Interview with Good Girls Don't Die Author Christina Henry

At New York Comic Con, Candace spoke to author Christina Henry about her latest book Good Girls Don’t Die.

Good Girls Don’t Die Summary: Celia wakes up in a house that’s supposed to be hers. There’s a little girl who claims to be her daughter and a man who claims to be her husband, but Celia knows this family—and this life—is not hers…

Allie is supposed to be on a fun weekend trip—but then her friend’s boyfriend unexpectedly invites the group to a remote cabin in the woods. No one else believes Allie, but she is sure that something about this trip is very, very wrong…

Maggie just wants to be home with her daughter, but she’s in a dangerous situation, and she doesn’t know who put her there or why. She’ll have to fight with everything she has to survive…

Three women. Three stories. Only one way out. This captivating novel will keep readers guessing until the very end.

Candace: You mentioned your inspiration for this book came from in the middle of the dark part of COVID.  

Christina:  I was reading these comfort books that kind of made me think I wanted to write something comforting, but I am incapable of writing comforting things

Candace: There are three different stories in this book; how did you weave three separate women's stories together?

Christina: So that was the interesting thing about the book, is each section has its own distinct tone, and then they all have to come together in the end.

I wrote them out of order. As I wrote Celia's story first, she's the first section of the book, and then I wrote Maggie's, which is actually the third section. And then I went back and wrote Allie's, which is in the middle. And the trick was that there is an overarching thing that unfolds in the book, and the trick was to lay in more clues in each section.’

You'd think it'd be harder to write Ali's section when I'd already written the third section, but it was actually easier in a way because I kind of knew how much I could reveal in that section, having written the third section already.

Candace: The twist got me; what goes into making a good twist?

Christina: If you don't see it coming, that's a good twist. I didn't have a super clear idea myself at first of where it was gonna go because I started off with this impulse I was gonna write a cozy mystery. Wait, no, I'm not. When I write, I just write, and I just let things happen as they go.

You would think there was a lot of plotting involved in this book, but there wasn't. It was like my usual I say I'm a half-assed writer. This is a very half-assed book.  

Candace: It doesn’t read that way.

Christina: Yeah, it somehow all seems to work out, which is great.

Candace: I can't believe you're saying this. I thought you had like a corkboard.

Christina: Like a serial killer with the yarn and the clues and the thing? No. 

Candace: You meld a lot of genres together, especially this book. Do you find defining genres confiding?

Christina: Yes, because I read across genres, and I understand that from a publishing point of view. I know that I have given the sales department fits in the past because they're not really sure how to categorize what I'm writing, and certainly, this book was a challenge for everybody to figure out how to market. Basically, because it's a little bit of a bunch of things, but I think that what's interesting is just to write the book that interests you, and if it’s more than one thing, that's okay.

A lot of times, the reason why books get confined to genre is because of sales. Where do we put it in the bookstore, how do we sell it, and find the right readers? It has less to do with the writer and more to do with business considerations, which, of course, as a writer, you want your book to sell, you want your book to find its audience, but I don't like to feel limited.

I want to write what I want to write, and hopefully, it'll find its people.

Candace: You said originally it was going to be cozy and then mystery, and then it just went everywhere. 

Christina: Then it becomes a bunch of things.

Candace: You took these familiar tropes, like Deadly Game (Hunger Games) and Final Girl. Why did you want to turn these tropes on their head?

Christina: One of the things that was fun about writing this book is there are these ongoing conversations at the beginning of each chapter where people who are fans of the genre are sort of breaking things down.

And I think it was less about flipping them on their head than more like building in a certain expectation for each chapter and acknowledging that those expectations exist, and that one of the reasons why people go to “cozys” is because there is a formula, because things happen a certain way, and they like that.

I read cozies, when I read a cozy, I know what to expect, and I know roughly how it's going to end. I know roughly how the clues are gonna unfold, all those things. When you watch a lot of horror, it's the same thing, but I've always loved not only the horror that fulfills the tropes, because I do love slasher movies, but I love kind of meta horror.

I love horror that seems aware of what it's doing things like Scream and Get Out, because I think after a certain point, you kind of have to acknowledge that we've all seen movies, we've all read books, we know how these things are supposed to work, and if you were in that situation, surely you would have some cultural understanding of how the circumstances would play out.

So I think it's almost unrealistic at this point to say, someone will be dropped into a situation and not know at least how to deal with it in like a pop culture sense.

Candace: Why do you think the Final Girl trope is so popular?

Christina: Obviously it started off as,  you know, uh, Jamie Kennedy's character Randy in Scream gives a whole speech about this, about the horror movie tropes, and how Jamie Lee Curtis was the virgin. She was the one who didn’t commit any sins, so she didn’t die.

You do see this play out. There always seems to be one character in a group of friends, who's like by herself.There'll be like two couples and then there'll be like one woman who's by herself. There's a few that sort of defy this, Evil Dead as an example because Ash is the one who lives and all the women get possessed and the men get mutilated. It started off kind of culturally,  maybe subconsciously, this girl is a kind of Madonna figure, where she stands alone, she stands outside of the terrible things that are happening, she's pure, and therefore she can overcome evil.

I think as time goes on, especially when you get to the Scream era, where Sidney is not some perfect girl, and yet she sort of overcomes over and over and it's more I think a sense of respect for the strength that women have. I think women, just in a general sense, have to endure more, and because of that, a lot of women have reserves of strength that they aren't even aware of.

And I think that this is a theme that's probably played out in all of my books in one way or another. Because I think there's all different kinds of strength. And I don't think it's just the kind of strength that ou have the strength to punch somebody. I think it's like the strength to put up with things.

Candace: Is there anything you want your readers to know about your new book?

Christina:  I think if you trust me, hopefully, you'll feel rewarded at the end. But I hope that you don't know where it's going.

Good Girls Don’t Die comes out November 14.