Author Interview: Dead Girls by Beck Kubrick

Dead Girls, out September 22nd, is a feminist slasher graphic novel following Ash Hargreeves, the teenage daughter of an infamous serial killer, who gets blamed for a new wave of copycat murders in her town and decides to hunt down the actual killer herself. It is a love letter to the slasher genre and a ransom note at the same time. We got to ask Beck some questions about it and the answers are exactly what you would hope for from someone who describes their work as stories about terrible girls and thinking about the apocalypse. Check them out below!

Dead Girls

by Beck Kubrick
Published by: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
on September 22, 2026
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A love letter to slasher films and angsty teenage friendship, Dead Girls is a graphic novel perfect for fans of Holly Jackson, Emily Carroll and Yellowjackets .

Clossdale has a history of dead girls. When a fifth missing teenager turns up dead, all eyes on are one suspect – 17-year-old Ash, the orphaned daughter of serial killer ‘Evil Evelyn’.

Ash is sick of her peers being murdered, and she’s sick of the police not taking the investigations seriously. After finding a note telling her she’s next, Ash, along with her foster sister Cassie and best friend Jamie, decides to take matters into their own hands.

But when their plan goes awry, the girls find themselves at the centre of a deeper and darker web than they could ever have imagined. Can they put a stop to the murders, or will they each become just another of Clossdale’s dead girls?

Interview with Beck Kubrick

Ash is living inside a story that was written about her before she ever did anything. That feels like something a lot of teenagers understand even without the serial killer context. Was that the entry point for you?

I think teenage and coming-of-age stories are always about the growing pains in your liminal teen years. You’re both child and adult, but also neither. You have to make terrifying decisions about your future but still pass English class. Even with all the support and opportunity from your parents or friends, there’s societal and subconscious expectations, there’s a “normal” path.

Teen girls are so underserved and dismissed by the world. They’re punished for no longer being little girls and for having the audacity to grow up, often while being told these are the best years of their lives. Being a teen girl is also intense and bloody and messy. It can be horror on its own. I was inspired by Penelope Scott’s songs, Dead Girls and Lotta’ True Crime. We have this myth of handsome, intelligent, charismatic serial killers who get away with the unthinkable for years, but a lot of it is just sexism, ableism, racism. Girls are targets and victims. Then when they’re dead, they’re judged for not being perfect victims, for not being murdered right. The people that made Ash the way she is hate her for being that way. She was never allowed to be innocent. They made her strong and angry, but that’s not empowerment, it’s survival. But Ash isn’t just a victim. She reclaims it. She uses her strength and anger to her advantage, to fight. She’s doing the best she can with the hand she was dealt. It’s all we can do sometimes.

The slasher genre has a complicated history with women, especially with who gets to survive and why. What did you want to do differently?

I love slashers. Dead Girls is my love letter to them. It’s also my ransom note. I wanted to filter the tropes and conventions through myself and my experiences. Ash, and all the other girls, are me, my friends, the feral girls I’ve read in YA prose and anyone who doesn’t often see themselves as a hero. Who struggle to be what people expect of them. I was thinking about the times I’d watched a horror film or read a book and wished the characters had acted differently, the times I could feel that they were written by someone who didn’t love or respect them. Tropes are fun, they’re tools, but we don’t need rigid boxes. That makes for boring stories. I wrote Dead Girls from the revolutionary stance that women are people and should be written as such and allowed nuance, complexity, and empathy.

There are more and more coming-of-rage and good-for-her stories being told. It’s not shocking that girls can get angry and can fight back. They’ve been doing that forever, in fiction and reality. Now they can just be overt about it and be heroes. Final girls survive because they are what a girl “should” be: pure, nice, pretty in a girl-next-door way. They fight back once they have been tormented and have no other choice. I wanted to push the limits. What about a girl who’s running towards the fight? Do we empathize with her? Do we love her? What about a girl who’s not waiting to be a final girl? Can one story have multiple final girls? Can we love them all? What about a girl that starts the fight? Or is good at fighting and killing? What if she doesn’t worry about the morality of it too much, just does what she has to do? What if she likes it? What if she’s doing it to punish herself? We need new perspectives, more diversity and intersectionality. Nothing exists in a vacuum. We can’t ignore the history and realities, but we can give ourselves and our characters more nuance and complexity. That includes making things fun and stupid. Dead Girls is about all of this. It’s also about furries and the internet and there’s a unicorn.

This is a graphic novel, which means the visuals are doing as much work as the words. What did the art change about the story you thought you were telling?

The story always existed as words and visuals. There’s so much iconography and opportunities for cool visuals in horror. I like to write by doing little sketches or thumbnails and Dead Girls was never not a comic. While planning, I had thoughts like “Oh god, how will I even draw that?” but it was never anything else. I like to write and draw as separate practices, but they always end up intertwining. It can feel like giving something up to do only one. I don’t really see images in my imagination, so when I draw it feels like a surprise. You’re literally creating a world. It’s exciting. I’m the strongest on the page. I can write witty dialogue, decide where to set it, but when I’m drawing I’ll find unexpected pockets to tell the story, character interactions, stuff in the background. It all comes together. There’s a bunch of different art styles and mediums in the book too. It’s more common in manga than western comics to do that, but the art serves the story, and I wanted to push it. The world of Dead Girls is like ours, but everyone is a little weirder, everything a little heightened. I wanted the art to reflect that: dreamy memories in watercolor, important moments as an oil painting, cartoonish violence drawn all cutesy. It adds to the intensity of it all. It’s fun. I hope you can tell I had fun when you read it.