We chat with author Zachary Sergi about his haunting queer coming of age novel, This Pact Is Not Ours!
Hi, Zachary! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
Of course! I’m a queer author of Speculative & Interactive Fiction, including the print novels This Pact Is Not Ours, Major Detours and So You Wanna Be A Pop Star?, plus the digital Heroes Rise, Versus, and Fortune The Fated series. I grew up on the Lower East side of Manhattan and attended Regis High School, then studied Creative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. I’ve lived in Los Angeles for 13 years since graduating. My greatest loves (aside from my family, friends, and husband) are superheroes, real housewives, reality talent competitions, pop music, and spooky thrillers.
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
Really young—my parents always like to say I was the type of kid to ask to pack pens and paper for family vacations. Just like now, back then I was all over the genre and format map: I’d make up little turn-based RPG games with action figures to play with my brother, I’d write (and attempt/fail to draw) superhero comics, simulate my own seasons of Survivor with super-powered action figures, and I even remember trying to craft a Choose Your Own Adventure novel about a slasher when I fell in love with Goosebumps: You Choose The Scare, Buffy The Vampire Slayer and I Know What You Did Last Summer (which I was not allowed to watch, but VHS-taped when it aired on TV and snuck away to watch on my own—to terrifying results).
Quick lightning round! Tell us the first book you ever remember reading, the one that made you want to become an author, and one that you can’t stop thinking about!
The earliest reading I remember doing on my own was X-Men and Avengers comics, and I do remember falling in love with Goosebumps and Animorphs really early.
There are milestone books in terms of cementing who I am as an author. The Great Gatsby was the first literary book I remember actually falling in love with in early high school, followed by Less Than Zero. In college, The Handmaid’s Tale changed everything for me, my first big encounter marrying the literary with the speculative. Then it was a spellbinding trio of The Hunger Games, We Were Liars, and The Hazel Wood that inspired me to take the leap from digital interactive novels back into traditional print YA novels. I think I broke enough one-book rules there to cover the last question as well!
Your latest novel, This Pact Is Not Ours, is out October 3rd! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Summertime Splashiness & Spooky Season Scarring
What can readers expect?
Aside from the obvious description (core group of friends in turmoil, love triangle drama, inter-generational and inter-class dynamics, spooky monster thrills, psychological haunting chills), I’d say readers can expect a tightly-banked roller coaster ride? There’s a big twist/reveal that cracks the novel open right around page 100ish (of 300ish). Up until that point it’s like we’re steadily ramping up to a rickety peak, then from the big reveal it’s all speeding downhill into twists and turns and traumas. My editor Josh and I debated a lot whether to include the details of “the pact” in the description, but decided to leave that to readers to discover on their own.
Where did the inspiration for This Pact Is Not Ours come from?
I’ll always remember the moment the concept solidified: I was reading We Were Liars on my brother and sister-in-law’s couch and the concept for the pact and the setting just dropped into my head. My family has frequented a beloved summer place every year since I was a kid, Silver Bay up on Lake George in upstate New York, and setting a novel there felt so personal and rich. It’s kind of a like a family-camp, where the same interconnected families meet every August. When it came to the actual writing, nothing influenced the style more than The Hazel Wood.
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
I actually wrote This Pact Is Not Ours before the print novels that published before it, so the main character (Luca) is the first (and only) character I’ve ever written fully based on myself/my teen self. It was cathartic to look back at who I was and some things I dealt with, put a character based on myself in a terribly fraught supernatural trap, and also arm him with some of the benefit of my own hindsight over the years.
This Pact Is Not Ours delves into anxiety, mental health, and inherited trauma. How did you approach tackling these topics?
For better or worse, from complete reality. Panic disorder runs in my family and I’ve always been a hyper-anxious person, and all of that caught up with me in the form of crippling panic attacks when I was 27. I wrote the first draft of this novel around age 30, when I had begun to sort through how to manage the chronic attacks and why they were happening in the first place. So it felt important to process my relationship with anxiety through Luca and offer some representation, tips, and tools to the many, many people out there (young and older) who experience panic attacks these days.
As for the inherited trauma, that was more of a writing exploration process. The pact directly begs the question: can the next generation really do better, or is it inevitable to repeat mistakes/fall into the same traps as equally well-meaning parents? I don’t think there’s a clear answer to this question at all, even by the end of the book. But given the world we live in, it feels like an important one to grapple with.
You mentioned This Pact Is Not Ours is inspired by late 90s teen dramas. What are some of your favourites?
All my favorites are heavily represented here! I think the setting and drama is fully Dawson’s Creek, while the research-headquarters and monster-fighting is fully Buffy The Vampire Slayer. There’s also a touch of Gilmore Girls in the Stars-Hollow-like contained setting, which I tried to fill with fun side-characters as much as space allowed. Also, I Know What You Did Last Summer was a massive influence—a group of 4 drama-filled, separated-by-class friends dealing with life transitions and being haunted/hunted by a past mistake is all over this book.
What’s next for you?
We just announced my fourth (!!!) YA novel, back with Hachette’s Running Press Teens (who published my first two print novels). It’s tentatively titled Don’t Love The Player, Love The Game and is a YA rom-com adventure in which a group of queer gamers, who know each other from a mythology-inspired online video game, meet up IRL to compete in an augmented-reality tournament where sparks fly as the team’s two lead players try not to fall in love. It was sold as a proposal, so now I have to write the novel, which is due to publish early Summer 2025. This one will be my second non-interactive published novel after This Pact Is Not Ours, so I’m excited to get to tell a more straightforward story. And while almost all my work involves romances, this is my first swing at a more traditional queer rom-com. Fingers crossed it all goes well!
Lastly, do you have any book recommendations for our readers?
Always—though I’ll keep it on spooky season theme for now. Literally anything by Melissa Albert, but I was obsessed with her latest, Our Crooked Hearts. Jessica Goodman’s latest, The Legacies, speaks directly to my own Gossip Girl heart as a native New Yorker high schooler. Your Lonely Nights Are Over by Adam Sass is Scream meets Clueless, need I say more? And the last book to explode my structural brain (which is saying something, for an interactive author) was Jane Unlimited by Kristin Cashore.
