The masked killer was never the point. The loop is the monster.
Rachel Harrison has been doing something quietly radical across seven novels: she’s convinced a large portion of the reading public that horror is the funniest genre going, and then she kills someone’s eyes out in chapter three. Her books arrive with deceptively cheerful premises, a friend returns from the dead, a woman befriends a witch, a werewolf takes over a body mid-family reunion, and then they do what horror has always done best: use the thing you think you’re reading to get at the thing you’re actually afraid of.
Kiss Slay Replay (Berkley / Titan, September 2026) is her seventh novel and, in structural terms, her most formally ambitious. It drops protagonist Willa Sullivan into a wedding weekend that ends in a masked slasher attack, then loops her back to morning and does it again, and again, each iteration bloodier and stranger than the last. The book arrives after Play Nice, which many critics considered the most frightening thing Harrison had written and Kiss Slay Replay immediately makes that claim complicated. There’s a real question here about where this author is heading, and whether the escalating dread of her recent work represents arrival at something or departure from it. That question felt worth asking her directly.
You Keep Waking Up and It’s Still a Massacre”: An Interview with Rachel Harrison
Willa Sullivan enters the wedding weekend already in a particular kind of pain two weeks out from breaking off an engagement to Ravi, watching him arrive with a new date while she’s still raw from the decision. That specificity feels important. The loop begins from a position of someone who is already questioning her own judgment, already wondering whether the life she stepped away from was the right one to leave. What drew you to a character in that state of suspended uncertainty as the person you’d force through repetition?
I usually have the concept and the themes I want to explore first. Then I ask myself, who is the right person to tell this story? For KISS SLAY REPLAY, a novel confronting feeling stuck, uncertain, anxious, and depressed, I needed someone who was all those things! Enter Willa. Poor Willa. There was no one better, or maybe no one worse, to put through a time loop.
One structural decision is how each iteration of the loop escalates things get more bizarre, not simply more violent, as the repetitions pile up. That’s a meaningful choice because it refuses the comfort of the loop as practice run, as gradual mastery. Willa doesn’t simply get better at surviving; she gets stranger situations to navigate. What were you trying to protect by denying her that competence arc?
From a logical standpoint, it’s to stop the novel from getting repetitive. Time loops present a real danger of becoming frustrating or dull. From an emotional standpoint, the only way the novel would work for me is if I tied Willa’s emotions to each loop. What is she feeling this time? What is she confronting? What challenge is she facing, and how is she going to face it? I think she does have a competence arc; it’s just not her becoming this ultimate final girl, learning how to hide and kill or whatever. It’s her overcoming her fears and anxieties, confronting the things holding her back emotionally, and learning how to move forward.
The novel is, among other things, a book about a wedding that refuses to function as a wedding, and you’ve returned to weddings before Black Sheep is also structured around a family gathering that behaves like a trap. You spoke in an earlier interview about being interested in the horror of belief and social obligation, of rituals that require us to perform certainty we don’t feel. What is it about the wedding specifically, as distinct from other communal rituals, that keeps pulling you back as a setting for horror?
Nat Cassidy called me out. He said because I’m a Virgo, so much of my work is about big events going wrong. He is, unfortunately, absolutely correct. Weddings are just so dramatic, and they’re supposed to be this perfect day. The expectation, the obligation, the pressure, all of it, fascinates me. I don’t know. It’s a joyous occasion I can ruin, essentially.
The title, Kiss Slay Replay, carries the echo of a dance instruction kiss, slay, replay as if the violence is part of a choreography Willa can’t stop performing. Was that resonance intentional, and how does the idea of choreography, of steps that must be followed, shape the way the loop operates in the book?
I have to be honest, I didn’t come up with the title! Alex Greulich at The Friedrich Agency helped me out. And I hadn’t thought about choreography, but that’s an interesting idea!
You’ve said before that the supernatural element presents itself as a solution to an emotional problem the human story can’t solve. The loop in this novel feels almost algorithmic a system that processes Willa’s indecision and grief by running the day until it crashes. Did the seed of this book come from a feeling of being stuck in a pattern you couldn’t algorithm your way out of, something that resisted the logic of learning and progress?
The seed came years ago, listening to the song “Always” by Blink-182. I thought about a horror romance time loop book set at a wedding, wrote myself a little note. When I came back to it much later, I thought about why I would want to write a time loop story because time loops stress me out. Then I realized that was the point. I hate feeling stuck. This book was me working through that.
Looking at your bibliography from The Return through to Kiss Slay Replay, there’s a clear movement from the external pressures of friendship and grief in the debut toward increasingly inward territory questions of identity, family formation, self-perception, and now, in Willa’s loop, something close to forced self-confrontation. Such Sharp Teeth felt like a turning point in that arc; Rory’s transformation is bodily, but the real horror is about what she’d suppressed rather than what she’d become. Do you see that as the book where your concerns shifted, or does it look different from the inside?
I think it looks different on the inside. I wrote The Return when I was twenty-eight, and I’m about to be thirty-seven. I write about what most compels me at the time, so it’ll naturally evolve. For me, the internal and external are linked, feed into each other. Such Sharp Teeth, Play Nice, they both deal with a lot of rage from lived experiences of womanhood. That’s very external.
In a 2023 interview, you described the process of writing Black Sheep as like “getting ketchup out of a glass bottle,” specifically because you’d pitched the concept before you’d written it. Such Sharp Teeth, by contrast, apparently poured out. What does Kiss Slay Replay feel like in retrospect and what did the specific technical challenge of the loop structure, of writing essentially the same day multiple times with escalating variation, do to your relationship with the book while you were inside it?
Kiss Slay Replay was a hard one, because structurally it’s so different. Back to choreography, it felt like learning a dance. At the beginning, I didn’t know what I was doing, didn’t know the steps, was trying to catch the beat. But I kept going, and by the end of the second draft I could groove. The more time I spent in the book, the more I enjoyed it and could refine it.
Comedy is a signature of your work, and you’ve managed to thread it through even the grimmest sequences. But a slasher that resets again and again also creates a specific kind of gallows absurdity: the same person dying in different, increasingly baroque ways, the repetition of panic. How did you approach the comedic rhythm of that repetition without letting it undercut the genuine terror, and were there any deaths you wrote that made you laugh out loud and immediately wonder if you’d gone too far?
I actually don’t ever think about comedy when I’m writing. I think about character, about motives, about grounding the book—making the environment and emotions tangible. In my life, I cope with humor. I think a lot of people do. That’s real! I don’t write strategizing about when to crack a joke, if it feels natural to the character and to the scene, it’s there. I take it all very seriously.
I want my work to be fun, sure, but I care deeply about my craft and so I’m not sitting there like “I’m going to write a bonkers death!!” for the sake of ridiculousness. I’m sitting there thinking “how am I going to raise the stakes in this scene, to reflect the chaos Willa feels in her life right now?” I don’t laugh at the deaths, would never laugh at the deaths, because I’m with Willa, and she’s terrified.
The slasher as a subgenre is famously moralistic, it punishes transgression, often in rigid, puritanical ways. But you’ve never been a writer who delivers simple comeuppance. In a novel where the masked killer strikes again and again, how did you negotiate that tension between the genre’s history of punishment and your own instinct to complicate blame?
I didn’t approach this novel as a slasher. Slashers are their own thing, and they intimidate me! There are rules that I haven’t studied well enough to follow, let alone break. I respect slashers, and I enjoy them, but because it wasn’t in my head when I was writing I wasn’t thinking about comeuppance. The villain isn’t a single masked killer. There is an external threat, but writing it, I was more concerned with the internal. So there ya go, maybe I am more about the internal!
You’ve spoken in interviews about Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” as a gateway, and about how Jackson’s domestic dread inflects your own work. But your prose has a very different register, there’s speed, there’s comedy, there’s an almost aggressively contemporary voice. Is Jackson an influence at the level of theme and structure, or is there something in the sentence itself that you’re still in conversation with? And who, if you’re honest, scares you most as a writer currently working in horror?
I’m going to be a little feisty and push back on that. Jackson was a contemporary voice, too. She wrote a lot about the times she lived in, about her experiences, reflecting on the world around her. That’s what I do. I’m not aggressively anything. Speed and humor can and do exist alongside beauty and depth. Jackson was also very funny! Influences should be just that, influences.
We should have many of them as artists, and how they influence us should evolve over time, and if we do it right, our influences won’t be painfully obvious. As far as writers currently working in horror who scare me? So many. I think the book that has terrified me most in recent memory is Gus Moreno’s THIS THING BETWEEN US.
Dread at the sentence level is something that separates horror writers almost immediately. There are writers who can describe a monster in anatomical detail and produce no unease whatsoever, and there are writers who make a glass of milk on a table feel wrong. When you are writing a sentence and you know it’s doing what you need it to do, when you feel the temperature drop, what is technically happening? What are you doing that you couldn’t fully explain to a workshop?
You’ve talked about keeping the joy of writing separate from the pressure of publishing, specifically about learning that lesson on Black Sheep, where the pre-pitched concept added weight that earlier drafts didn’t carry. That’s a piece of advice you’ve given publicly and clearly mean. But joy and dread are strange bedfellows. How do you sustain the actual pleasure of the work when the work itself is asking you to stay inside something frightening?
The work itself never frightens me, because I’m in control of it. Back to being a Virgo, that’s what terrifies me most. A loss of control. On the page, I control the fear. It’s catharsis. Beyond joy, there’s real beauty in that.
Kiss Slay Replay by Rachel Harrison
FIRST PRINTING A DELUXE EDITION WITH STENCILED EDGES, SPOT GLOSS AND EMBOSS.
Every wedding guest’s worst nightmare is on repeat in this monstrous, gripping, heartfelt time loop horror story about love, loss, and moving on from the New York Times bestselling author of Cackle and Play Nice.
Will this nightmare ever end?
It’s the picture-perfect wedding weekend—the venue is dreamy, the weather is beautiful, love is in the air, and Willa Sullivan is having a bad time. She’s excited to celebrate her best friends finally having the big wedding they always wanted, but this is the first time she’s seeing her ex-fiancé in months, and he brought a date.
Everything feels off, like she stumbled into an alternate universe. But things start to look up when Willa meets Danny, the groom’s charming and single childhood best friend. When they sneak off together, their rendezvous is interrupted by a masked killer terrorizing the reception. Willa and Danny fight to save the ones they love and survive the night, but the killer is unrelenting. A final girl Willa is not.
Or is she? She wakes up and it’s the morning of the wedding. She just had the most intense nightmare of her life. Only as the day unfolds, there are some uncanny coincidences that make her question if it was really a dream, déjà vu, or something more sinister. After a horrifying turn of events, Willa comes to understand that she’s stuck in a loop of carnage and terror that she must learn how to escape or suffer a fate worse than death—being an eternal wedding guest.
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