Make A Home Of Me
Vanessa Santos
12 JUNE 2025 | DEAD INK BOOKS | PAPERBACK ORIGINAL | £10.99
“Chilling, haunting and unflinching, Vanessa Santos is an astonishing writer and I’m utterly obsessed with this collection of unsettling short stories” - Lucy Rose, Sunday Times bestselling author of The Lamb
“A beautiful and skillful excavation of the haunted harbor that is home” - Heather Parry, critically acclaimed author of Carrion Crow
A mysterious dinner party with a sickening twist. A woman’s intense new relationship with a single father and his strange young daughter. A family driven to despair by the impossible appearance of nonsensical notes. A wife finds herself fading out of existence during a holiday trip with her husband to a seaside town.
From houses that should provide protection but instead turn on their inhabitants, to places of safety invaded without warning, and familiar landscapes that gradually change beyond recognition, Make a Home of Me is about all the ways in which our sanctuaries can turn into foreign places, casting us as strangers as we roam the halls.
Unsettling, distinct and often strangely poignant, Make a Home of Me is an outstanding story collection, about all the ways a person may try to save themselves, or come undone. Infused with dread, peril and what it means to be human, it introduces Vanessa Santos as an exciting new voice in the horror landscape.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Vanessa Santos was born and raised on a tiny island in the middle of the Atlantic. She now lives in Scotland (though still by the sea) and spends as much of her time as possible devouring stories, writing stories, and wandering the endless Scottish woods. Her short fiction has been published online at Samjoko Magazine and Idle Ink, and in anthologies by Sliced Up Press, Colp, and Solar Press. Make a Home of Me is her first book.
Vanessa’s first full length novel In Your Heart a Devil, to be published in 2026, is a gothic tale of love and alienation, inspired by local Scottish folklore. Reminiscent of Rebecca meets Death in Her Hands set in Bluebeard’s castle, In Your Heart a Devil is full of loneliness, longing, and the sharp bite of evil.