Author Interview: The Midnight Game by Cynthia Murphy

Spooky season is here and we are prepping by gathering allllll the thrillers for our TBR. The Midnight Game is a classic story (play the game; summon the monster) with a modern twist (internet!) and we checked in with Cynthia Murphy on what it was like writing such a story. Check out our interview below and pick up The Midnight Game, out now!

The Midnight Game

by Cynthia Murphy
Published by: Scholastic, Delacorte Press
on July 2, 2024
Genres: Horror, Paranormal, Thriller, Young Adult
Bookshop
Goodreads

From the next big name in YA thrillers that fans on Book Tok have dubbed, "The CEO of plot twists" comes a classic horror story for a new generation.

Six strangers. One night. But how many survivors?

When a group of six strangers who have only ever spoken on a creepy Deddit thread decide to meet IRL, they have one plan in mind: they are going to play The Midnight Game and summon the Midnight Man.

Rules of the game are simple: Do not turn on the lights. Do not go to sleep. Do not leave the building.

And once you start the game, you must finish it--there's no other way out...

Interview with Cynthia Murphy

Writing more than one POV is hard – and you wrote 6! Tell us about that. Do these characters randomly pop into your thoughts still?

Sometimes they do, particularly the final two (no spoilers!) because I get a lot of readers asking if they really play the Eleven Mile game or if I’m writing a sequel!

In terms of the multi POV, I really wanted to have that third person element, never being inside of one character’s head. That way people could wander off to think and do terrible things and you’d never really be sure who to suspect.

The rules of the game are Do not turn on the lights. Do not go to sleep. Do not leave the building.How did you decide them?

The game itself is based on a Creepypasta of the same name, so a lot of these rules are floating around the internet. I cherrypicked the ones I wanted and added others so I had my very own version, but the main ones are very similar and for good reason. I think any game where you’re stuck somewhere in the dark with strangers is asking for trouble and I loved the Nightmare on Elm Street vibe of not being able to fall asleep…

The Midnight Game features mixed media with posts within the text. What was your writing process like including those?

In a word, disciplined. This book is the only one I’ve ever written out of order and I had to do it to keep my sanity somewhat intact! The most intense bit was Part One because the chapters and the threads lead into one another, but after that I could write the internet threads, texts and DMs later on, once I’d told the present day part of the story. I had a list of date and times of the internet chats, another of the POVs and times of each chapter and even a spreadsheet that tracked which character was in which room and when. It was intense but I think it worked well in the end and kept the editing of those logistics to a minimum!