Victoria Dougherty is a purveyor of “the deep end.” As a co-founder of Speakeasy Editions, she crafts stories for readers who prefer their history served with a side of shadows and their magic rooted in bone-deep truths.

Her newest work, the Appalachian Moon Witch Chronicles—including Night of the Moon Witch and Night of the Mother—is a work of gothic horror, plunging readers into ancient, cursed soil where power is inherited, memory is dangerous, and the past is very much alive. Alongside it sit the morally fraught spy novels of her Cold War Chronicles and the reincarnated lives of her historical fantasy cycle A Thousand Lives. Whether following a Jesuit priest turned spy, a mountain witch reclaiming her power, or souls bound across centuries, Victoria writes at the intersection of history, horror, and reckoning—where every character carries the weight of a hidden inheritance.

An immigrant kid from the Chicago suburbs who grew up believing stories could reshape the world, Victoria’s writing has appeared in The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune. When she isn’t conjuring worlds that keep readers awake until dawn, she co-hosts the Speakeasy Editions podcast or dispatches Gothic Tales and Desert Revelations via her Substack. Victoria writes for the curious, the nostalgic, and those who understand that the most powerful magic happens when yesterday’s secrets meet tomorrow’s possibilities. Welcome to the party. The tea is cold, the whiskey is neat, and the secrets are all true.