She overcomes all the monsters in the story, she has that agency, where she takes hold of her own power in order to defeat all the bad guys. The really interesting thing about the horror genre is that so many times, it’s told from the girl’s perspective-usually a young girl, and in the end, she survives. I know that I watched The Exorcist and The Omen long before I probably should have, but here I am now with a book about scary movies, so it couldn’t have been that bad. And I guess we developed a horror movie obsession. We probably just went picking movies that had kids on the boxes. My sister and I used to go to the video store when we were kids in Brooklyn, and we would go straight for the horror section.

But it definitely started when I was a kid. What inspired that love, and when did it start? It’s clear that you have a deep and abiding love of horror and its tropes. I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if I set this in modern times, with New York City teenagers trying to come up with a scary story? But I figured, I can’t make them writers, because writers aren’t that interesting, so if I can make their horror come alive outside of the page, if they can try to enact these horror stories, that would be really cool.

They were trying to one-up each other, to come up with the best horror idea, and she basically won by coming up with Frankenstein in one night. She went to a summer getaway in a villa in Switzerland and she met up with all these contemporaries of her time, really fancy writer-types. There was a video being played on a loop, and it was the story of how Mary Shelley came up with Frankenstein, which I had never heard. And there was this room off to the side-a cute little windowless lecture room. Even though he was there, setting everything up, I’m so anti-social that I didn’t want to just hang out and say hi, so I ducked out and decided to explore the basement level of the library. I got there early, and it hadn’t started yet. That’s the way my mind works-to me, that will always make the story more interesting.ĭo you remember when and how the idea for this book came to you? What inspired the premise?ĭo you know the New York City Teen Author Festival that David Levithan throws? I had just gotten to know him when I went to the one in the main library on 42nd Street. Generally, even when I am doing a comedy, I try to see if I can put a dead body in there. I like comedies, I like dramas, I like horror and thrillers and everything, and I just try to get it all down. I want nothing more than to just go down a straight path and find a dedicated readership who knows what to expect from me, but for some reason, my ideas are all over the place. What made you decide to try your hand at horror? Your first two books, Kill the Boy Band and No Good Deed, are dark comedies.

The mary shelley club goldy moldavsky