About Laura
Laura Clarke Walker is the author of the Coldharbour series of novels.
A Millennial brought up in South East England, Laura comes from a mixed-heritage background and identifies as Queer.
Laura has been fascinated by ghost stories her entire life, which has influenced her writing immensely. She believes that some of the best fiction in horror and fantasy is that based in a reality we can recognise as our own, especially when psychology plays a vital part in the strangeness the characters and the reader experience.
She also appreciates a strong sense of setting, such as the Lot in ’Salem’s Lot, Shirley Jackson’s Hill House and Blackwood estate, and Manderley in Rebecca. This also extends to the other fiction which inspires her, such as Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock – in her opinion, the more claustrophobic and decayed the environment, the better.
When she’s not writing as Laura Clarke Walker, she works as an English language teacher and has previously been an advertising copywriter and content manager.
She can also be found brushing up on her Italian and German, drinking espressos strong enough to cause palpitations, and running very slowly around her neighbourhood.
Coldharbour
Enter the wicked world of Coldharbour, where the Wilde family investigate serial killers, exorcise demonic spirits, and make shaky alliances with vampires - all while pretending to be perfectly normal themselves in late Nineties/early Noughties Essex.
This speculative fiction series opens with Coldharbour: A Gothic Tale of Love and Death, due to be released January 2026:
A desolate Essex seaside town in October 1999.
While everyone else is worrying about the Millennium Bug, Alex Wilde is staring into a sea that she hasn’t seen for a month. She is home, finally, after a failed suicide attempt, and it’s time for her to resurrect her life: get a job, get somewhere to live that isn’t her uncle’s old haunted house, and get her teenage daughter back.
But Coldharbour is a town of shadows and Power, the hereditary magic running through the veins of the blessed (or cursed) few, including Alex. When she meets Elizabeth, the new owner of the run-down café on the promenade, Alex stumbles into a paranormal murder mystery that even the police can’t solve and starts to unravel the sinister family secrets that have stalked her since she was a child.
How haunted can one woman be?