You Are Fatally Invited

by Ande Pliego

And why is The Haunting of Hill House still regarded as one of the greatest stories of all time?

oh because of Mike Flanagan

Writing is a kind of beautiful madness. It is slitting yourself open, bleeding your soul onto the page in that paradoxical mask of vulnerability perhaps only a writer can achieve. And writing fear requires the greatest vulnerability of all: a willingness to face your demons, and set them free.

“How the devil would you plebeians workshop a J. R. Alastor book?

plebeins wow okay what a guy

After so many years, you were mine.

me??

Creating written worlds ex nihilo—from nothing—is the closest we get to the divine. Perhaps, in writing, we are divine. But I wonder: what if the page wasn’t the only place we could control fate?

“Justice, best served cold.”

right thats the phrase

Did you include any common tropes, or do you disdain them all?”

I think you've got quite the ego if you are a mystery author who thinks they have no tropes

“Sometimes the art of fiction isn’t in how intellectual it is, but how well it makes you actually forget the world around you. Sometimes, binge reading to escape reality can save a person’s life.”

books can be good and not literary fiction

and wanting with a capital W

you can capitalize it too you know

My whole life, I’d craved this—dissecting story, talking about characters and prologues and voice.

girl just go to writing events

They took a life. In some cases physically, in others, symbolically, and as a result forfeited their own. It is justice. Just not the pretty kind.

“Sometimes wounds become scars, not because they’ve healed, but because they’re hiding what’s underneath from ourselves.”

when this book tries to come up with writing that sounds good it is always just a bit corny it reminds me of tiktoks where people will be like "share the last line of you novel" or whatever and they're just giving Fake Deep

If you hadn’t stolen my book, I wouldn’t have agreed to Alastor’s proposition. Neither of us would be here. You wouldn’t be stuck in a burning mansion, and I wouldn’t have to watch that mansion burn to the ground, with you inside it.

I mean she was 18

But the minute you stepped out of the confessional, it would detect that your weight was gone, and my door to the corridor would be sealed.

could we not put something there

“Though, between you and me, it’s a cheap trope when overused, and I’ve always tried to avoid it.

if there's no body there's no death and you're the only one we didn't see

The plan was for me to “die” and go off the radar, while she worked the others over from the inside. When one of us found proof of Alastor’s identity, we’d take him by surprise.

now THAT is a cheap ressurection

The Ocean at the End of the Lane, by Neil Gaiman.

oh BOOOO

This is your first book since you revealed that Violet Blake is the pen name for both of you. Could you tell us about the first book you wrote together, An Ecology of Scars, and why you, Mila, decided to remain anonymous?

oh I'm sorry no one is buying that when you had a whole court case