Emily Carpenter is a bestselling author of novels of suspense. Her previous novels include Burying the Honeysuckle Girls, The Weight of Lies (which received starred reviews by both Kirkus and Publishers Weekly), Every Single Secret, Until the Day I Die, and Reviving the Hawthorn Sisters, which Publishers Weekly called a “refreshingly modern gothic tale” and Kirkus called “an exciting, gothic-tinged quest.”  

Her next novel, GOTHICTOWN, about a couple and their young daughter who accept a too-good-to-be-true offer to start their lives over in an idyllic Southern town, only to find that there’s something very sinister going on, will be published by Kensington in March 2025.  

Q: GOTHICTOWN as a novel defies categorization in a way—the cover gives a distinct horror vibe, the story is grounded in suspense, and there’s a supernatural aspect too. How do you describe or categorize your book? 

Emily: I call it Gothic suspense. To me, Gothic is the element that kind of covers all three genres, including those ghostly supernatural elements, creeping dread, and atmospheric and terror-inducing horror elements. I’ve always been a big fan of gothic literature and movies, so I love being able to write in that space.

Q: The town of Juliana is almost a character unto itself. What did you turn to for inspiration when you were envisioning this very unusual town, in which nothing is really as it appears?

Emily: I thought a lot about the unnamed town in Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery as well as Twin Peaks, David Lynch’s show about a really strange town in the Pacific Northwest.

Q: Why was it important that the presence of Covid factored into the plot of your novel? 

Emily: I don’t really go into it much, but it did feel like a really natural place to start the book. I mean, that’s always been a thing city people have had, right? Chucking it all and moving to the country to run a bed-and-breakfast. But the pandemic escalated it—this global trauma that destroyed a lot of businesses and claimed lives and ultimately got people wanting to relocate and live totally different lifestyles. Also, of course, there was the rise of remote working, so all that factored into the set-up of Billie and Peter looking outside of New York for a new start.

Q: You’re a native Southerner (from Alabama, living in Georgia). How did your perspective from growing up in the South affect how you told this story? Why was it important to you to set this book in the South? 

Emily: Because I’m Southern, I set most of my books in the South, but truthfully the story could be set anywhere. I loved bringing in this angle of the town past of going through the Civil War and committing this one act, this atrocity, that sort of set their town’s future in motion. This is the backbone of the Southern Gothic genre—the South’s sins of the past and how they reckon with them. In traditional literature, this usually has to do with slavery and race, but in my book, it’s a different sort of sin, which is tangentially connected to those issues but different.

Q: You worked in a restaurant yourself during the pandemic, and Billie is a restauranteur. What real-life experiences did you draw on while crafting Billie’s work in the book? 

Emily: I’d originally thought Billie was going to be a bookstore owner. But after working at my friend’s café, which was my first experience working in the service industry, I thought it worked perfect to have Billie a restauranteur. I was a host, and it really opened my eyes to how incredibly hard people in the restaurant business work. Also how service can feel like a stage play—with the attendant adrenaline and performance aspect. It was interesting to observe how a really charismatic owner can be a sort of celebrity in a community, and that element played into Billie’s sense of loss after her place in New York closed. She misses that adrenaline rush of the day’s work and also the celebrity status she had and yearns for it.

Q: What kind of research did you do for the backstory of the mine and tragedy that had occurred in Juliana? Was there anything in real-life history that sparked the storyline, or was it completely imagined? 

Emily: The town where I live, Roswell, has this really interesting past. During the Civil War, it lay right in Sherman’s path, and when he arrived with his troops he found cotton and wool mills churning out rope and fabric that was being used by the Confederacy. He promptly declared the women and children working in the mills (while the men were off fighting) to be traitors, loaded them on trains bound for Kentucky and Ohio, and burned the mills. When the men returned after the war, their wives and children were gone. Some went to look for them, but most just started over.

Q: Congratulations on Gothictown being developed for a TV series. What can you tell us about the development deal, and the next steps? 

Emily: I can’t really divulge any details, but I do know our showrunner and executive producer Abby Ajayi is working on developing a script.

Q: Do you have a new book in the works, and can you tell us about it?

Emily: A SPELL FOR SAINTS AND SINNERS, coming out March 2026, is about a young psychic in Savannah who gets swept up in an intense friendship with the heiress of a mega-wealthy family who has lots of secrets and a past full of dirty deeds.