We chat with author Racquel Marie about If We Survive This, which is a tense and emotional young adult horror novel about a teen girl leading a group of survivors on a perilous journey during the apocalypse—think The Walking Dead meets Yellowjackets!
Hi, Racquel! Welcome back! How has the past year been since we last spoke?
Hi! Lots of good and bad over the last year, but I’m excited to be back here to chat about my new book.
Your latest novel, If We Survive This, is out June 17th! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
If I could only describe If We Survive This in five words, they would be: gruesome, bittersweet, symbolic, loving, and reflective.
What can readers expect?
Well, this book is definitely more intense than my others when it comes to the stakes involved. If We Survive This follows Flora, a teenage girl with OCD and strong fears about death, as she tries to lead her brother and a few fellow survivors up California several months into a zombie apocalypse. So all of these characters’ interpersonal and internal conflicts are impacted by the impending threat of death around every corner. This book is thematically comparable to my other books—dealing with mental illness, queerness, found family, forgiveness, and growing up—but there are new layers to how I’m exploring everything because of the environment the characters are in and the lengths they have to go to in order to stay alive in it.
Where did the inspiration for If We Survive This come from?
In my late teens, I started playing this game in my head when I’d get especially tired on family hikes where I’d pretend we were in a zombie apocalypse, trying to find a safe place to hide out. Eventually, I realized that a book following a family prior to then during a zombie apocalypse on the exact same hike could be a great foundation for exploring how trauma effects different people and a family’s dynamic as a whole. As I worked on actually writing it, the concept shifted a bit to be more about the siblings and their journey to this hike, in the past and present, but that core element of juxtaposing characters before and after/during such a tramatic series of events stayed the same. Also, I just love zombies and wanted to give writing my own take on them a shot!
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
I really loved getting to dive into the complicated sibling relationship between my main character, Flora, and her older brother, Cain. My books tend to explore familial relationships primarily between my main characters and their parents, but this was the first time I made siblings the most significant relationship in the story, even above any friendships or romance. In the past, Flora is the more sensitive one who is viewed as “weaker” in many ways, especially when it comes to dealing with hard truths about the world because of her struggles with OCD and anxiety. But in the present, she’s adapted much better to the zombie apocalypse than her brother because she’s used to thinking everything is always trying to kill her and the people she loves. It was fun subverting protective sibling tropes by making the “less competent” younger sister the one keeping her older, “more grounded” brother safe, and exploring what that subversion would do to their relationship.
Did you face any challenges whilst writing? How did you overcome them?
This was probably the hardest of my books to write when it came to the revision process. Which genuinely shocked me! But my first round of revisions were like pulling teeth, where I struggled to get past the first 100 pages for several months. Part of this was the pressure of writing in a new genre and feeling an invisible audience creeping in every time I tried to make progress, convincing me that I shouldn’t have attempted something new. But another part was that this was the most plot-driven of any of my books, so moving scenes around was much more complicated than it had been in the past because any changes would totally impact the trajectory of the physical journey these characters were on. The thing that finally broke me out of this rut was telling myself I’d rather make the book worse than continue to do nothing to it, so I had to just start messing things up. And it worked!
This is your fourth novel! What are some of the key lessons you’ve learned since your debut in 2022?
The lesson I mentioned above is one of the biggest breakthroughs I’ve had in my writing. It’s scary to feel like you’re moving backward by deleting things or temporarily destroying continuity by shifting scenes around, but making a mess is sometimes the first step in organizing. Another lesson though is that even if I think meticulous outling isn’t for me, figuring out how to roughly outline an idea before I have written a single word of it is an important skill in this industry. If We Survive This was the first book of mine that I sold on proposal (only giving your publisher sample pages and a summary, not a whole book) where I truly had not written anything beyond the sample pages, but I doubt it’ll be my last. Another author (Aminah Mae Safi) was the one who gave me the advice years ago to treat outlines like a very brief zero draft of a book, and following that framing has served my pantsing brain very well.
What’s next for you?
There’s nothing I can officially talk about right now, but I’m looking forward to continuing to explore new angles in the horror/thriller space and hopefully breaking into even more genres with my work! I really just want to follow where my interests take me, which feels like a good, established place to be in my career and life.
Lastly, what books have you enjoyed reading this year? Are there any you’re looking forward to picking up?
I really enjoyed The Manor of Dreams by Christina Li (who happens to be one of my best friends) which is an adult gothic literary about generations of a Chinese family and their experiences in a Southern California manor with a dark history. It’s such a gorgeous and phenomenally atmospheric read, and was also Christina’s first book diving into the spookier space like If We Survive This was for me! For books I’m looking forward to, I cannot wait to get my hands on Andrew Joseph White’s adult debut, You Weren’t Meant To Be Human, which is a dystopian horror novel about a transman’s pregnancy while living in a hive run by worms and flies.
