Vicky Brewster: Author Profile

Vicky is an author of scholarship, journalism, and fiction. They also edit for Horror Tree Press/Trembling With Fear. They have provided writing workshops for the Sutton Writers, Abergavenny Writing Festival, and Bristolcon. Find out more about Vicky’s writing and publications below.

Scholarship

Vicky is currently seeking a publisher for their monograph, Haunted Fiction in the New Age of Austerity. They have published in several academic collections and journals:

• “Review of Contemporary Women’s Ghost Stories by Gina Wisker” in Contemporary Women’s Writing Journal (2023)

• “’You can’t stop picturing that beautiful handset’: The Found Phone Trope in Twenty-First-Century Media” in LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory (2023)

• “’I wish, please, to live’: Religion and Rewilding in Michel Faber’s Ecohorror” in Future Folk Horror: Contemporary Anxieties and Potential Futures (ed. Simon Bacon) for Lexington (2023)

• “’Oh No! Not Again!’: Toxic Nostalgia and British Antisemitism in Ghost Stories by Andy Nyman and Jeremy Dyson” in Gothic Nostalgia: The Uses of Toxic Memory in 21st Century Popular Culture (ed. Simon Bacon) for Palgrave MacMillan (2024)

• “Haunting through the Layers in Contemporary Staged Ghost Stories” in Literature, The Gothic, and the Reconstruction of History (ed. Neil Cocks and Daniel Renshaw) for Routledge (2025)

• “Mother Yourself: Cloned Women and Paternal Erasure in Contemporary Science Fiction” in Hélice (expected 2025)

journalism

Vicky has produced blogs, reviews and articles periodically for Planet, the British Fantasy Society, and Trembling With Fear. Their journalistic writing focuses on gender and sexuality, speculative fiction and fan communities, game design, and creative writing.

Here is some of Vicky’s recent work:

• Meet Vicky Brewster (BFS)

• Bloomsbury Announce New SFFH Imprint, Bloomsbury Archer

• Review: The Folklore of Wales: Ghosts

fiction

Vicky is currently working on two long-form fiction projects, and co-authoring a short project. They draw on their experience in Live Action Roleplay and TTRPG game design to craft original fiction drawing on mystery, supernatural, and horror genres.

The Farmer Wants a Wife begins like a typical golden age of crime novel, with a world-famous detective about to reveal the murderer in a remote country farmhouse. At the crucial moment, some kind of hideous beast swoops in and kills the detective, leaving the suspects trapped with mortal threats and existential crises as they try to solve the mystery and stabilise their reality. The Farmer Wants a Wife will be independently published in 2016.

Abandon mixes narrative and found documents to tell the story of an abandoned weather station on a remote island, where the crew have mysteriously vanished without a trace. The investigators must work through the traces left by the station crew to work out what happened on their final days on the island, and where they could possibly be now. Perfect for fans of Janice Hallett and Jess Kidd, Vicky will be querying Abandon for traditional publishing in 2016.