let’s do the broad strokes first!!!!
i have a new book coming out in june 2025
it is called KILL CREATURES
it is about a girl called nan, whose three best friends disappeared a year ago. when one of them shows up, miraculously alive, nan can’t believe it. she was sure they were dead—after all, she’s the one who killed them.
preorder links aren’t up yet but you can add it on goodreads (or storygraph or to the list you keep in your notes app etc etc etc)
here are the Official Announcement Screenshots I Took
and the UK one (v fancy) (international screenshot)
i am so so excited about this book okay!!!! like look i love all the stuff i have published and i know this sounds vaguely lucille bluth
but i always want whatever i’ve published most recently to be the book i love most — i think that’s a good sign for things like Growth and Artistic Evolution and blah blah blah — and right now? right now KILL CREATURES is my favorite child. sorry everyone.
part of my enthusiasm comes, i think, from how long it’s been since i’ve put a book out. i mean all things considered, it hasn’t really been that long. by the time KILL CREATURES comes out, it will only have been about 2 years between it and IN AN ORCHARD GROWN FROM ASH, my most recent. in an industry where things move at a glacial (but also… somehow breakneck? sometimes?) pace two years is nothinggggg. but it FEELS like longer okay!!! because while yes it will have only been 2 years since a rory power book (lmao) came out, it will have been five since i last published YA. FIVE!!!! and not five regular years okay like five BIG fuckin years!!! the world has changed a lot!
i have also changed a lot! since 2020 i’ve thought a lot about the kind of work i want to make and the ways in which i want to grow and challenge myself, and this new book really feels like a reflection of that. KILL CREATURES is a thriller, and it’s twisty and horror-influenced, like my other YA, but unlike those books this one is not speculative — no sci fi, no fantasy. for me it was a new kind of puzzle to solve and i had the best fuckin time doing it.1
some of the ingredients that went into KILL CREATURES
spencer hastings from pretty little liars (just the tv show though) (i cannot speak to book spencer as i have never read the books) (this is a crime, i know, but i like how pristinely bonkers the version of PLL i have in my head is)
amy dunne from gone girl (i originally typed gonne girl)
the pied piper
alice in wonderland but it’s not IN the book so much as it is generally present in the way that you smell someone’s perfume as they walk past
picnic at hanging rock
this needs sub bullet points
i haven’t seen the peter weir movie in its totality but i’ve stared at a lot of screencaps and my mom talked about it a LOT when i was growing up.
i HAVE seen the natalie dormer tv show. i don’t want to talk about it.
this one line in david brower’s foreword to eliot porter’s book the place no one knew, which reads: “Glen Canyon died in 1963, and I was partly responsible for its needless death. So were you.”
this photograph by neil krug, which i’m pretty sure i first found by googling “canyon cool weird”
i will leave it there for today! now that the book is announced, i’ll be talking more often about it on my instagram, answering questions and sharing updates! and though it isn’t quite time yet, i can’t wait for you to see the cover! it is SICKKKKK
if there’s anything you’re particularly eager to hear about re: KILL CREATURES, you can always let me know, whether that’s here, on insta, or via my contact form on my website.
more soon! i hope you are all safe and well!
i will absolutely write another spec thriller like we are not Done with those but i think even if you read “it’s not speculative” and went “aw man” you will still like KILL CREATURES like it has that vibe u feel me