Steampunk, horror, and urban fantasy speculative fiction receive a distinctive blend of regional atmosphere and historical detail in award-winning alternate histories and supernatural novels. Cherie Priest gained widespread recognition with her steampunk novel Boneshaker, an award-winning alternate history work that earned Locus and PNBA awards alongside Hugo and Nebula nominations.
With a publication record spanning dozens of novels and novellas, her work bridges atmospheric Southern Gothic ghost stories, cosmic horror reimaginings, and haunting modern thrillers.
Career & Background
Born in Tampa, Florida, in 1975, Priest experienced a mobile childhood as the daughter of an Army father, living in Florida, Texas, Kentucky, and Tennessee before attending college. She graduated from Forest Lake Academy, a Seventh-day Adventist boarding school in Apopka, Florida, in 1993. Continuing her education in Tennessee, she earned a B.A. from Southern Adventist University in 1998 and an M.A. in Rhetoric and Professional Writing from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 2001. Priest lived in Chattanooga for twelve years, setting her Eden Moore sequence there and writing the first two books of the trilogy. Although baptized into the Seventh-day Adventist Church during her youth, she maintains no religious affiliation. In May 2012, she and her husband Aric Annear moved to Tennessee from Seattle, Washington, before returning to live in Seattle in 2017. Outside of writing novels, she served as a reviewer for the Bram Stoker Award-winning website Chiaroscuro, worked on staff at Subterranean Press, participated regularly as a panelist at DragonCon, Penguicon, and Steamcon, and gave public talks on urban exploration.
Writing Style & Themes
Priest's narratives frequently combine detailed historical settings with speculative mechanics, drawing heavily on Southern Gothic traditions and place-based lore. Her debut Eden Moore trilogy explores haunted landscapes, ghost sensitivity, and the influence of fundamentalist Christianity in Southern culture. In her Clockwork Century universe, she blends alternate nineteenth-century history, steampunk technology, and horror tropes. Later standalone releases, including the haunted house narrative The Family Plot and the coastal thrillers The Drowning House and Maplecroft, emphasize architectural memory, claustrophobic settings, and reinterpreted classic terror tropes. Her short fiction and contributions have also appeared in major speculative anthologies such as New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird.
Major Works
- Boneshaker — This 2009 alternate-history novel launched the Clockwork Century series, earning the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel and nominations for both the Hugo Award and Nebula Award.
- The Drowning House — A modern horror novel focused on coastal isolation, family secrets, and supernatural dread.
- The Family Plot — A gothic ghost story centered on an estate salvage project that uncovers dangerous hauntings.
- New Cthulhu: The Recent Weird — An anthology collecting contemporary Lovecraftian fiction and modern weird tales.
- Maplecroft — A Philip K. Dick Award-nominated gothic novel that reimagines the Lizzie Borden story through cosmic horror.
