Alexis Henderson grew up in Savannah, Georgia, a city whose reputation for haunting and history seeped into her early reading life. Southern Gothic folktales, ghost stories, and the particular atmosphere of a place that wears its darkness openly shaped her sensibility long before she wrote a single word of fiction. She now lives in Charleston, South Carolina, another city that carries its past like a second skin.
Her debut novel, The Year of the Witching (2020), arrived fully formed: a theocratic society called Bethel, a young woman named Immanuelle, and a forbidden forest that holds the secrets of her bloodline. The premise drew on Henderson's childhood fascination with the woods behind her home, her research into Wicca and witchcraft, and a deep interest in the way religious institutions concentrate power over women. The novel earned a Choice Awards finalist nomination and introduced Henderson as a writer with a clear, unflinching voice and a precise command of dread. It has since accumulated hundreds of thousands of reader ratings, an unusually strong performance for a debut.
Her follow-up, House of Hunger (2022), moved into Gothic vampire territory with a class-conscious edge. Marion Shaw, a young woman raised in poverty, answers a peculiar advertisement seeking a bloodmaid and finds herself inside the opulent, predatory world of a noble house where blood is the currency of power. The book sharpened what The Year of the Witching had promised: Henderson is drawn to hierarchies that feed on women, and to women who learn to feed back. House of Hunger also earned a Choice Awards finalist nomination, cementing a rare back-to-back recognition in the horror genre.
With An Academy for Liars (2024), Henderson turned to dark academia. Set partly in a hidden magical college secreted within Savannah itself, the novel follows Lennon Carter, who possesses the ability to bend others to her will — a power the book refuses to frame as purely heroic. The Savannah setting gave Henderson the opportunity to write back into the landscape that formed her, though filtered through something stranger and more unsettling than nostalgia.
Her most recent novel, When I Was Death (2026), continues to demonstrate the range within her dark fiction. Henderson has also contributed short fiction to anthologies, including Eternally Yours and The White Guy Dies First, the latter edited by Terry J. Benton-Walker.
Across all her work, certain preoccupations recur: women who are difficult, determined, or dangerous; institutions — religious, aristocratic, academic — that demand submission and receive something else entirely; and atmospheres so carefully built that the dread accumulates in the reader before anything overtly terrible has happened. Henderson has spoken about her writing process including immersive research, dreaming through story problems, and a personal library that runs to first editions of Stephen King and multiple translations of Dante's Inferno. Those influences are legible in the work: the theological weight of King's early horror, the moral architecture of Dante, and the Southern Gothic tradition all find expression in her fiction without ever feeling like imitation.
Published by Ace, an imprint of Penguin Random House, Henderson is represented by New Leaf Literary and Media. She writes, by her own account, for readers who want their protagonists complicated, intense, and capable of violence.
