[Post originally published: May 15, 2026]

My guest today is Mary Berman, who will publish her horror novel about obsessive wedding planning, Until Death, next Friday.

And if you haven’t checked it yet, Mary also has a newsletter, where she talks about the messy world of publishing and other stuff. I’ve been reading her news for a while and I highly recommend it if you’re into publishing or just want to know more about her wonderful work.

By the way, I’m always accepting suggestions for this (hyper)space (of potential guests, but also other ideas in general!), so if you want to drop me a message or just want to chat, feel free to reply to any of these posts!

Tell me more about Until Death and what made you write it.

Until Death is a horror novel about wedding planning. It’s also been called “daughterhood horror,” which I love. It’s the fun, escapist kind of horror; think Mona Awad, Rachel Harrison, or Grady Hendrix.

It is also, if I do say so myself, extremely funny.

I had the idea for the book in the summer of 2023, when it felt like everyone I knew was getting married, or getting engaged, or traveling to a different wedding every weekend and spending thousands of dollars on presents and plane tickets. All my friends couldn’t stop talking about our friends’ wedding venues and dresses and menus and crazy moms. An obsession with weddings — not marriage, but weddings — had wormed its way into all of our skulls, like the parasite in RFK’s brain. It was crazy. It was making us all crazy.

So obviously I was like, I should write a horror novel about this.

Until Death mixes horror and romance. What are elements and tropes of those genres that surprisingly fit well when blended in your story?

They go together better than people think. Both genres are so cathartic. In romance, the catharsis is positive — What if I fell in love?! — whereas in horror, it’s negative — What if I escaped from a serial killer?! But both genres knock on the same part of the heart, so to speak.

What is an underrated piece of fiction that you think didn’t get enough attention?

Naben Ruthnum’s Helpmeet. Possibly I am cheating by calling this underrated because it was nominated for the World Fantasy Award, but I think it’s the best piece of horror fiction I’ve ever read, hands down. It was published in 2022 by Undertow and I thought it was just unbelievable, so, so unusual and nasty and yet so warm and emotionally smart. (I think all the best horror fiction has an undercurrent of warmth, actually.)

Show me an illustration that you love and tell me why! [It can be related to your work or not. Feel free to provide alt text, but if you do not have the time, I can do it for you]

My book cover is illustrated by Andreea Dumuta. I was thrilled when I found out she was the artist; her work is so cool and fun and offbeat. (She also illustrated the covers for One Bad Night, Nicky Gonzalez’s Mayra, Chuck Tingle’s Bury Your Gays, and Rachel Harrison’s Play Nice and So Thirsty.) She does non-book cover illustrations, too, that are just so quirky and cute. So I will share her fun illustration of a frog. Credit to her Instagram.

Your newsletter was an inspiration to me at several moments, seeing how you progressed and all the stumbles and victories along the way. As a writer, I truly appreciate this openness about how things really are in the background. In our social media era, we tend to only see the positive outcomes of any situation, so knowing the intricacies of publishing is essential. This might be a bit of a motivational question, but here it is: what made you keep going? Why not give up?

Aww, thank you!

As you might know from my newsletter — or from Codex, the forum that you and I are both part of — I actually did give up, in some sense of the phrase, in early 2023. That was a year after I finished the Pitch Wars mentorship program. I had had such high hopes that I would sign an agent with my Pitch Wars novel, which was also my fourth novel. I did not.

That year of rejection was particularly brutal and stretched-out. While it was going on, I found myself unable to write anything new. By 2023, I felt so battered and depressed and hopeless about writing that I decided that all I wanted to do was get the joy back, and that meant returning to how I had approached writing as a child, when it was purely recreational. And that meant that if I didn’t feel like writing, I wouldn’t do it.

So for months, I didn’t. And then eventually I did have an idea for a short story (which was later published in Diabolical Plots), and then I had the idea for Until Death. I can’t tell you the relief I felt when writing Until Death. I had no sense of whether it would sell, but I was just so relieved and overjoyed to be having fun with it, to be eager to hang out with the page.

So I guess I would say that keeping going and giving up are relative terms. If I could go back and advise someone in my position — someone who loves writing, someone who connects to the world and to themselves through writing, someone who sees writing as a core part of their identity, but who’s begun, for whatever reason, to find writing very painful — I would gently urge that person to give themself grace. If that person wanted to step away from writing, I wouldn’t think of it as giving up. I would think of it as offering the work the space it needs to return to you.