[1][2] The son of a working-class parents, Joyce grew up in Keresley, a small mining village just outside Coventry, before moving to live in Leicester.

[4] Joyce names his grandmother as an early influence; a woman who spoke of seeing ghosts and whose strong personality inspires several of the women characters in his books.

[10] Joyce was a strong supporter of children's education and literacy, and in 2014 spearheaded a petition signed by more than 100,000 people to remove Michael Gove from office over his changes to the English literature GCSE syllabus, telling The Guardian: "Michael Gove climbs on tables and gleefully tears the wings from mockingbirds as his coterie of supporters looks on with immobilised grins, knowing there is no one around with the power or the will to stop him.

Bill Sheehan, who wrote the introduction for Partial Eclipse, states: Among the issues Graham dramatizes are the inevitability of grief, loss, growth, and change, the primal importance of family bonds, the beauty of the feminine, the life altering effects of parenthood, the nature of the creative unconscious, the overwhelming power of the erotic, the corrupting effects of power, the importance of self-awareness, and the fundamental need for order, meaning, and coherence in the face of a chaotic, inimical universe.

[18]American author, editor and literary critic Jeff VanderMeer said: Joyce's fiction has always displayed a certain generosity of spirit that lifts it above the ordinary.

This literary approach is influenced in part by Joyce's experiences with his own family: My grandmother was one of these old women who used to have dreams and visions and messages arriving.

[21]This particular quality has prompted some critics to classify Joyce as a magic realist in the vein of such Latin American writers as Gabriel García Márquez or Julio Cortázar.

Joyce disagrees with this, feeling that his lineage is tied more closely to writers of the English "weird tale" such as Arthur Machen or Algernon Blackwood.

Joyce co-wrote song lyrics for French songwriter and composer Emilie Simon on her albums The Big Machine (2009) and Franky Knight (2011).

"[27] Josh Lacey of The Guardian ranked him alongside Philip Pullman, Angela Carter, and Jonathan Carroll as part of a 'small group of fascinating writers... who pursue adult themes and ideas without shedding childhood fears and obsessions.

'[28] According to his official site and the Internet Database of Speculative Fiction, Graham Joyce published fourteen novels and twenty-six short stories.