We’re PM official!

I am SO EXCITED to share that my adult debut novel, EVEN YOUR BONES WOULD DO, will be published by Berkley (US) and Daphne Press (UK) in early 2027.

As a writer, I should have eloquent thoughts about this, but it’s mostly just a lot of screaming right now. Thank you thank you thank you to my editors, Gabbie Pachon and Davi Lancett, and my agent, Clara Foster, for taking a chance on a weird little gothic horror debut that I pitched, barely-titled, as “Bluebeard with Lesbian Ghosts.” I couldn’t be more excited for it to have found such a perfect home on either side of the Atlantic, and to get to share it with readers. This book is very personal to me, and I am so, so proud of it. I hope you love it as much as I do.

BONES is a Gothic horror Bluebeard retelling, deeply queer and deeply influenced by my own background in Gothic literature and fairytale scholarship. It is pointedly NOT a children’s book (sorry to everyone who sees my MPhil in Kidlit and assumes I write children’s books……….. not this one), but it is a response to the haunted house stories and folklore I was raised on. I’m talking Rebecca, The Haunting of Hill House, The Bloody Chamber, Jane Eyre, and more than a little bit of Robin McKinley’s Rose Daughter. I’ve left a lot of myself in the foundations of Thornwood House, and I hope readers find it as cathartic as I do.

If you’re asking “what’s it about?” and “Bluebeard with Lesbian Ghosts” isn’t enough for you, here’s a very rough synopsis:

April Harker lives a small life. A small life in a small Massachusetts town with small sums for the fairy stories she sells and small pleasures since her parents lost all their money in the 1929 crash. Until, one day, Julius Thackeray arrives. With his unsettling blue-black beard and his shiny, shiny shoes, Thackeray promises to marry April. To take her to his townhouse right outside Boston, make her stories famous, show her the world.  

But April should know from her fairy stories that the man on your doorstep promising the world is too good to be believed. Thackeray’s eyes are cold, his fingers bruising. The home is Thornwood House: a sprawling mansion in the middle of nowhere, with hallways that lead different places on different days and two silent-footed servants as her only company. The servants, her husband—and another presence. One who leaves lipstick-stained teacups in the library. Who can be seen only obliquely in the mirror. Who, on the day that Thackeray deposits a ring of keys in April’s hand as he sweeps off for a business trip, guides April to unlock the very chamber which hides the horrifying secret at the heart of Thornwood House. 

 The presence who, it turns out, is a woman, a previous wife: with soft hands and a pointed chin and bright eyes. Marie, who must help get April out, out, out, before she too is subsumed by the grim fairytale which traps all the wives of Thornwood House within.