ABOUT MARISSA

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Marissa van Uden is a writer and editor who loves wildlife, wild places, and Weird horror. She grew up in Aotearoa New Zealand, spent most of her adult life in Munich, Berlin, and Los Angeles, and then gave up on cities and moved to a cabin in the woods of rural Vermont. She is the editor of Strange Libations: Dark Cocktails anthology from Apex Books and The Off-Season: An Anthology of Coastal New Weird (forthcoming from Dark Matter Ink). She’s also an acquisitions editor for Dark Matter Magazine, an associate editor at Apex Magazine. Her stories appear in Dark Matter Magazine, the Los Suelos anthology, and Zero Dark Thirty. She’s an active member of the HWA and EFA. When she’s not reading, writing, or editing, you can find her taking photos of moss and lichen in the woods, watching otters and beavers down by the pond, or communing with chickadees.

Her editing credits include award winners, Amazon #1 bestsellers, and National Geographic books. She has line edited horror books such as Brian Keene’s Curse of the Bastards; CS Humble’s Black Wells series novels; and Tracy Cross’s Rootwork. She was a developmental and/or line editor for Alys Arden’s The Casquette Girls (an Amazon #1 bestseller, Starred by Publishers Weekly, and picked up in two-book deal by Skyscape Publishing) and The Romeo Catchers (Nominated for Best Young Adult Protagonist in the 2017 RT Reviewers’ Choice Awards); Ciara Ballintyne’s In The Company of the Dead (winner of Pinnacle Awards Best Fantasy Novel); Megan Crewe’s A Mortal Song (Amazon Kindle #1 Bestseller) and A Ruthless Magic; D Robert Pease’s Shadow Swarm (Winner of Mom’s Choice Awards Gold Medal in Fantasy & Science Fiction), D.A. Godwins Guardian’s Prophecy Series; and Debra Goelz’s Mermaids and the Vampires Who Love Them (winner of the Watty award in 2014, picked up by Hatchette Audiobooks and adapted into an interactive mobile game).

Creatives who inspire her include Philip K Dick, Jeff VanderMeer, Karin Tidbeck, James Tiptree Jr., Octavia Butler, Cordwainer Smith, David Lynch, China Miéville, JG Ballard, Robert Aickman, Algernon Blackwood, William Hope Hodgson, Leonora Carrington, Carl Sagan, Jim Henson, and everyone who wrote and designed the The Last of Us videogames.

PODCASTS & BOOK REVIEWS

Marissa reviews novels, nonfiction, short stories and (coming soon) science fiction/fantasy narrative-based video games. She joins fellow dickheads Jesse Willis and Paul Weimar — sometimes with very special guests — at the SFF Audio podcast to review all of PKD’s works in roughly the order he wrote them, and to talk about Things in speculative fiction.

YOU CAN FRIEND/FOLLOW/FIND HER AT