ABOUT MARISSA

(long version)

Marissa van Uden is an editor, a writer, and a semi-feral woodswitch who befriends all the animals. She grew up in Aotearoa-New Zealand, spent many years in Munich, Berlin and Los Angeles, and now lives in rural Vermont, in a cabin in the woods. She loves wild nature, Weird horror, and salty licorice. Her fiction has been published in Dark Matter Magazine (2022), Zero Dark Thirty (Dark Matter Ink, 2022), the Los Suelos anthology (Surface Dwellers, 2022), and Vastarien (2023). She is an anthologist (editor of Strange Libations: Dark Cocktails and the forthcoming Strange Machines: Dark Manuals (Apex Books) and The Off-Season: An Anthology of Coastal New Weird (Dark Matter Ink). She’s also an acquisitions editor for Dark Matter Ink and head of acquisitions at Apex Books, and an active member of the Horror Writer’s Association and Editorial Freelancer’s Association.

Her manuscript 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 (Apex Books); CS Humble’s That Light Sublime trilogy & the Black Wells series (Cemetary Dance); Rootwork by Tracy Cross (Dark Hart Books), Mosaic by Catherine McCarthy (Dark Hart Books), Our Love Will Devour Us by R.L. Meza (Dark Matter Ink).

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