Jo Salazar’s If We Survive the Night started out as The Dead Weight, released by the author herself, and arrives from Sourcebooks Fire in 2026. In this interview, the YA zombie writer talks about building a protagonist you follow but never trust, writing institutional damage without a diagnosis, and why Quinn will never get the redemption arc readers keep waiting for.
Jo Salazar’s If We Survive the Night is apocalyptic YA horror built around one of the most compelling antiheroes the genre has produced in years. Quinn, sixteen, ASPD-diagnosed, and done with the systems that have failed her since childhood, finds herself at the start of the zombie apocalypse inside a residential treatment centre. What follows is a fast, psychologically precise survival story that asks hard questions about who gets written off as dangerous, who gets called a hero, and what those labels are actually worth when civilisation ends. Sharpened by Salazar’s social work background and driven by a protagonist you can’t look away from, this is feminist horror fiction doing exactly what the best of the genre does: using monsters as a mirror.
