Catherine’s Influences

Catherine McConnell writes from the borderlands where dream and dread entwine. Drawing from the spectral precision of Edgar Allan Poe, the psychological gravity of Stephen King, and the sensual, immortal ache of Anne Rice, her work lingers in that twilight between intellect and instinct, elegance and grit.

A direct descendant of the Bach musical lineage, McConnell’s ear for rhythm runs through every sentence—each phrase scored like a nocturne, each pause deliberate as a heartbeat. Her tastes are vast and contradictory: gothic rock for its cathedral-dark defiance, delta blues for its haunted humanity, country for its grit and truth, and classical for its order and sorrow.

What she craves, and often achieves, is balance—between beauty and horror, chaos and composition, longing and restraint. Her stories are not written; they are composed, like requiems for the living.