Meet the Author

Hi there!

I’m Alexandria (A.M.) Vaňková—Van-koh-vah, not Vank-oh-vuh, and no, I don’t expect anyone to get it right on the first try. I promise. It’s Czech, which is not an easy language to begin with.

A little about me: I grew up in a small-ish town in East Texas with a very large family—about half of whom are from Lake Charles, Louisiana. They’ve all since relocated to Texas, but thankfully brought the Cajun food and traditions with them.

I now live in the Austin area, procrastinating my way through a Ph.D. and writing the All Hungry Gods Wear Red cycle—Southern Gothic psychological thrillers about power, obsession, and what happens when justice and guilt get a little too comfy.

When I’m not writing, I tend to hyper-fixate on my other hobbies (knitting like a grandma) or embarrass my kids by showing them dances from the early 2010s.

Traveling, though, is the real obsession. I love new places, but I have a few favorites you can reliably find me returning to: New Orleans—a city I keep coming back to without bothering to justify it—or Galveston Island, where the history, humidity, and LaKing’s Candy make sure I show up at least once a year.

Other facts that exist primarily to embarrass me: my go-to karaoke song is “Gimme Three Steps” by Lynyrd Skynyrd; The Lord of the Rings occupies a permanent spot in my all-time favorite movies (my long-standing obsession with Cate Blanchett should have been everyone’s first red flag about my sapphic tendencies); my brother and I can still recite—and aggressively sing, usually off-key—the entire 2004 film adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera; I have a black belt in Tae Kwon Do; and I’m a trivia addict, even when the information is wildly impractical.

I hope you enjoy this side project my wife very patiently hounded me into releasing. Like most things in my life, I eventually gave in. So if you ended up here—thank Rebekah.

Book Recommendations

  • Diary of an Oxygen Thief

    By Anonymous

    "I knew from the first sentence this wasn’t going to be gentle. Bleak, intimate, uncomfortable—just a raw spiral of ego, cruelty, and control."

  • The Masque of the Red Death

    By Edgar Allen Poe

    “I read The Masque of the Red Death in 7th grade English, and it was my first real dive into symbolism. It showed me stories can mean more than what’s on the page.”

  • Call Me By Your Name

    By André Aciman

    “Call Me By Your Name nails that first-love ache—too intense to feel real, impossible to forget. The writing is unconventional in the best way, like you’re inside the main character’s head the whole time.”

  • Sharp Objects

    By Gillian Flynn

    “Sharp Objects is Southern Gothic and deeply psychological—obsessed with the darker sides of womanhood, power, and buried truths. One of the best modern psych thrillers I’d read in a long time, and that ending had me reeling.”

  • The Apocrypha

    By Various Authors

    “I was raised in a very black-and-white religion, but by my first world lit class I was already falling in love with symbolism. Reading the Pentateuch and Apocrypha as literature—not doctrine—kind of blew my mind.”

  • The Great Gatsby

    By F. Scott Fitzgerald

    “The Great Gatsby sealed my love for allegory and symbolism back in high school. Messy people playing elegant, rot under all that decadence—and I’ll always side with the theory that Zelda Fitzgerald contributed more than history likes to admit.”

  • Carmilla

    By J. Sheridan LeFanu

    “I read Carmilla because my sister knew I loved Dracula, and it reset the bar permanently. The prose, the characters, the sapphic energy—nothing else has really compared. If you’ve read my first book, you get it.”