Scotia Petkov

Scotia Petkov writes gothic romance about the beautiful, ruinous things people refuse to let go of.

Saint’s End began with a simple enough wish — to write a story and put it out into the world. What it turned into was something more personal: experience and pain, transferred into characters. Five books later it was a town, a family, and a curse. One love story per book, and one question running underneath all of them. What would you give up to feel something again?

The books are cold. The life behind them is not. She writes on the coast, in a house run by too many animals, most of whom have strong opinions about the working day. There is always coffee. There is always something being knocked off a table. The real plotting happens on the long walk along the river with the dogs, where the fog does what fog does and the next chapter usually turns up somewhere around the halfway point.

Her characters are borrowed. Never wholesale, and never by name — but the stubbornness, the loyalty, the particular way a person can love someone badly and mean well the entire time: all of that came from people she has known.

The curse came from closer still. The Harrows live on borrowed feeling: they take what they need, it never lasts, and they wake up needing it again. She did not invent that shape. Anyone who has watched addiction work from the outside, or lived through a stretch where feeling nothing was simply the most available option, already recognises it.

“The fog and the manor are invented. The hunger is not.”

Scotia Petkov is a pen name, and there is no author photograph. That is deliberate. The Harrows are the only faces she is willing to publish — and they are a good deal more honest than a photograph would be.

What she loves most is the building. The character who arrives fully formed and then refuses to behave. The detail dropped in Book One that turns out to matter in Book Four. The moment a town that existed only in scattered notes becomes somewhere you could walk through in the dark without needing the map. Watching it come together is the whole reward.

She is at work on Saint’s End.