Author Chat: Margot Harrison on Crafting Her Chilling YA Mystery Only She Came Back.
Margot Harrison talks complex women, true crime, and noir novels.
We’re starting spooky season with a bang! I am really excited to share this delightful interview with the brilliant Margot Harrison about her upcoming and, frankly, heartbreaking new YA novel Only She Came Back. Before we dig into that you may have noticed that I have redesigned the look and logo for the spookiest of seasons, and it's because I have a ton of great treats for all of you this autumn!
The first is this brilliant Q&A with Harrison about her startling new novel that begins when a young woman wanders out of a national park alone and covered in blood. Harrison deftly guides us through the ensuing media frenzy in this timely and terrifying tale that will have you reading late into the ever chillier nights.
Only She Came Back is such an original take on the true crime / social media crossover. Could you tell me about the origin of the story and how it came about?
This book was conceived on a single wild night of exploring online rabbit holes. I was looking for distraction, and my sister had sent me a story about young minimalist YouTube influencers. I read that, and then I did something I had told myself I wouldn’t do—read about the Gabby Petito case. That was a week or so before they discovered her remains, so many people were still discussing it as a “mystery” rather than as yet another tragic case of domestic violence.
I felt queasy and voyeuristic, yet also fascinated by the role that social media played in the case. I couldn’t shake the idea of an influencer couple updating their road trip in real time and presenting a happy front to the world while terrible things were happening behind the scenes. There was also a lot of discourse about the disproportionate attention we pay to cases involving pretty young white women. All this kind of jelled in my head, and then I thought: What if a woman came back alone from a road trip, claiming her minimalist influencer boyfriend had disappeared? How would we treat her? Would she be demonized in ways a man wouldn’t be? I decided to present the story through the eyes of a true crime fan who knows her obsession with the case is voyeuristic but can’t look away, and then the basics of the plot appeared in my head. I didn’t sleep much that night!
Something that really stood out to me is how complex and morally complicated Kiri and Sam get to be, something that feels so rare in YA fiction. It's something you've excelled in with your previous books too, why is presenting that unusual and powerful side of female representation important to you?
Thank you for noticing that! One thing I have in common with Sam, my narrator, is that I have a lifelong fascination with women who do very bad things—not just morally gray characters but villains, too. Maybe it’s because I was raised by the sweetest, nicest mom imaginable. Of course I don’t condone those bad things, but I love to imagine how it would feel to make those choices, and fiction feels like a safe place to do that.
I think we can learn a lot from characters who make the wrong choices, assuming they eventually develop some level of awareness of what they did wrong. Because most of us have felt tempted by those paths at some point. Sam makes so many terrible choices in this book as she pursues a friendship with Kiri hoping to learn her secrets and, potentially, broadcast them online for clout. Kiri presents herself as a naïve victim whose worst mistake was loving a controlling guy, but there are hints of her darker side. Sam rejects traditional expectations of femininity and Kiri conforms to them—or seems to—and that’s all that a lot of people would see about them. But I wanted to show there’s so much more to them than that.
Was there anything that particularly shocked or surprised you as you researched the world of true crime and influencers to prepare for writing the book?
I work at a newspaper, and though I don’t cover so-called “hard” news, I know there are rules that crime journalists have to follow—for instance, using the word “alleged” to avoid passing judgment on someone who hasn’t been convicted of a crime. So I was a little shocked by some of the true crime discourse online. It’s like the wild west: You can state your opinion as fact and pre-convict the suspect for your audience. Without editorial oversight, you can say whatever makes a good story. You can even use AI to animate a ghoulish image of the victim “telling us” how they died.
That said, there are true crime podcasters who are doing a careful, respectful job with their subjects. And it’s not as if traditional crime journalists are all paragons of ethics. In The Journalist and the Murderer, Janet Malcolm argued that they often mislead and manipulate their subjects to get that great story.
What were the stories — in any medium whether books, TV, film, or comics — that you were looking to for tonal inspiration with Only She Came Back?
At one point, my editor said the story was starting to feel like a noir film, and I realized that had been the inspiration without my thinking about it. I love the noir pulp novels of Jim Thompson and their tight focus on interactions between morally questionable characters who are all dead set on getting what they want. I set most of the action on a commuter strip at the edge of Burlington, Vermont, where you would never know what a trendy city it is. There’s an old motel there with a retro sign that is just so noir to me, so I pulled that into the story.
Then I started to think of Kiri as a femme fatale, and I decided that femmes fatales have gotten a bad rap—yes, it can be a misogynist trope, but there’s also a ton of interesting potential for female agency there.
Is there a single piece of advice you'd give to aspiring novelists about how to craft a truly gripping mystery?
Outline! Use index cards! I used to be a so-called “pantser,” someone who never outlines the story ahead of time and lets it develop organically, and I found out the hard way that this method doesn’t work too well for mysteries or thrillers. That’s doubly true when you’re writing on a tight deadline, as I was with this one.
It’s incredibly helpful to have the blueprint of a mystery arc—the midpoint reversal, the twists—even if you later deviate from it. You can still have those moments of organic discovery, and the solution of the mystery might not be what you thought at the beginning.
Only She Came Back hits bookshops on Nov 14 and you can pre-order it here.