Melanie Cossey grew up in the burgeoning suburban neighborhoods of North Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, where old-world history often collided with urban sprawl. If she wasn’t climbing through abandoned houses, she was sneaking onto construction sites, imagining what came before or what was yet to come.
These childhood experiences left her with a great appreciation for the quiet plaintiveness that often lurks between the passing of the old and the formation of the new, where unfinished, discarded lives surrender to the demands of modernism. This appreciation forms the basis of her passion for weaving haunting Gothic tales of pathos and woe.
During her formative years, Melanie’s parents exposed her to a wide and constant array of art, literature, theater, and music, while her best friend’s parents exposed her to the twisted world of Eerie magazines, the Trilogy of Terror anthology and early Stephen King movies. This clash of culture resulted in Melanie’s love of writing lyrical, literary prose that explores a world laced with horror, tragedy, and human frailties.
Melanie puts little stock in the happy ending, instead favoring the lessons that an untidy and often ironic conclusion can teach us about the intangible, illusive, impermanent nature of life. Sometimes the most poignant element of the human story is there is no resolution, we must go on without answers, or the answers are not the ones we expect and we must find a way to accept unanticipated outcomes.
Melanie has enjoyed a twenty-year freelance writing career crafting non-fiction articles for the web and magazines, but in recent years has changed her focus to creating poetry, short fiction and novels. Melanie’s Gothic fiction The Nymphalidae won Honorable Mention in the Storm Crow Tavern’s 2015 Tales from Beermat Micro Fiction Contest and her short story, The Choice Between Fire and Ice was shortlisted in the 2016 Surrey International Writer’s Conference’s Short Fiction Contest.
Melanie is currently completing her second novel, Equanimity – Asylum for Women, a Female Gothic tale that exposes the Victorian practice of institutionalizing women who were conscious of their sexuality. She is also working on a flash fiction collection dealing with the transitory nature of life.
Whenever she is not writing, she can be found painting commissioned pet portraits, teaching art or refereeing gloves-off scrimmages between her boxer dog, Keira and cat, Ozymandias—all in good fun, of course!
Regal House’s imprint Fitzroy Books is proud to be publishing Melanie’s novel A Peculiar Curiosity in 2018.
