This interview originally appeared in the September/October 2024 Horn Book Magazine as part of the Publishers’ Previews: Fall 2024, an advertising supplement that allows participating publishers a chance to each highlight a book from its current list. They choose the books; we ask the questions.

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Here Lies a Vengeful Bitch indeed, as the recently dead Annie tries to solve the mystery of her death and find answers to her many questions about her friends and enemies.

Photo: Luis Hernandez.

1. Was there a Chapel House in your childhood neighborhood?

There was an abandoned village in the woods near my hometown with a bunch of moldering old houses and a reputation for being haunted. Everyone thought it was creepy, but to me it sounded kind of cozy. I imagined the ghosts dancing and partying all night in their phantom town, probably to the tune of Saint-Saëns’s Danse macabre.

2. Are you an Annie?

In the sense that my mere existence seems to annoy the shit out of men, yes!

3. Plan to attend your own funeral?

Like Annie, I’d need a killer outfit, and I would be listening in on private conversations so I could decide who might need a Jacob Marley–style visit from me later on.

4. Scariest book you ever read?

Not a book, but a magazine: Weird NJ features my home state’s local legends, bizarre happenings, ghost stories, and folklore. It’s sold at gas stations, bookstores, and mall kiosks all over the state. As a kid, I loved scary stories and horror movies, but I had never read anything that took place where I lived. I’ll never forget the first issue of Weird NJ I read. There was an article about an embalmed torso found in a parking lot in a town nearby, and I was so terrified and intrigued that something like that could happen right around the corner from me!

I pored over every article, took it to school, and shared stories from it like I was ­proselytizing the good word of Weird NJ. It was cool to imagine that all this was ­happening around me. It made New Jersey feel like this eerie place full of abandoned mansions and discarded bodies, where every road has a ghost story and the urban legends have minds of their own.

5. Pretty tough title (and story!). What do you think Walt Disney would say?

I don’t know, maybe we can ask Walt’s cryogenically frozen head!

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