Sheila Masterson

Sheila Masterson came back to writing the way many people did during the pandemic: looking for an escape. What began as a search for dissociation and joy during lockdown turned into something far more sustained. As a child she had filled notebooks with short stories and even wrote fan fiction inspired by the Goosebumps books before the concept of fan fiction was widely known. She studied at West Chester University of Pennsylvania, loading her schedule with as many writing electives as she could, and she has spoken openly about how grief shaped her earliest long-form work. When she started writing The Lost God in early 2021, she had recently experienced a loss in the family that severed the connection to an entire generation of memories, and it was through that grief that the central magic of her debut world was born.

That debut grew well beyond what she first imagined. What she sat down to write as a single story expanded across four books, becoming The Lost God Series, an angsty epic romantasy quartet that established her signature blend of intricate magic systems and emotionally raw romance. Set in a world where memory itself can be wielded as power, the series follows memory witch Cecilia and her guardian Rainer through meddling gods, simmering wars, and magical exchanges that test everything Cecilia believes about loyalty, love, and herself. A notorious love triangle sits at its centre, earning the series comparisons to other emotionally gruelling romantasy sagas and a passionate readership that responds strongly to the push-and-pull of characters who feel, above all else, deeply human. The quartet comprises The Lost God (2023), The Memory Curse (2023), The Storm King (2024), and The Godless Kingdom (2024).

Following the success of the quartet, Masterson expanded the same universe with A Legacy of Stars, a next-generation standalone spinoff designed to work both for new readers and as a continuation for fans of the original series. The story follows Stella McKay, who seeks a magical heart bond with the man she believes is her great romance, only for a mischievous goddess of love to link her instead to the last person she would choose: Teddy Savero. The only route to breaking the bond is surviving the Gauntlet Games and winning a favour from the gods. Built around a rivals-to-lovers dynamic, the book uses its tournament setting to explore how characters misread one another's power before they can genuinely connect.

Song of the Dark Wood, the opening book in her Fable Song series, demonstrated Masterson's range within the romantasy genre. An Amazon bestselling gothic fairy tale fantasy romance, it blends a fractured Red Riding Hood retelling with threads of a Hades and Persephone dynamic, set in a remote community where a centuries-old pact with the gods demands the sacrifice of a Red Maiden. Readers who gravitate towards authors such as Rachel Gillig, Rebecca Ross, and Hannah Whitten will find familiar atmospheric pleasures here, alongside Masterson's own emotionally specific take on myth and folklore. The second book in the series, Ballad of the Heartless, followed in 2026.

Her most recent standalone, The Poison Daughter, represents perhaps her darkest work to date. Set in a walled city surrounded by a vampire-infested forest, it centres on a vigilante who uses her magically poisonous kiss to kill abusive men in her community, until an encounter with the one man immune to her power forces her into an arranged marriage she never anticipated. The enemies-to-lovers trope runs through the book with particular intensity, and its dark romantasy tone has drawn in readers who want romance with genuine moral complexity at its core. The Poison Daughter debuted as a USA Today bestseller.

Across all of her work, Masterson writes what she describes as emotional, character-driven stories about the joys and heartbreaks of love, the losses and triumphs of claiming agency, and the angst and healing of personal evolution. Her magic systems tend to feel grounded in recognisable human experience, whether memory, poison, or ancient pacts, rather than acting as mere spectacle. She has spoken in interviews about writing her own experiences into her characters rather than basing them on people she knows, which gives her protagonists a particular kind of interior credibility. Anxiety, grief, societal expectation, and the fear of failure all recur across her casts, framed through the lens of fantasy but rooted in feelings readers recognise immediately.

What separates Masterson from many of her contemporaries in the romantasy space is her persistent interest in power imbalance as a romantic engine. Drawing on ideas she encountered in workshops with romance authors, she treats the journey from inequity to parity between two characters as the true love story, using magic and world-building to make those power dynamics visible and concrete before her romances can resolve. That structural commitment, combined with her willingness to put her characters through genuine emotional difficulty, gives her books a reputation for making readers cry. She leans into that reputation rather than softening it, understanding that the emotional stakes are precisely the point.