something… without quite knowing what.
👁️ Who Is Priya Sharma (and Should You Be Afraid)?
Yes. Gently. Beautifully. Absolutely.
A British author with a knack for folding folklore into the shape of very modern dread, Sharma’s fiction lingers like a perfume made from grave flowers and sea salt.
She writes about:
Mythology, metamorphosis, and the monstrous feminine
Generational rot (the elegant kind)
Secrets pressed between pages like dried, poisonous flowers
The family reunion you deeply regret attending
Her work has earned her Shirley Jackson Awards, British Fantasy Awards, and the quiet, reverent fear of her readers.
📚 Required Readings (Preferably by Candlelight)
🖤 Ormeshadow (2019)
A boy. A farmhouse. A family secret that hisses beneath the floorboards. This is gothic folklore in a minor key, where ancestral land remembers everything, and dreams smell faintly of sulphur.
🏆 Shirley Jackson Award Winner
💀 Warning: the dragons are metaphorical. Mostly.
🖤 All the Fabulous Beasts (2018)
A short story collection so elegant it bleeds silk. Every tale is a slow descent—into longing, into loss, into something with hooves or wings or too many teeth.
🏆 Shirley Jackson & British Fantasy Award Winner
✨ Bonus: You’ll wake up at 3 a.m. thinking about one sentence. Possibly forever.
🖤 The Crow Palace (2017)
A woman returns home. The crows are watching. The house remembers. And the past? Still flapping its wings in the attic.
🏆 Shirley Jackson Award Winner
🪶 Side effect: An enduring distrust of birds and siblings.
🌿 Why Sharma Stays With You (Like a Curse in the Wallpaper)
✔️ Horror with a heartbeat—slow, rhythmic, unsettling
✔️ Metamorphosis as metaphor and as a problem
✔️ Gothic prose that tastes like opium and ash
✔️ Monsters who sometimes look a lot like your reflection
Her stories don’t just haunt. They claim something. A small, secret corner of you—gone forever.
💬 Final Thoughts (But Not Last Rites)
Priya Sharma writes like the love child of a myth and a nightmare. Her fiction isn’t here to startle you—it’s here to transform you.
If you like your horror elegant, your dread folkloric, and your emotional wounds shaped like antlers and broken mirrors, Sharma is your next obsession.
Just be warned:
Once you step into her stories, they don’t always let you leave the same.
Comments