Instead of trying to find your perfect match in a dating app, we bring you the “Author-Reader Match” where we introduce you to authors you may fall in love with. It’s our great pleasure to present Gemma Amor!
Writes:
Gemma Amor writes horror, speculative and crime fiction, has penned many audio drama scripts for podcasts and live performances, and has begun learning how to write for screen. Her work often features complicated protagonists, discussion of sensitive themes including mental health struggles, trauma, feminist narratives and other darker, serious topics. She is extremely interested in examining what happens to ordinary, everyday people placed into extraordinary circumstances and many of her characters have difficult backgrounds to contend with. Gemma veers into the paranormal, wyrd, strange side of writing but several of her novels are true-crime inspired with no supernatural aspect.
About:
Gemma Amor is a Bram Stoker and British Fantasy Award nominated author, voice actor, editor and illustrator based in Bristol, in the UK. She was named one of the ‘Writers Shaping Horror’s Next Golden Age’ by Esquire Magazine, and recently featured in Ellen Datlow’s prestigious Best Horror of the Year anthology, Vol. 15 and 17. She self-published her debut short story collection Cruel Works of Nature in 2018 and went on to release award-nominated, multi-adapted novella Dear Laura and a number of other books including White Pines, Girl on Fire, Six Rooms, and others before signing her first traditional publishing deal for her novel Full Immersion, published by Angry Robot books in 2022.
Her latest novel Itch! came out from Hodder & Stoughton in 2025. An anthology of ancestral horror stories called Roots of my Fears, edited by Gemma was also published by Titan in 2025.
Gemma is the co-creator, writer and voice actor for horror-comedy podcast Calling Darkness, starring Kate Siegel. Her stories have been adapted many times over by the NoSleep Podcast, Pseudopod, Shadows at the Door, Creepy, The Hidden Frequencies and more. She also appears in a number of print anthologies. A short film she co-wrote called Hidden Mother (2021) was well received at film festivals and she is currently working on her first feature length screenplay. Gemma illustrates her own works and also provides original, hand-painted artwork for book covers on commission. She narrates audiobooks too, including The Possession Of Natalie Glasgow by Hailey Piper, in 2020, Full Immersion in 2022 and ITCH! In 2025.
I’m looking for WLTM readers who love:
● Vile women
● Complex characters and unlikeable protagonists
● People doing horrid things to each other
● Monsters, murder, ghosts, ghouls, wyrd and weird happenings, sacred geometry, insects, folklore and feminist themes
● Beautiful settings and melancholy ambience
● Moss, weeds, trees, beaches, canyons, caves, castles, moors…
What to expect if we’re compatible:
I’m afraid I will probably hurt you, over and over again. But you’ll come back for more, every time.
FIRST DATE by Gemma Amor
In this gory thriller by Bram Stoker award nominee Gemma Amor, a couple of lonely misfits on their first date are kidnapped and held captive in the remote wilds of the Norfolk Broads… will they be able to escape?
Naive and particular, Amandine is no stranger to being alone since both her parents died in a terrible car accident years earlier. As a neurodiverse adult orphan living in the quiet rural backwaters of Norfolk, she battles loneliness and a raft of mental health complications. Determined to end her solace and find a partner, she embarks on a troubled dating journey that ends in disappointment time and time again.
Until she is introduced to the needy, vulnerable Connor, another lonely heart looking for a home. Connor plucks up the courage to ask Amandine on a dinner date, she accepts, and both their lives are changed irrevocably, for unbeknownst to them, a deranged killer is prowling the area.
His primary target? Happy couples.
At first, the date starts well: the restaurant location is romantic, the conversation meaningful, the food and wine excellent. Sparks fly over a candlelit dinner. But the night takes a sinister turn with their growing awareness of an unpleasant presence in the otherwise empty restaurant: Lone Diner, who acts in increasingly strange and hostile ways until he is evicted from the restaurant. The couple think that’s the end of it, but it turns out to be only the beginning. Lone Diner has a plan, and is forming a nasty habit: capturing and torturing those who are happier than him, and keeping grisly souvenirs.
The date ends, and the lovestruck pair find themselves stranded outside the restaurant in the middle of the freezing night with no way of getting home. As temperatures plummet, they resort to walking the dark countryside roads, only to meet car headlights. The driver is Lone Diner, and he offers them a ride: a ride that quickly turns to a battle for survival as his real intentions become horribly clear. When the car crashes, their fate is sealed.
The couple wake the next day to find themselves tied to an abandoned jetty out in the empty, reed-choked wetlands of the Norfolk broads. Alone, freezing and badly injured, they know they don’t have long before either the weather, or the violent man who kidnapped them, kills them both. Their only chance of survival lies in each other, but can they work as a team to escape before their time runs out?
And even if they do, will they ever be able to escape each other?
Thriller Psychological [ Watkins Publishing, On Sale: February 10, 2026, Paperback / e-Book, ISBN: 9781915523808 / eISBN: 9781915523815 ]
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About Gemma Amor
Gemma Amor is a Bram Stoker and British Fantasy Award-nominated horror author, editor, illustrator, and podcaster based in Bristol, UK. She was named one of Esquire’s Writers Shaping Horror’s Next Golden Age, and recently featured in Ellen Datlow’s prestigious Best Horror of the Year anthology, Vol. 15. Gemma loves to write about misunderstood monsters, both human and supernatural, as well as feminist horror. Itch! is her first novel with Hodder & Stoughton.
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