Hi, Hailey! Welcome back! What have you been up to since we spoke last year for Teenage Girls Can Be Demons?

Thank you for having me back! I’ve been writing a new book and new stories primarily, but I also got to roam around a bit for Teenage Girls Can Be Demons and A Game in Yellow, meeting many wonderful readers along the way.

Your latest novel, This Movie Doesn’t End the Way We Want, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?

Haunting, tragic, mysterious, twisty, creepy

What can readers expect?

In 1994, three girls go to the movies and only one comes out. Thirty years later, the survivor learns the movie isn’t done with her yet. So readers can expect the weight of the past, a neo-noir style investigation, unsettling theater scenes of feeling like someone’s watching you instead of the movie, and answers that are worse than the characters can imagine.

Where did the inspiration for This Movie Doesn’t End the Way We Want come from?

I remember seeing the title of a Laird Barron story, “Ode to Joad the Toad,” and thought of an unsettling toad creature menacing a swamp village. While that story turned out to be a dark fantasy tale once I read it, my contemporary thoughts had morphed into a non-existent B-movie, Blood-Curse of the Toad Man, which I thought was a fun idea that on its own wouldn’t make a great story. But what if I kept it as a movie? Around then I was thinking how a lot of horror writing advice suggests mining your personal trauma, which is fine, but what about mining horror from joy? I love going to the movies, so why not use horror to ruin that a little? That ended up birthing my 2020 short story “Toad Man, Toad Man.”

Can you share some insight into the timeline from concept to publication?

A couple years after “Toad Man, Toad Man” was published in Monsters, Movies & Mayhem, I started thinking about what might happen after the end credits. In 2023, I pitched the novel version to Titan Books, and I began writing it immediately. I spent much of 2024 writing the majority of the book, which takes place in the last week of that year, so I had to make a lot of assumptions. Thankfully I was right that DC and Maryland, where the book takes place, were in for a wet start to winter with mild temperatures.

Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?

The whole book was an interesting time, but I very much enjoyed writing Roxie’s investigation and her conversations with her friend Barnaby. Probably my favorite parts are the theatre scenes and Roxie laying out her conclusions to Val.

Did you face any challenges whilst writing? How did you overcome them?

Probably the biggest challenge was unraveling the 1994 section. Originally it was longer, but my editor Daniel Carpenter suggested we split part of it into moments of reflection throughout the book. It wasn’t an easy task, but he was absolutely right, and the book works much better for it.

What’s the best and worst writing advice you’ve received?

The best writing advice I’ve received is to jot things down when they occur to you. John Langan phrased this on a podcast once as “a little messenger comes up an elevator to deliver something to your brain” (paraphrasing). If you keep turning the messenger away, eventually you’ll stop getting messages. You have to train your brain to be receptive to observations, ideas, characters, dialogue. The worst advice was probably one of those lists that go “10 things to never do when writing.” Every one of those is complete garbage and is usually something to do sparingly or is a pet peeve of whoever wrote the list.

What’s next for you?

After This Movie Doesn’t End the Way We Want, my next novel comes out from Saga Press, She Isn’t Herself Tonight, which releases on October 27^th. And I’ll have a new novel in 2027 as well, but we haven’t announced that yet. I’ll also have stories in upcoming anthologies like The New Golden Age of Horror, Where Devils Stand, and Views from the Overlook, which celebrates the 50^th anniversary of Stephen King’s The Shining.

Lastly, what books are you looking forward to picking up? Any you’ve read so far this year that you’ve enjoyed?

Right now I’m enjoying Johnny Compton’s collection Midnight Somewhere and the anthology Something Followed Us Home edited by Cynthia Pelayo, and I had an amazing time getting an early look at the upcoming Gwendolyn Kiste werewolf novel Everything Looks Better in Red. I’m looking forward to checking out Our Cut of Salt by Deena Helm and A Deadly Blooming by Daphne Fama.

Will you be picking up This Movie Doesn’t End the Way We Want? Tell us in the comments below!

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Hi, Hailey! Welcome back! How has the past year been since we last spoke?

Hi! It’s certainly been a busy one to say the least.

Teenage Girls Can Be Demons is a new collection featuring 13 stories written by you! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?

Unsettling, transformative, honest, defiant, angry

What can readers expect?

As you can probably guess by the above, there are several different kinds of stories. Some of them are the haunting kind that creep up behind you with the face of a stranger, or worse, with a face you know. Others are about loneliness, and some are about triumph. But they’re also a journey together, and the only way out is through.

Where did the inspiration for Teenage Girls Can Be Demons come from?

The title comes from a line in the collection’s final story, “Benny Rose the Cannibal King,” a few words that grew into a rallying concept. There’s a lot of pain leading up to, experiencing, and even after adolescence. Being young is already scary, and a horror story about it with monsters, human and otherwise, is a representation of that, not a new invention. Some people forget that because they don’t want to face what’s happened to them, or what they’re doing now. It always bewilders me that people watch slashers and are rooting for the killer. I want those teens to live and grow up, so I’m rooting for them. My editor Daniel Carpenter applied “coming-of-rage,” which perfectly describes the book.

Can you tell us a bit about the process of pulling together and writing 13 short stories?

I’ve written A LOT of coming-of-age horror in short stories. Putting together the collection meant cutting some favorites, and there’s honestly enough to do another volume if we want. But for this one, I wanted a range of experiences that reflected the varying nature of adolescence. Stories at school, stories at home, stories on the playground. Stories of kids without parents or without homes, or with parents and homes and peers who are themselves monstrous. Coming-of-age is a complex subject, with many varied acets to approach, and I wanted the collection to honor that.

Was there a particular story you enjoyed writing the most? One you had the most challenges with?

I remember enjoying writing “Hopscotch for Keeps” a lot. Once the hopscotch kid became a living character in my head, she kind of took over the story. As for challenges, probably “Magical Girls Child Crusader Squad” was the most challenging because it’s very much an episode in the life of these busy characters (like the movie Dredd) while they deal with all the outlandish circumstances constantly thrown at them. I’ll probably have to check in on them again someday.

Do you have any other coming-of-rage recommendations, be it books, movies or shows?

I’d highly recommend reading The Weight of Blood by Tiffany D. Jackson for being in the thick of that coming-of-rage, and likewise The Eyes Are the Best Part by Monika Kim. Mister Magic by Kiersten White for looking back on your coming-of-age and finding rage at it after the fact. In TV, there’s the criminally underwatched mini-series Ares on Netflix. Movie-wise, the recent film Cuckoo, and one of my all-time favorite movies, A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors.

What’s next for you?

Early next year, my dark fantasy noir novel No Gods for Drowning returns to print from Bad Hand Books, and then in September 2026, my next Titan Books novel This Movie Doesn’t End the Way We Want releases, about a 1990s incident where two girls disappeared during the viewing of a cursed film, and how the girl who survives investigates the film 30 years later to find the truth.

Lastly, what books have you enjoyed reading this year? Are there any you’re looking forward to picking up?

I think my favorite new reads this year have been Black Flame by Gretchen Felker-Martin, Spread Me by Sarah Gailey, and Devils Kill Devils by Johnny Compton. And I can’t wait to read Issues With Authority by Nadia Bulkin and Cyanide Constellations by Sara Tantlinger.

Will you be picking up Teenage Girls Can Be Demons? Tell us in the comments below!

The post Q&A: Hailey Piper, Author of ‘Teenage Girls Can Be Demons’ appeared first on The Nerd Daily.

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.

Will you be picking up All the Hearts You Eat? Tell us in the comments below!

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