SWANSEA: The horror collection written after work, in bed, with a cup of tea

A Swansea author has published her debut in four separate editions since April, produced her own audiobook and built a readership from nothing. She will not tell you who she is.

She writes as A. Sjoberg. She is 25, holds down a full-time job, and got in touch with Swansea Bay News at the weekend on one condition: that anything we ran used the pen name and nothing else.

“I write under a pen name because I like my stories to speak for themselves,” she says. “It also gives me the freedom to explore subjects that are much darker than I am in everyday life.”

The book is This Isn’t Unusual, nine psychological horror stories running to 472 pages. It is out in paperback, hardback, Kindle and, since 23 July, on Audible, narrated by S.C. Lando.

There are no monsters in it and very little blood. The stories open somewhere entirely ordinary, then let something slip out of place, a message that arrives before it should have done, an account of events that quietly stops adding up.

She wants readers left unsettled rather than shocked. “If one of my stories leaves you staring at the wall for ten minutes afterwards, wondering what you would have done, then I’ve done exactly what I hoped to do,” she says.

First story online in December, audiobook by July

None of this existed 14 months ago. Her partner suggested writing as a creative outlet in the middle of last year, and she put her first story online on 12 December.

The Kindle edition landed on 8 April, the paperback two days after it, the hardback on 8 June. Every stage of it, the writing, the editing, the cover, the formatting, the marketing, she did herself.

“It isn’t just about a book,” she says. “It’s about proving independent publishing works.”

Written on the sofa with a cup of tea, after the day job

The work happens in the evenings, around the job she has not given up. “Most of my writing happens curled up on the sofa or in bed with a cup of tea,” she says. “Once I’ve found the ending, I work backwards, making sure every scene earns its place.”

Nothing starts with a plot. “I’ll see one scene so vividly that I have no choice but to build an entire story around it,” she says, describing ideas that arrive as a single image and refuse to leave.

The research is true crime. She says she can lose hours on documentaries about what drives people to commit terrible acts, and how ordinary people behave when they are pushed into impossible situations. “To me, that’s far more frightening than monsters.”

Her biggest influence is not another writer at all. It is the way series such as Monster and Trainwreck leave a viewer sitting with something uncomfortable long after the credits have finished.

Keeping the writer and the person apart

The anonymity is not modesty about the work. She says she wants the stories judged without readers making assumptions about the person who wrote them.

“My everyday life is very different from the worlds I create,” she says, “and keeping those two parts of my life separate allows me to write honestly.”

Away from the page she describes herself as a positive person, part of the Wiccan community, someone who looks for the good in people. The dark stays where she puts it.

270 bookmarks in Swansea’s independent shops

Plenty of the marketing has been done on foot. She says she has placed more than 270 bookmarks in independent businesses across the city, each one carrying a QR code that takes a reader straight to her fiction.

The rest has been Instagram, TikTok and a Substack that now has paying subscribers. The reviews are a modest run of five stars on Amazon and Audible, one of them from a reader in Canada who finished the collection in two days.

She is not the only local name working in dark fiction. Swansea novelist Rebecca F John, shortlisted for a Costa award, found the inspiration for one of her books in a soldier’s Great War journal.

Ferryside crime writer John Nicholl has built a whole series around Carmarthenshire settings. Earlier this year a Kidwelly author published a surreal novel rooted in west Wales.

A first full-length novel is now underway. “It’s my biggest project so far,” she says, “and although I can’t reveal too much just yet, it’s taking everything I’ve learned from This Isn’t Unusual and pushing it even further.”

Her advice to anyone still thinking about it runs to two sentences. “I want people to realise you don’t need permission to become an author,” she says. “You just need the courage to begin.”