“Come night, with creatures fearsome
hidden and wary. I crave
claws at my flesh, teeth at my bones,
the warmth of fresh blood
spilled in the snow.”
-Poppi Multz, The Wild Woods
Poppi Multz is an author and poet, living in Portland, Oregon with her husband and three children. She writes creepy dark fantasy and speculative thrillers for the MG, YA, adult, and crossover crowd. She’s often inspired by literature, obscure folk songs, spooky fairy tales, and folklore.
Poppi was raised by her fisherman father and artist mother in a small coastal town in Southcentral Alaska with her five brothers and two sisters. Ecstatically, she left and went to the University of California, Santa Cruz where she received a Literature degree in Creative Writing with an emphasis in Poetry.
Poppi’s interests include riding her cargo bike, reading, stress baking, walking her 120 pound Bernese Mountain dog in the rain, and researching her next novel.
Poppi is represented by Rena Rossner at the Deborah Harris Agency.
My Projects
The Wild Woods
Young Adult Dark Fantasy-Currently on Submission
Seventeen-year-old Larkspur Blythe isn’t afraid of the dark, she prefers it. Night gives her the privacy to use her gift—the ability to hear memories in rock, glass, wood, and bone. After frequent mishaps at her past schools and too many relocations to count, Lark is desperate to make her new home work and resolves to keep her gift a secret. But the quiet lakeside house presents a mystery. The girl who lived there before vanished, leaving only a glass marble and memories of her past scattered in the woods.
The eerie forest around the house whispers to Lark, tempting her to use her powers. There are animal skull altars, a sinister spruce called The Devil’s Tree, and cold hands reaching from beneath the lake. And when a cloaked figure beckons her towards a lighted lantern, Lark suspects the missing girl’s disappearance wasn’t an accident. At school, she finds a mysterious invitation to a secret poetry group and discovers one of its masked attendees is alluding to killing the missing girl. Unable to ignore her growing malaise, Lark tries searching the lake for more clues, but she’s continually thwarted by a neighbor boy who warns her to stay out of his woods. Despite Rey’s rebuffs and his sly, foxlike nature, Lark is drawn to his otherness, something she knows well.
When Rey becomes a suspect in the missing girl’s murder, Lark’s life starts to unravel. The cloaked figure closes in, graffiti on the side of the school slashes her name, and the unknown poet threatens her life. Lark realizes she’s next, but she has no idea who she can trust. To find the missing girl and stop the evil forces in the forest, Lark must use her hidden gift—before she joins the other girls at the bottom of the lake.
Crime and Poetry
Adult Dark Romantic Fantasy-Currently Revising and Preparing for Submission
Plagued with dreams of death from a young age, twenty one-year-old Hester Fin has always purged her nightmares through her poetry. But when her ex-girlfriend dies at sea, in a manner far too close to her poem to be a coincidence, Hester fears she’s been killing the people on her remote island home for years.
Haunted by the shadows of her guilt, she vows never to write again, but to carve out a future for herself, she has to pass her college classes. Per her professor’s suggestion, Hester’s forced to pair with the insufferable Russian lit tutor—Lev. Slowly, she reveals her strange gift, and after mutual feelings bend their strictly professional relationship, she discovers painfully that Lev is not merely her uptight teaching assistant and the shadows following her have come to collect. When Hester dreams of a young woman’s murder, she suspects Lev has been killing girls on the island for years. To stop him, Hester will have to use her power for good, even if it means losing her freedom—and his love—forever.
Locks of Gold
Adult Dark Romantic Fantasy-Drafted and Revising
Since her parent’s tragic death, Mari has avoided going home. But when financial matters require her to sell the family property, she returns one last time. Despite her horrific childhood memories, she visits the woods to heal and finds herself lost, the old growth Alaskan forest returning her again and again to an abandoned cabin. Mari takes shelter there and finds food, firewood, and a mystery—despite obvious upkeep, the tools and books are from over a century ago. To her surprise, three brothers appear, believing she’s a midsummer bride, an offering from the nearby village.
Refusing to marry, Mari tries to escape, but the forest doesn’t release her and a terrifying woman in the woods taunts her, haunting her every step. So, she stays with the brothers to survive, secretly gathering supplies and hoping to flee through the mountain pass to the village on the other side. But as summer nears, Mari finds strange graves in the trees, and discovers the true nature of her betrothal—she must escape the forest before her wedding day—or become another victim to its sinister magic.
Hemlock Girls
Young Adult Speculative Thriller-Drafted
A faded Victorian with a hidden garden,
Mysterious twin sisters with two very different hearts,
And a curious neighbor boy, drawn to both girls.
But when a boy drops dead and another disappears, seventeen-year-old Hawth must discover the sisters’ secret before he’s next.
The Crow Children
Middle Grade Dark Fantasy-Drafted
This Middle Grade novel is written partly as a novel-in-verse and interspersed with Slavic folklore:
A band of logging orphans in a 1900’s seaside town
A boy in a rival gang with a strange sickness
A disguised girl working as a witch’s messenger
And a curse that could help her find her lost mother
Tillamara
Dark Fantasy Crossover-Drafted
A lost magical key
A goblin with a heart of precious stone
A woodsman with a penchant for baking
And a curse that unites them all…
Lure of the Tempest
Young Adult Dark Fantasy-Edited
Sixteen-year-old June is an asthmatic band geek who longs to leave her sleepy Alaskan fishing town. She bides her time working at her mother’s record store, but she is still fixated on her grandpa’s death. June has never believed his drowning was an accident, and over the years, she has only become more distrustful of the sea.
When a local fisherman’s body washes up after a storm, June becomes suspicious that history is repeating itself. She’ll do anything to find out more—even befriend the smug new boy her mom hired at the record store. June couldn’t care less that Dorian is the star of the swim team or easily the hottest guy at school, but he is from the hidden cove where her grandpa’s body was found. Extracting information from Dorian proves difficult; June is clueless when it comes to boys, and it doesn’t help that there’s a deadly rift between their families. She also could be falling for him.
As the town’s drownings continue—all eerily similar to her grandpa’s death—June is convinced his murderer is back. Her investigation changes course when June experiences the spellbinding effects of Dorian’s voice at the music concert. She concludes he’s not a human at all, but a devious creature capable of killing fishermen. June must risk the waves to uncover the truth about her grandpa—before she’s the next victim.