We chat with author Hailey Piper about All the Hearts You Eat, which is a visceral and heartbreaking work of gothic horror about small town mysteries, local folklore and the things we leave behind when we’re gone.
Hi, Hailey! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
Hi, I’m Hailey Piper! I love horror and writing it, and my work tends to involve weirdness, queerness, empathy, and the cosmic. All the Hearts You Eat will be my fourteenth published book.
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
When I was little. At first I was kind of didctating stories to adults since they could write faster (and more legibly) than I could, but in time I had to start doing it myself. Most of those didn’t have endings; I would keep jumping to new things, but that changed as I began to take it more seriously as something I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
Quick lightning round! Tell us:
- The first book you ever remember reading: The Boxcar Children by Gertrude Chandler Warner
- The one that made you want to become an author: It by Stephen King
- The one that you can’t stop thinking about: That describes a lot of books, by at the moment Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
Your latest novel, All the Hearts You Eat, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Moody, tragic, sexy, gory, queer
What can readers expect?
A mystery surrounding the teenage girl who’s found dead on the shores of a tourist town, her friends trying to understand why her spirit seems restless, and the woman who found the girl’s death poem and wants to know what happened to her, only to find something else that’s far more terrible lurking within the town’s shadowy past.
Where did the inspiration for All the Hearts You Eat come from?
Different places. I feel each artist is working with a garden of experience inside themselves, and so if something has taken root in you, it becomes harder to detect its origin. This book kind of grew from the inside out, where I had ideas for scenes I wanted to do in the middle or late in, and the rest of it slowly spread forward and backward from those moments. I set out to write a kind of horror romance with vampires, but the book decided to dredge up a lot of my own trauma and experience, and it morphed into a very different beast, much like some of what happens in the story. So I suppose part of an answer is, a rough adolescence.
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
On some level, all of them. I tend to be kind of hedonistic with my writing, so I want to write things I’ll enjoy. I think the diary entries in the book were the toughest because of how much they demanded of me emotionally. I enjoyed the scene of Xi, Rex, and Marla discussing which bits of vampire media they should trust or not, and the séance scene, and Ivory’s discovery of the secret mountain, and the moment the vampire Honey reveals more of her true self. It’s a big book with a lot going on, and I tried to fill it with moments I wanted to explore from start to end.
With it being the spooky season, what are three go-to films to watch?
I’m a horror gal, so it’s kind of all year round with the horror movies. That said, The VVitch feels seasonal, and It Follows feels like a fall movie to me even though it intentionally doesn’t have a season or time period, and of course there’s Halloween, which I’ve been watching since I was little and feels like a comfy sweater at this point.
What’s next for you?
I had four books out in 2024, with All the Hearts You Eat being the last. That was a lot, so I’m glad next year is scaling back a little. A Game in Yellow, my erotic cosmic horror novel that’s Euphoria meets The King in Yellow, will release from Simon & Schuster in summer 2025, and then I have a new book from Titan coming in autumn, but I can’t say anything about that until it’s announced. Sorry!
Lastly, what books have you enjoyed so far this year and are there any that you can’t wait to get your hands on?
I’ve had a fantastic reading year so far. Incidents Aroung the House by Josh Malerman is certainly the scariest. I also really dug Donyae Coles’s dreamlike debut Midnight Rooms, and Nadia Bulkin’s novella Red Skies in the Morning is inventive and heartbreaking. The Reformatory is a marvel; Tananarive Due outdid herself there. I really loved Countess by Suzan Palumbo, which dresses like a space opera but has a horror nature in its heart. Oh, and Sofia Ajram’s Coup de Grace; that one is a nightmare. And Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin is a saga in itself. I also just read Pet Sematary for the first time and loved it so much more than the movie. There’s a ton good stuff out there, old and new, too much to ever run out of amazing books to read.
