Fans of Killing Me by Michelle Gagnon will be happy to know the author is coming out with a sequel this May. In Slaying You, readers will find Amber six months after escaping the hands of two different serial killers. She is leading as normal of a life as it can be in a happy relationship with her girlfriend Kat.
After outrunning the same psychopath, Grace and Amber haven’t seen each other. Things change when they meet up in Vegas for their friend’s wedding. The pull the dark side has on them might be stronger than they expected.
Gagnon spoke to us about her upcoming book and the importance of uplifting queer voices in literature.
Eulalie Magazine: When you wrote Killing Me, was the idea to keep working on a second book and make this a series? Or did it come after you had written the book?
Michelle Gagnon: I think I knew the whole time that I would love for it to be a series because I really fell in love with these characters, and I fell in love with this weird, kind of campy version of Vegas, and the heightened realism elements of it. As soon as I was halfway through the book, I knew I wanted to write another one with them so there were no surprises. I had a hard time convincing the publisher. The publisher felt like it was a standalone. But they’re such great characters, and I love writing series. I have a hard time with standalones because even when reading books, I want to know what happens. I want to know what happens to these people forever, for the rest of my life, if I fell in love with them in the book that I was reading. I love it when authors give you at least a little taste of that.
Eulalie Magazine: Based on that, is the idea to continue to expand, or will it stop at two, and you’ll move on to a new series?
Gagnon: I keep going back and forth right now. I have this idea of moving the series to New Orleans, taking it on the road a little bit more because it started to become a little too Vegas-centric for me. I’m on the fence right now. I’ve been swamped with work this year. I’m juggling this other job, and so it’s been a little bit challenging, especially over the last two months, to find the time to write. And I’m a writer who doesn’t plan anything out. I just write. For me, it’s about what comes out and I’m interested in following when I sit down and have some time to write.
Eulalie Magazine: I recently spoke to another author who said that for them, a perfect series is three books. Do you have a number in mind that would make for a perfect series or, like you said, just what you’re feeling when you’re writing?
Gagnon: I always thought it was really interesting how John Updike used to go back to the same characters periodically, and he’d write other books in the middle, but then he would get an idea for characters from an earlier book, and he would write a follow up to that. I love that. With publishing, if you’re writing a series, you’re producing a book a year, and you’re on book 28 before you know it, and you’ve done nothing but write these characters. I did that for a long time. I did that with my first 10 books, and it felt like it was just becoming a grind. I wasn’t loving the writing anymore because it didn’t feel like I had a choice. I really hated that. I don’t like working on strict deadlines. I try to avoid that if I can. I don’t do my best work when I’m trying to churn something out in a year. Particularly for these characters, like with the next book, if I start writing and it’s not really working, I’ll probably go on to something else for a while. I’ve got a couple of other ideas that have been percolating, and we’ll see how they go. And for me, I’m always churning two or three books along at the same time. So it’s whichever one has the most momentum.
Eulalie Magazine: With that sort of process, is that how you came up with Amber and Grace? Or was there something in particular that you saw and wanted for these characters?
Gagnon: The original idea came to me. I wrote the first 25 pages during the Me Too movement because I had all this anger. I wanted to write a book that was female-centered, and it’s all about women who, by and large, really use their female strengths, their ability to form relationships, their ability to think outside the box, and their ability to organize things that are not usually really valued as much. I wanted a book where the men were off-stage so that it was all about the relationship between these women. It was really about these women forming this community to support each other. I think the only men in the first book are secondary characters, or they are the killers. We’ve been working on adapting this for TV right now, and there are not many men.
Eulalie Magazine: How important or why do you think it’s important for queer voices and queer authors to dive into the thriller genre and explore those ideas?
Gagnon: When I was growing up, I didn’t see anyone like me represented in books, and I think it made it much harder for me to come out. I came out later in life because of that, because it just didn’t feel like an option for me. As I’ve watched representation become more and more present, it’s so exciting. We’re still seeing a lot of when there is a queer character in a book, it’s all about them being queer, right? That is their defining characteristic is that they’re gay. And there has to be some of them wrestling with being gay in there, too, and it has to be almost more of a social issues thing. I wanted to have a character who, from page one, is gay. I’m not even going to say that she is gay; you’re just going to figure it out based on who she is talking about and who she is developing attraction to and flirting with. The same way we automatically assume that with heteronormative characters, right? I had a couple of reviews in this book where it was literally people who would get 10 or 15 pages in and then suddenly realize, “Oh, she’s gay.” We should have characters representing everything in these books because it’s about what they’re going through. It’s not about who they are as a person.
Eulalie Magazine: I think that’s important because, as you said, so much of the representation focuses on just saying characters are gay instead of just making it something that’s in their personality and not entirely who they are. Touching on that, do you think that representation has been better in literature than what we’ve seen on TV and in movies?
Gagnon: No. I think it’s gotten a lot better in TV and movies. There’s a whole generation coming up that just takes it for granted. It’s no big deal at all to them that there are that. I think there are still times when it’s presented as, “Look at all the extra challenges these people have to face.” Not that that isn’t true. It is obviously truer now than ever. But I think that young adult literature, particularly, is always pushing ahead with this stuff more frequently. I do feel like when I go to conferences, I’m usually on the LGBTQ panel now, and there are not as many people in the audience. The sad truth is that we’re still shelved sometimes in a different part of the bookstore or the library. That really bothers me because I feel if we’re talking about representation, then it shouldn’t be like this is queer fiction. It should be like this is fiction and shouldn’t be segregated. I know some straight people won’t even go near that section.
Eulalie Magazine: Is there any advice that you would give to queer voices that want to get started as writers, particularly in the thriller genre?
Gagnon: I think it would be helpful if we had more of a mentoring program specific for that because I don’t think we’ve done a great job of fostering those voices. The publishers have gotten better about publishing and not seeing it as a niche thing anymore. But I feel we need more support than ever because everyone is backpedaling so quickly from anything with a whiff of DEI in it. Most of the big publishing houses are owned by these big corporations, who are all beholden to the political winds. It does worry me sometimes. We need to support each other.
Slaying You comes out in May.
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Lara Rosales
By day, Lara Rosales (she/her) is a solo mom by choice and a bilingual writer with a BA in Latin-American Literature who works in PR. By night, she is a TV enjoyer who used to host a podcast (Cats, Milfs & Lesbian Things). You can find her work published on Tell-Tale TV, Geek Girl Authority, Collider, USA Wire, Mentors Collective, Instelite, Noodle, Dear Movies, Nicki Swift, and Flip Screened.
