Perfect for fans of Don’t Let the Forest In and Wuthering Heights , May the Dead Keep You is a gothic YA horror about the pasts that haunt us and the stories we decide to make for ourselves.

There’s nowhere Catie East would rather be than the redwood forest that surrounds her family’s unusual historic home, the Heights.

She prefers being alone in the forest. People are…complicated. But when a scientist and his son move into the estate’s cottage, planning to study the woods around them, the boy catches Catie’s eye. And when a dead woodpecker miraculously comes back to life in his precious hands…he captures her heart.

Necromancy isn’t the only strange thing happening in the Heights. There’s an unfamiliar face in the mirror. Blood on the floors. Eyes in the wallpaper. And the men around her—including her once-sweet nature boy—are becoming something else. Something possessive and frightening. Something violent.

As the Heights’s dark history starts to come to light, Catie discovers that the home she loves is imbued with pain. And even though the pain isn’t her own, it will corrupt her and the people around her all the same—unless she can stop it.

A story about breaking cycles of abuse and overcoming generational trauma, May the Dead Keep You is an edge-of-your-seat listen—equally horrifying, heart-wrenching, and hopeful.

Content Warning: generational trauma, animal deaths and resurrections, stalking and related behaviors, drug references, underage drinking, blood and gore, violence including mentions of domestic abuse, miscarriage, parental loss, abandonment, character death, character injuries/ characters in peril.

Jill Baguchinsky grew up fluent in darkness and Disney. She spent much of her life on a barrier island just off the coast of Southwest Florida, where she read way too much Stephen King and dodged more hurricanes than she could count.

Jill’s queer YA horror novel, SO WITCHES WE BECAME, will launch in summer 2024 from Little, Brown and Company. Inspired by Jill’s experience with Hurricane Irma in 2017, SWWB is a story about storm surge, female rage, and toxic bro culture. If boys will be boys, girls will fight back.

Jill still lives in Florida, but after one hurricane too many, she and her mini menagerie of rescue animals moved inland. Aside from the manatees she used to watch in her backyard canal, she doesn’t miss much about island life.