A lot of us question our sanity at some point in life. I had a moment just like that in my twenties, and it didn’t involve a ghost, a full moon, or a single thing I write about for a living. It involved my car, quietly leaving the driveway every weekend without me, and just […]
I came to a scene in Ravens Cove and went completely blank. I knew the church had burned. I knew a mob had gathered outside it, the same people from the town’s other congregation, whipped up by a man who wanted Paul Lucas gone. What I did not know was how any of them, Paul, […]
From Alaska blizzards to Texas heat, discover how extreme weather became a lesson in humility, faith, resilience, and finding beauty in every season.
A heartfelt reflection on introversion, family, faith, and why writers often find their deepest peace in the quiet worlds they create.
I was standing in the grocery store, list in hand, doing the same weekly shopping I’d done a hundred times before. And I was in despair. My son was going into fourth grade, and he wanted, more than almost anything, to attend a Christian school instead of the public one down the road. My husband […]
In Ingress, a boy named James Clarke wanders somewhere his grandfather forbade him to go, chasing nothing more than a game of hide and seek. What he finds is a village with an old, spired house his people call the Forgotten Place, and a voice that tells him he is not yet a man, and so […]
Every house makes noise. The settling of wood, the tick of a cooling wall, the hum of a refrigerator in another room. We learn the language of our own four walls so well that we stop hearing it. But there was a season in my life when my house began to speak in a way […]
There is no profanity in my books. Readers notice, and now and then someone asks me about it, usually with a little surprise in their voice, because my stories are not gentle. They are supernatural thrillers. There is real fear in them. So how do you carry a character through terror and fury and grief […]
People ask me why I write about darkness. They expect a complicated answer. The truth is simpler than they want it to be. I spent more than forty years in Alaska, and Alaska teaches you that the dark and the light are both dramatic, and that neither one is ever very far from the other. […]
Have you ever watched a dog stop cold in a doorway — perfectly still, staring at something you cannot see — and felt the hair rise on the back of your own neck? You weren’t imagining it. And neither was the dog. I’ve spent years writing about the supernatural, and one of the truths I […]
Mary Ann Poll, America’s Lady of Supernatural Thrillers, is the award-winning author of the Ravens Cove series. Born in Texas and shaped by its wide skies and stubborn spirit, Mary Ann called Alaska home for over forty years — and though her boots are back on Texas soil, her heart never left the Last Frontier. That love for both lands breathes through every page — from the sun-baked spirit of Texas to the eerie perpetual light of the Alaskan solstice and the rich traditions of Alaska’s Indigenous peoples.
Her love for a spine-tingling story and her love for Christ come together in her writing. Mary Ann’s own spiritual journey — from a lifelong fascination with the supernatural to a deep and abiding faith — gives her novels their distinctive voice: suspenseful, grounded in real spiritual stakes, and rooted in hope.
When she’s not writing, Mary Ann enjoys gardening, swimming, and time with her beloved family and pets — who have a habit of finding their way into her stories.