C. J. Tudor

C. J. Tudor, born Caroline Tudor, is a British author of psychological horror and crime fiction. Raised in Nottingham after leaving school at sixteen, she worked a string of jobs, including copywriting and dog-walking, before her debut novel, The Chalk Man, was published in 2018 to wide attention and won the Barry Award for Best First Novel. Citing Stephen King as a key influence, Tudor followed it with a run of similarly atmospheric standalone novels, including The Hiding Place (2019), The Other People (2020), The Burning Girls (2021), The Drift (2023), and The Gathering (2024), along with the story collection A Sliver of Darkness (2022). The Burning Girls was adapted into a television series for Paramount+ in 2023. Tudor's novels typically combine small-town English settings with slow-building dread and a late structural twist, a formula that has made her one of the more consistently successful horror novelists to emerge in the UK since the 2010s.