The Welcome Wagon to Horror: Rachel Harrison on Time Loops, Bad Energy and Staying True to Your Art

Rachel Harrison has become one of horror’s most distinctive voices, with books that are as funny and heartfelt as they are unsettling. I spoke to her about Kiss Slay Replay, the myth of “making it”, and which of her fellow horror writers would be hiding in the cellar.

I’ll admit it: I was fangirling. Earlier this year I read Play Nice on a girls’ trip and ignored my friends for a full 24 hours while I devoured it. When Kiss Slay Replay came out, my family got the same treatment. So sitting down with Rachel Harrison felt like a bit of a pinch-me moment.

Rachel is warm, funny and refreshingly honest about the strange business of being an author. She describes publishing a book as a surreal experience. “You’re alone so much when you write,” she says. “Then the book comes out and you’re meeting all these people, and they’re bringing up Willa, or Archimedes the cat, and part of me goes, ‘How do you know that?’”

Her schedule adds to the strangeness. She is always promoting one book while writing the next, so she’s “always ahead and behind at the same time”. When readers ask about her debut, The Return, she sometimes feels it was written by someone else entirely. Back then she was an administrative assistant at a bank, living in Brooklyn. Since then there have been moves, friends’ weddings and babies, and the leap to writing full time. “New levels, new devils,” as she puts it.

The scared kid who found horror

For someone so at home in the genre, Rachel came to horror surprisingly late. “I was a very scared kid, and I’m a very anxious person,” she says. She had planned a career in film and TV. It was a horror contest run by her college screenwriting club that drew her into dark fiction and the supernatural.

What she found there was catharsis. “Otherwise I’m just writing about my issues,” she laughs, “which is less fun than dealing with them through monsters and time loops.”

That approach sits at the heart of how her books are born. Each starts with something real she’s wrestling with, paired with a supernatural way to explore it. Her vampire novel So Thirsty began with her staring at her reflection, picking at new wrinkles. “I thought: vampires don’t age. Vampires can’t even see their reflection. What would it be like to no longer see yourself?”

Kiss Slay Replay grew out of feeling stuck. Rachel wanted to explore how you break out of a cycle of depression or anxiety, and a horror time loop gave her the means. The challenge was keeping it from feeling repetitive on the page, so each reset brings a whole new killer. Having finished the first day convinced everyone was dead and the story had nowhere left to go, I can confirm it works.

Rachel wants her books to work on more than one level. “I want them to be fun and entertaining,” she says, “but I also want there to be a bit more substance for whoever needs it.”

Why horror, and why now?

These days Rachel reads almost nothing but horror. A book outside the genre has to be “really something” to hold her attention. Films are a different matter: she still describes herself as “a bit of a weenie”, because on screen she can’t control the imagery.

She’s currently championing Gus Moreno, whose debut This Thing Between Us is one of her all-time favourites. His second novel, If You Think You’re Lonely Now, is due in February 2027. Rachel loves his particular brand of vague, surreal dread: the sense that something is there, and it’s not good.

So why is horror having such a moment? Rachel believes the genre is more welcoming than most, though there’s still a way to go. It’s open to new voices, and freer to experiment and take risks. She also sees the appeal of escapism at a time when the world feels bleak, the same pull she thinks is driving the boom in romance and romantasy. “Things could always be worse,” she says. “Horror is a good place to go, ‘Yes, things are bad, but not that bad.’”

Ghosts, energy and holy water

Rachel does believe in ghosts, and she’s sensitive to energy. Most of the presences she’s felt have been positive, but some places simply feel wrong. She’s felt it in a castle basement, and more recently in an ordinary roadside hotel. “You can walk through a cemetery and the energy is perfectly fine,” she says, “then walk into a pharmacy and feel that something bad happened there once.”

That chimed with a conversation I’d had earlier in the week with two authors of a book of ghost tales. They’d asked a local pastor why churches rarely feel haunted. His answer was that keeping a church a happy, peaceful place is part of the job. Rachel was delighted. “They’re in there with the holy water and the incense, clearing it out. They’re doing what all of us should be doing!”

Art, not content

When I ask which authors she looks up to, Rachel names Paul Tremblay. She admires his work and his generosity: he has put her name forward for opportunities when he didn’t need to. Above all, she respects his commitment to his art. “Some very successful authors have one successful book and then keep doing the same thing again and again,” she says. “The line between art and content can get blurred.” His novel The Pallbearers Club, one of her favourite books, inspired the annotations in Play Nice.

That philosophy shows in her own work. If you took her name off the covers of Play Nice and Kiss Slay Replay, you might not guess they were by the same author. That’s deliberate. “I don’t want to recreate the same thing over and over to fill a niche or meet an expectation,” she says. “That isn’t what art is. You can’t predict what will resonate. You just have to stay true to yourself.”

Her current book tackles cynicism, and the hopelessness she sees whenever she goes online. She’s exploring what makes life worth living, and how to find hope and connection when everyone feels far away. It’s heavy material, but writing it has been cathartic, “almost like therapy”. She’s already promised herself something fluffier next, perhaps a romance.

There’s no finish line

The myth Rachel would most like to bust is the idea that you eventually “make it”. She remembers thinking that everything would fall into place once she had an agent, then once she had a book deal. “There’s no point where you feel settled,” she says. “Every author I’ve met is still hustling.” Writing full time has its benefits, but it is physically, emotionally and mentally demanding, and she admits that her boss, herself, is very difficult to work for.

Horror for everyone

Rachel would happily see her books shelved as general fiction. She writes for everybody and resists being boxed in by labels. Fantasy readers might enjoy Cackle, her most whimsical book. Romance readers could try Such Sharp Teeth or So Thirsty, which both have romantic subplots. The Return is her scariest, and she loves hearing from readers who started with Cackle and got a shock.

She sees herself as a gateway for anyone wary of the genre. Her gore is never gratuitous, and she prefers not to end on a bleak note. “I’d like to be the welcome wagon into horror,” she says. “Come on in, I’ll hand you a beverage and guide you into the haunted house.”

That’s exactly why Kiss Slay Replay is one of the picks for our new book club with a local wine shop. It sits between Victorian Psycho and Don’t Fear the Reaper in a line-up aimed at thriller fans curious to try something darker.

Welcome to the haunted house

The highlight of our conversation was building a haunted house of horror writers. It’s now officially a recurring segment.

Rachel greets you at the door, of course, with black pom-poms. Nat Cassidy leaps out from behind the grandfather clock in the foyer. Down in the cellar is Eric LaRocca. “He writes very bleak, dark, messed-up stuff,” Rachel says, “but he’s the loveliest person.” CJ Leede has turned the attic, or perhaps a haunted treehouse, into a cosy den with fairy lights and snacks. Stephen Graham Jones is in the shed out back with the chainsaw. And somewhere upstairs is a single rocking chair with Stephen King in it, slowly creaking back and forth.

King prompted a final flight of fancy. I’d once heard him mention an unpublished book he never wanted to revisit, a manuscript that seemed to scare even him. Rachel suspected a bit of mischief, and immediately decided she wants one too. Look out, one day, for the cursed Rachel Harrison manuscript.