Erin A. Craig Books In Order

Publication Order of Sisters of the Salt Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Anthologies

Author Erin A. Craig has always enjoyed telling stories. She got her BFA in Theatre Production and Design from the University of Michigan. After this, she stage managed tragic operas with seances, hunchbacks, and killer clowns. All before she wanted to pen novels that were just as spooky.

She is a rabid fan of basketball, a decent quilter, a collector of typewriters, and avid reader. She has a lot of basketball memorabilia, towers of books, and a bunch of typewriters. Erin likes her coffee to be black and strong, her shoes extra sparkly, and her movies spooky and atmospheric.

Erin and her sister would get fairy-tale cassette tapes that they got from sending in Jell-O pudding box tops. They would play them on their little boom box they had in their bedroom and completely wore out their copy of “Rumpelstiltskin”. They would listen to the tape once, and then start it all over so they could act out all the parts with as much drama in their voices as the actress on tape. Years later, she is still able to remember lines from it.

Erin spent her childhood immersed in stories. She had different silly bedtime stories that her dad made up for her, and weekly trips off to the library with her sister and mom to get a lot of books. She has written stories her entire life.

During college, she would toy with small projects the entire time she was an undergrad and wrote some really embarrassing and swoony type fan fiction as she managed the front desk of her dorm. She never believed that any of it would actually go anywhere.

During one night, she was working on the closing shift, and got an idea for what would later be her first book. She worked on the idea for years, and was able to finish it a decade later. Other parts of her life took time away from her writing.

It wasn’t until she was home with her newborn child, and she was on hiatus from her job before she realized that she could begin taking her writing seriously. She polished her novel up and began querying it. When she was out with agents, she came up with the idea for “House of Salt and Sorrows” and began drafting it.

The idea was an island estate covered with fog, dark, dark secrets and shadows. This idea would not leave her alone, and she was convinced there was an entire novel there. While she was looking through boxes of keepsakes, she found a picture from when she was ten. She was playing the role of soldier in her sister’s Girl Scout troop’s production of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses and from here the story clicked into place for her.

It took her only three months to pen the first draft, but she had been thinking about the world of Arcannia for around a year. She finds plot to be easier to do if she really understand what the world of the characters looks like. It helps Erin make choices on how they react to situations and how they behave.

At one time, she was trying to retell “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allen Poe. She could see the world she wanted to create, but was unable to produce enough of a plot to warrant an entire novel out of it.

Erin loves the morning the most. Both she and her husband wake up early. She gets them both coffee and he goes upstairs to begin his day. During this time, she is able to get a good amount of her writing for the day done before their daughter wakes up. Once she runs in, all snuggly and happy, her husband makes breakfast.

When Erin is working on something, her mom and sister get sent pages in their rawest and earliest forms. She has been having them read her work since she was little, writing about magical animal and thinly veiled fanfics about ‘Phantom of the Opera’.

She also has Hannah Whitten read her work. They met when Hannah asked if anybody was looking for a critique partner that liked fairy tale retellings. First they passed their stories back and forth to see if they would work well together, and Erin fell in love with Hannah and her writing right off. Hannah is able to find something good in the messiest and nonsensical drafts and give suggestions on how to make it shine.

Erin’s debut novel, called “House of Salt and Sorrows”, was released in the year 2019. Her work is from the young adult, horror, and fantasy genres.

“House of Salt and Sorrows” is the first stand alone novel, which was released in the year 2019. Annaleigh lives her sheltered life at Highmoor with all of her sisters, their dad, and stepmom. There once was twelve, but loneliness fills these grand halls now that four of the girls’ lives have ended prematurely. Each death was even more tragic than the previous one. The plague, one plunged to their death, one drowned, and a slippery plunge. Whispers throughout all of the surrounding villages suggest the family could be cursed by the gods.

Annaleigh, who is disturbed by some ghostly visions, gets more and more suspicious that the deaths of her sisters were not accidental. The girls have recently been sneaking out each night so that they can go to glittering balls, and they dance until dawn in their shimmering slippers and silk gowns. Annaleigh is unsure if she should attempt stopping them or join in on their forbidden trysts. Who, or what, could they really be dancing with?

Annaleigh’s involvement with an enigmatic stranger who has got secrets of his own gets more intense, it is a race to unravel the darkness that has fallen over her family. She has to figure things out before it is able to claim her next.

This book is atmospheric and chilling, and allows the reader to step inside a spooky fairy tale of a book. Erin’s take on the fairy-tale “The Twelve Dancing Princesses” is a magically engrossing story. It is interesting to see how she retells this fairy-tale, and readers were hooked almost right off the bat.