Sami Ellis
Sami Ellis is a queer horror writer inspired by the horrific nature of Black fears and the culture’s relation to the supernatural. Don’t mess with teeth. Never give a stranger your hair. Hexes, Haint Blue, and hearing hymns from the ancestors.
You can support her by following her @themoosef on Twitter, checking out her work as the the co-founder of the Write Team Mentorship Program, using her writing resource, the Agent Adjacent Cheat Sheet, and checking out her words in the upcoming Black horror anthology, All These Sunken Souls (2023) and in her debut novel Dead Girls Walking (2024).
Welcome to the Dark.
We are all familiar with tropes of the horror genre: slasher and victims, demon and the possessed. Bloody screams, haunted visions, and the peddler of wares we aren’t sure we can trust. In this young adult horror anthology, fans of Jordan Peele, Lovecraft Country, and Horror Noire will get a little bit of everything they love—and a lot of what they fear—through a twisted blend of horror lenses, from the thoughtful to the terrifying.
From haunted, hungry Victorian mansions, temporal monster–infested asylums, and ravaging zombie apocalypses, to southern gothic hoodoo practitioners and cursed patriarchs in search of Black Excellence, All These Sunken Souls features the chilling creations of acclaimed bestsellers and hot new talents.
A month ago, Junie Daniels was in a car crash that left her with a dead sister, fragmented memories of the accident, and a mother too checked-out to plan a funeral. The cheapest grave plot Junie can find is in the next town over. Sure, Williamsville is still proudly named after a slave master who was rumored to dabble in dark magic—but this North Carolina, after all.
When unexplained occurrences start happening at the graveyard, though, Junie and her best friend, Omari, investigate. And it’s not long before Junie and Omari are taken...
Williamsville wants both Daniels girls. But Junie will do anything to protect her sister—even if it's only her corpse.
Dead Girls Walking is a shocking, spine-chilling YA horror slasher about a girl searching for her dead mother’s body at the summer camp that was once her serial killer father’s home—perfect for fans of Friday the 13th and White Smoke.
Temple Baker knows that evil runs in her blood. Her father is the North Point Killer, an infamous serial killer known for how he marked each of his victims with a brand.
He was convicted for murdering 20 people and was the talk of countless true crime blogs for years. Some say he was possessed by a demon. Some say that they never found all his victims. Some say that even though he’s now behind bars, people are still dying in the woods.
Despite everything, Temple never believed that her dad killed her mom. But when he confesses to that crime while on death row, she has no choice but to return to his old hunting grounds to try see if she can find a body and prove it.
Turns out, the farm that was once her father’s hunting grounds and her home has been turned into an overnight camp for queer, horror-obsessed girls. So Temple poses as a camp counselor to go digging in the woods. While she’s not used to hanging out with girls her own age and feels ambivalent at best about these true crime enthusiasts, she tries her best to fit in and keep her true identity hidden.
But when a girl turns up dead in the woods, she fears that one of her father’s “fans” might be mimicking his crimes. As Temple tries to uncover the truth and keep the campers safe, she comes to realize that there may be something stranger and more sinister at work—and that her father may not have been the only monster in these woods.