Soft Light, Sharp Teeth
ROWAN TAYLOR BOOKS
Welcome to the quiet horror of Rowan Taylor — where memories linger, love unravels, and the line between presence and absence is never quite clear. These are stories that don’t scream — they whisper, weep, and wait in the silence.Here, hauntings are intimate. Familiar faces become unfamiliar. Rooms remember. And some doors never close.Rowan Taylor writes unsettling fiction that blends psychological dread with the supernatural, exploring what it means to forget—and to be forgotten. She is also known as Tracy Fobes, author of eight award-winning paranormal romances published by Simon & Schuster and Leisure LoveSpell. Fobes has also independently published numerous romantic suspense stories, including Hard Charger and Billionaire’s Hidden Heart.As Fobes, she wrote of witches, grimalkins, haunted seas, and dangerous love. As Rowan, she steps fully into the dark.She lives near Philadelphia, owns too many books and too few flashlights, and believes the scariest monsters are the ones who know your name.
Noted by Critics
Rowan Taylor’s horror fiction has received two Editor’s Picks from BookLife Reviews (Publishers Weekly) and critical acclaim from Kirkus Reviews across all three novels of The Oblivion Cycle, each earning a “GET IT” verdict. Croatoan was further selected by the Kirkus Indie Editors for a spotlighted print review, a distinction reserved for standout titles. Kirkus praised The Memory Keeper as “a white-knuckled, sharply crafted piece of cerebral horror,” Croatoan as “a taut horror tale that simmers with tension,” and Dead Friends Forever as “a wholly absorbing dark mystery,” noting that it effectively closes the trilogy.Her work is recognized for its emotional intensity, atmospheric craft, and disciplined suspense. Her screenwriting has been optioned twice, underscoring a body of work that blends cinematic tension with immersive, character-driven dread.
Some confessions refuse to stay buried
Velvet Mouth
A novel of ecstatic horror
She made a career of saying what other people couldn't.
Then she met a man whose work made them say it themselves.
Sophie Arden sits in front of a microphone and speaks strangers’ worst sentences until her voice breaks. The secrets are never hers.After one performance, a sculptor named Lucien Voss looks at her mouth instead of the work and leaves a card with no name, only an hour, a street, and two words: come alone.Behind an unmarked door, his exhibition is waiting. Tongues, cleaned and lit like relics. A room that will not stay quiet. People begin to confess in their own voices, in front of everyone. Sophie tells herself she's there as an artist. Her body files a different report.What Lucien makes is not spectacle. It's preservation. Every piece remembers the last truth its owner could not say. The longer Sophie stays, the more the work reaches for the sentence she has spent years refusing to speak, and the more she wants the man who already knows where she keeps it.Velvet Mouth is an erotic literary horror about confession, hunger, and the violence of being kept. Some truths should never have been buried. Some should never have been saved.
Advance Reading Copies Available
Some towns don't let you leave
SMITHFIELD
A psychological horror novel
Something is wrong with Zoey's life. She just can't remember what.Smithfield is the kind of town where nothing ever changes.For years, Zoey found comfort in that certainty. Life was simple: her husband, her daughter, and the quiet rhythms of a small desert town where everyone knew everyone else.Now she finds herself questioning everything.A growing sense of déjà vu. Memories that shouldn't exist. Reactions she cannot explain. The persistent feeling that everyone around her is following rules she was never taught.The more she tries to ignore the feeling, the stronger it becomes. Familiar places seem subtly wrong. Strangers appear in her dreams before she meets them. Pieces of another life flicker at the edges of her memory, refusing to stay buried.As the cracks in her world widen, Zoey becomes obsessed with understanding what is happening to her. But every answer leads to new contradictions, and every recovered memory raises a more disturbing question. If her past is real, why doesn't anyone else remember it? And if her memories are false, who gave them to her?Soon Zoey is forced to confront an impossible possibility: the life she remembers may not be the life she lived. And the truth waiting beyond those memories may be more terrifying than forgetting ever was.
Now available across all major bookstores:
True death comes with forgetting
The Memory Keeper
A gothic psychological horror
A woman enters a house that doesn’t want to kill her.
It wants to erase her.Archivist Mara accepts a quiet contract to catalog the crumbling Dumont estate. She expects solitude and routine. Instead, she finds a house where the walls listen, the mirrors shift, and memory itself becomes unstable. The longer she stays, the more her reflection falters. Names slip. Thoughts blur. The line between herself and the presence within the house begins to dissolve.What haunts the estate isn’t a ghost.
It’s a patient predator, practiced in the art of rewriting lives — and it has set its sights on her.Somewhere in the estate’s history, a woman named Isabelle Dumont was erased. Her name was forgotten. Her existence hollowed out. Mara feels that same fate closing in, and the deeper she digs into the house’s records, the more the house begins to catalog her.The Memory Keeper is a gothic psychological horror about coercion, haunting, and the violence of being forgotten. It is the first novel in The Oblivion Cycle — a series of standalone horror novels united not by character or plot, but by a single devouring idea:What if identity is not a fixed truth, but prey?
Selected as an Editor’s Pick by BookLife Reviews (Publishers Weekly)
“Taylor’s gripping haunted house gothic […] pulls readers in from the first pages and doesn’t let go until the end… assured and often electric.”Kirkus Reviews calls it
“A white-knuckled, sharply crafted piece of cerebral horror.”
Now available across all major bookstores:
A voyage into madness and the unknown
CROATOAN
A nautical body-horror nightmare
The sea didn’t give John Cabot something.
It took him.When Kit Cabot stows away aboard the clipper Apollyon, he’s trying to save his uncle. Captain John Cabot returned from a sea cave carrying a strange red pearl — and whatever followed him back is wearing his body poorly. His eyes gleam with a red-black swirl. His voice strikes like a blow. The name he murmurs, Croatoan, makes hardened sailors fall silent.John is changing.His body bulges. Flesh ripples. Bones crack. Each day at sea strips something human away, replacing it with a terrible calm — and an authority no one dares defy. As whispers of mutiny spread and the lash sings on deck, Kit and a handful of allies race to uncover the pearl’s origin, only to learn it isn’t a jewel at all.It’s a window.
An invitation.
And something on the other side has noticed them.Storms close in. The coast turns hostile. The sea demands obedience — and it always collects its due. To save his uncle, maybe even his soul, Kit must decide how far he’s willing to go, and what he’s willing to become, in a battle where defiance is the only prayer left.Croatoan is a brutal tale of possession, transformation, and devotion under pressure — where belief becomes contagion, flesh becomes unstable, and identity erodes one heartbeat at a time. It is the second novel in The Oblivion Cycle, a series of standalone horror stories bound by a single devouring question:What if the greatest threat to humanity is not death — but erasure?
Kirkus Reviews
“Keen characterization fuels a taut horror tale that simmers with tension.”BookLife Reviews (Publishers Weekly)
“New terrors are unleashed on nearly every page… a frightening metamorphosis that thrums with horror, sacrifice, and purpose.”
Now available across all major bookstores:
Some friendships refuse to stay buried
DEAD FRIENDS FOREVER
A Southern Gothic ghost story
Some friends don’t stay buried.
They wait.Lily swore she would never return to the bayou — not after her cousin Amelia vanished, not after the angel statue was set in the garden to mourn what could never be recovered. But when her brother’s body is pulled from the swamp, the past drags her home whether she’s ready or not.The house still stands, sagging beneath silence and damp earth. Aunt Clara tucks letters and photographs into drawers, as if hiding the past might keep it from finding them. It doesn’t.The intrusions start small.
A locket engraved MINE turns up where it shouldn’t.
Polaroids reveal more than darkness when the flash goes off.
And Amelia appears — smiling the way she used to — though the girl standing before Lily is not the cousin she lost.Every night, the angel statue moves. One morning it stands in the garden. The next, in the cemetery. Then ankle-deep in the swamp. Lily can’t tell whether it’s coming for her — or whether she’s already trapped inside its gaze.In the bayou, the dead do not rest.
They wait for you to remember them.
And to finish what you began.Dead Friends Forever is a Southern Gothic horror of ghosts, betrayal, and the dangerous comfort of letting the dead back in — a slow-burn descent into memory, guilt, and the violence of unfinished grief. It is the third novel in The Oblivion Cycle, a series of standalone horror stories bound by a single devouring question:What if identity is not a fixed truth — but prey?
Selected as an Editor’s Pick by BookLife Reviews (Publishers Weekly)
“Taylor skillfully molds imagery and language… sweeping readers into horror, anxiety, and dread.”Kirkus Reviews
“A wholly absorbing dark mystery… an unnerving mood that refuses to let up.”
Now available across all major bookstores:
The Oblivion Cycle
The Oblivion Cycle is a series of standalone horror novels united not by character or plot, but by a single devouring idea: *what if identity is not a fixed truth, but prey? Each book opens a different doorway into oblivion, exploring how the self can be stolen, rewritten, hollowed out, or willingly surrendered.Like Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy and Caitlín R. Kiernan’s Tinfoil Dossier, The Oblivion Cycle is a thematic series. Every novel is complete on its own, yet each reveals another face of the same ancient hunger.
Doorways Into Oblivion
🜂 Memory – stolen, replaced, rewritten until the self becomes a stranger wearing your skin.🜄 Body – possessed, consumed, transformed, proving that flesh remembers what the mind denies.🜃 Relationship– friendship transmuted into sacrament or sacrifice, revealing that devotion is the surest path to ruin.These books may be read in any order. Individually, they are ghost stories, possession tales or psychological nightmares. Together, they map the many ways the human soul can be unmade.
Doorways in This Series
#1: The Memory Keeper
#2: Croatoan
#3: Dead Friends Forever