About the author
S.D. Fox
Folk-horror from the river country — where the legends are old, the places are real, and the dead don't always stay where you put them.
S.D. Fox writes American folk-horror — stories about grief, inheritance, memory, and the things a community will bury to keep itself alive.
The work begins where the author lives: southern Illinois, a short drive from the Great River Road and the limestone bluffs of the Mississippi that inspired the very first book. Those bluffs still carry the painted legend of the Piasa Bird — and that legend, and the real history of the places each book visits, is the soil the fiction grows out of. From a river town in Illinois to an Appalachian coal hollow, the cold edge of Lake Superior, a salt-kept desert ghost town, and the frozen top of the world, every book is rooted in a real American place and the things it would rather forget.
Fox writes under two names. The folk-horror novels — The Wren Ouatoga Series and the work that grows from it — appear as S.D. Fox. Earlier and adjacent projects, including The Pinecone Ridge Chronicles, carry the Shawn Fox byline. It's one author, two doorways into the same dark woods.
Beyond the page, Fox is a musician and game-maker: original musical scores, a folk-pop rock opera that became a novel, and self-contained browser games built from the same legends that drive the books. The throughline is always the same — old American stories, told honestly, with the lights low.
Lives
Southern Illinois, near the Great River Road
Writes
American folk-horror · literary YA
Also makes
Original music, rock opera, browser games
Also known as
Shawn Fox
What the books are really about
"The answer is the opposite of alone."
Under the monsters, the series asks one question over and over: what does it cost to carry something by yourself — and what becomes possible when you finally don't have to? The horror is real. So is the warmth underneath it.
Start reading
Begin with The Bird That Devours, or browse the full bookshelf.