Laura Purcell

Laura Purcell grew up in Essex, originally from Basildon and raised in Billericay, before settling in Colchester where she lives today. Before fiction took over entirely, she worked as a bookseller - a background that shows in the precision of her genre sensibility. She writes gothic horror and historical fiction, and she does both with a seriousness of craft that separates her from writers who merely borrow the aesthetic.

Her earliest published work was rooted in Georgian and Regency history. The Hanoverian series, beginning with Queen of Bedlam (2014) and followed by Mistress of the Court (2015), explored the lives of the women who orbited the Hanoverian court - consorts, rivals, and figures history had largely pushed to its margins. Purcell has spoken about her intention to eventually write around seven books centred on Georgian queens, though her gothic fiction career has taken precedence in recent years.

The pivot came with The Silent Companions (2017), a novel that announced her as a genuinely distinctive voice in British horror. Set in a crumbling Victorian country estate, it follows a newly widowed woman who discovers a collection of painted wooden figures that seem to move of their own accord. The atmosphere is slow, suffocating, and precise - the horror arrives not through spectacle but through the steady erosion of rational explanation. The book became a BBC Radio 2 Book Club pick and went on to win the RUSA Horror Award in 2019, attracting hundreds of thousands of readers worldwide.

The Corset (published in the US as The Poison Thread, 2018) followed a different thread - a Victorian philanthropist visiting a young seamstress in prison, accused of murder, who believes her needlework carries a lethal curse. It won the WHSmith Thumping Good Read Award in 2018, was shortlisted for the Goldsboro Glass Bell, and was selected for the Zoe Ball ITV Book Club. Bone China (published in the US as The House of Whispers, 2019) moved to a Cornish setting, weaving together a tale of tuberculosis patients, fairy folklore, and a nurse with a secret, across two timelines.

The Shape of Darkness (2021) returned to Victorian Bath, following a struggling silhouette artist who enlists the help of a child spirit medium after her clients begin turning up murdered. The novel was a finalist for the Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original and won the Fingerprint Historical Crime Book of the Year at the 2022 awards. It further confirmed Purcell's skill at rooting supernatural unease in the anxieties of a specific historical moment - in this case, an era in which photography was making older image-making crafts obsolete, and Victorian spiritualism was at its height.

Purcell's short fiction has appeared in the anthology collections The Haunting Season (2021) and The Winter Spirits (2023), both of which gathered some of the most prominent names working in British horror and historical fiction. Her story 'Cameo' also features in a separate horror collection. Beyond prose, she served as lead writer on Roanoke Falls, a Realm horror podcast executive produced by John Carpenter and Sandy King Carpenter, which won a Signal Award for Best Scripted Fiction and Best Sound Design.

House of Splinters (2025) returned to The Bridge, the estate at the centre of The Silent Companions, this time as a prequel exploring an earlier generation of the Bainbridge family. Her work continues to earn recognition across genre awards: in 2023, the Dracula Society presented her with its Children of the Night Award. Purcell's fiction is characterised by its psychological patience - the dread accumulates slowly, grounded in historical detail, before arriving somewhere genuinely unsettling.