Who Wrote The Summoning Series And Its Spin-Offs?

I got completely absorbed by the world Kelley Armstrong built around 'The Summoning', and I still tell people it’s a neat gateway into her other books. She’s the author of the YA trilogy that starts with 'The Summoning', followed by 'The Awakening' and 'The Reckoning'. Those three make up the 'Darkness Rising' arc, which is explicitly tied into her larger supernatural universe that many readers know from the 'Women of the Otherworld' novels.

Beyond the three YA books, Armstrong has threaded short pieces and tie-in material into that same universe over the years — little novellas and companion short stories that expand on minor characters or side events. More importantly, the adult 'Women of the Otherworld' series is what you can consider the mainline story world; the YA 'Darkness Rising' books are effectively a spin-off exploring younger protagonists and slightly different tones.

If you love urban fantasy with layered myth-building, that connective tissue between the YA trilogy and the adult series is super satisfying. I enjoy flipping between the gritty adult books and the more coming-of-age YA chapters because Armstrong keeps the supernatural rules consistent while shifting the emotional focus. It still feels like visiting a familiar town with new faces, and that cozy-but-wicked feeling is why I keep returning.

There’s a clear, practical answer: Kelley Armstrong wrote the trilogy that begins with 'The Summoning' and the related spin-offs live in the same fictional universe she created. The three YA volumes — 'The Summoning', 'The Awakening', and 'The Reckoning' — are packaged as the 'Darkness Rising' sequence and act as a youth-oriented branch of Armstrong’s long-running supernatural setting.

Around those core books you’ll find tie-in material, short stories, and novellas that expand the backdrop, but the cornerstone spin-off relationship is the one between 'Darkness Rising' and Armstrong’s adult 'Women of the Otherworld' series (the latter includes titles like 'Bitten' and several follow-ups). In practice that means characters or concepts sometimes cross over, themes echo, and the supernatural rules feel unified. If you want to read in a way that preserves reveals, consider starting with 'Women of the Otherworld' or just read the YA trilogy straight through — both approaches work fine depending on whether you prefer a mature or teen vantage point. Personally, I like switching between them to appreciate how the same world shifts tone with different protagonists.

I’ll keep this quick and casual: when people ask who wrote the summoning series, there are a few common things they might mean. For book readers, 'The Summoning' (published 2008) is by Kelley Armstrong and is the opening of her 'Darkness Rising' trilogy — a slice of YA supernatural fiction. That’s a clean, single-author trilogy with Armstrong’s voice all over it.

On the other hand, the phrase 'The Summoner' usually points to Taran Matharu’s YA/young-fantasy franchise. Matharu launched that world with a first novel often recognized as the entry point and later built out the setting with additional volumes and companion pieces that act like spin-offs, expanding character arcs and the lore of the world. Lastly, if you’re coming from gaming, the summoning-heavy 'Summon Night' games were developed by Flight-Plan and released under Banpresto, spawning various spin-offs across consoles. Each of these is worth checking out depending on whether you want YA paranormal, high-fantasy summoning, or tactical RPGs — I’ve enjoyed bits from all three, honestly.

Short and practical: if you mean the novel 'The Summoning', that’s written by Kelley Armstrong. If you actually meant the fantasy sequence people call 'The Summoner', look to Taran Matharu — he created that world and added companion works that function as spin-offs. And if your mind was on games rather than books, the summoning-centric ‘Summon Night’ series is a product of Flight-Plan (developer) and Banpresto (publisher) and it produced several spin-offs like the 'Swordcraft Story' titles. I’ve bounced between all of these over the years and it’s fascinating how the same concept gets handled so differently across media.

I get why this question can feel a bit fuzzy — the words 'summoning' and 'summoner' show up in lots of books and games. If you mean the YA novel 'The Summoning' that most people talk about, that one was written by Kelley Armstrong and it kicks off her 'Darkness Rising' trilogy. It’s a supernatural YA story with a haunted-house vibe and teenage psychic shenanigans; Armstrong later kept exploring similar supernatural beats across her wider bibliography, but 'The Summoning' itself is firmly her work.

If, instead, you were thinking of the fantasy YA series often called 'The Summoner' by readers, that’s the one by Taran Matharu. His franchise (which begins with the book published as 'The Novice' in some regions) grew into a multi-book arc and he also expanded the universe with companion material and shorter pieces that act like spin-offs and worldbuilding extras. So, depending on which title you’d actually seen on the spine, your author is likely Kelley Armstrong or Taran Matharu — two different flavors of summoning stories.

And for the gamers in the room: if your question is about the long-running tactical RPG franchise that’s all about calling creatures — the 'Summon Night' family — that was created by Flight-Plan and published by Banpresto, and it spawned a bunch of spin-offs like the 'Swordcraft Story' games and other handheld entries. I love how one simple word leads to such different worlds, and I always enjoy rediscovering which 'summoning' someone means when we dig into these series.

Yep — Kelley Armstrong is the writer behind 'The Summoning' trilogy and the broader spin-offs. The three books, 'The Summoning', 'The Awakening', and 'The Reckoning', form a YA arc often referred to as 'Darkness Rising', and they’re set in the same supernatural universe as Armstrong’s adult series, which people usually call 'Women of the Otherworld'. That shared setting is what makes the YA books feel like spin-offs: they explore fresh characters and younger perspectives while using the same rules and mythos. I like how Armstrong balances spooky mythology with teenage stakes; it makes the spin-off feel both familiar and new, which keeps me coming back for more.