Interview With Kate Alice Marshall, Author of ‘We Won’t All Survive’

I love writing for PopHorror because I get the opportunity to speak to some of my most favorite authors. This time, I got to chat with author Kate Alice Marshall, who wrote the fantastic The Narrow, the sad but triumphant I Am Still Alive, the diabolical No One Can Know, plus a slew of others. Her latest book, We Won’t All Survive is a tale of survival featuring a group of young adults who come together in a remote, unknown location to film what they think is a reality show. But when they become trapped inside the gates and there’s an empty set with no crew, they quickly realize that nothing is as it seems and are determined to find out who is behind it all as people start getting picked off one-by-one.

To celebrate the release of the book, Kate and I discussed how the story came about, her favorite character, her creative process, and more!

PopHorror: I’m a huge fan and I loved We Won’t All Survive so I’m super excited to talk to you about it today.

Kate Alice Marshall: Thank you very much! I’m excited. This is kind of my first interactive event of any kind with this book so I’m excited to get my feet wet.

PopHorror: Oh, awesome! So, what sparked the idea for the book?

Kate Alice Marshall: So, I like telling this story because I was on my anniversary trip with my husband, walking through a crowded downtown and I said very loudly, “I just want to isolate a bunch of teenagers in a remote location and just start killing them off one by one!” And he was like, “Okay, lower your voice.” I just wanted that set up. I wanted an isolation thriller, and I wanted to have a group of teens who were just really compelling characters that I could put through a pressure cooker. I sat down and came up with several versions of the idea and I actually settled on a much different one, kind of a similar set up to get everyone there and the characters were the same, but the nature of the show was different and there was a crew around and things like that. And it didn’t work, so I ended up going back to an earlier version of the idea and completely rewriting it in an astonishingly short amount of time. It was very adrenaline fueled when I realized I had just written half a book that wasn’t working. But what emerged was that theme of what survival means and what it means to be worthy of survival, and building community as opposed to the individualistic model of survival. A lot of that kind of came out of just how much I fell in love with the characters as I was writing it.

PopHorror: I really love isolation thrillers, locked room thrillers, things that take place in one location, so this was right up my alley. I love the creativity it takes to be able to base an entire story in one location and make it effective.

Kate Alice Marshall: Yeah, it’s a fun challenge.

PopHorror: This book deals with a lot of traumas. All of the kids involved all have some underlying thing that they’re going through. Was there anything that you were adamant about keeping in the final draft, no matter what?

Kate Alice Marshall: There was nothing that came up. There were certainly things that I would have dug my heels on if there was a discussion over it, but what survived the end is pretty much what I put in at the beginning. I really wanted to make sure that the characters were diverse and that they had a real diversity of not just personality but where they’re coming from surrounding that central question and with their traumatic backgrounds, everyone reacts differently to trauma. I needed to create characters that were both very different in where they were starting from and could still get to that central place of being there for each other. I think that having that as the core that I was starting from made everything else hang together cohesively. It felt like if you were trying to pull out any one piece of who those people were, it was going to fall apart.

PopHorror: Everyone deals with trauma differently and everyone deals with grief differently, and I feel like grief was underlying in there as well because they all had something where someone was lost or they lost a piece of themselves going through these events of their lives, which definitely put them all on different paths in their healing.

Kate Alice Marshall: Yeah, and I think for all of them, they are dealing with the loss of the version of their lives that they were expecting to have. It doesn’t directly interact with Covid, but while I was writing it, I was thinking about that loss of time for kids graduating high school and going through middle school. You have this very clear narrative of what a teenager’s life is supposed to proceed as and then a giant chunk of it gets excised and you can’t get that back. Whether it’s traumatic or not, you have to create a new story for yourself.

PopHorror: What I liked about this book is that I had no idea where it was going or what was going to happen. I was convinced that Mercy’s sister Jamie was dead and she was having these conversations with herself, and I’m glad that I was proven wrong. I don’t want to be right halfway through the book. The whole time I was like, she’s dead, she was killed in the shooting. So, I’m happy that I was not right.

Kate Alice Marshall: That would have been an interesting twist, though!

PopHorror: Yes! In We Won’t All Survive, who was your favorite character to create?

Kate Alice Marshall: Oh, gosh. That’s a really hard question to answer because I made myself fall in love with every one of them, which became a problem when it became time to start dropping bodies. I think at any given time in the book, everybody got their chance to be my favorite for one draft or one pass. I really loved Harrison and he’s the one who actually was supposed to die and I finally was like, I can’t do this to you.

PopHorror: It was close there for a second!

Kate Alice Marshall: Yeah, he got rescued by the author because it was just too sad. He’s just, I think, fun to write because he’s such a sweetheart through the whole thing and in a book that is so steeped in darkness and people’s sharp edges and distrust, it was nice to have kind of the sunshine at the center of it.

PopHorror: If this book was to be made into a movie, who would you cast as Mercy and Damien Dare?

Kate Alice Marshall: Oh, gosh. I’m terrible at these kinds of questions.

PopHorror: I am too. I’m just curious as to what other people would say.

Kate Alice Marshall: Let’s see… I feel like there’s a lot of actors who would enjoy playing the sleaziness of Dare and could pull it off really well. Just like anybody who does smarmy well.

PopHorror: Absolutely! What is your creative process when starting a new book?

Kate Alice Marshall: I usually have a really clear sense of the type of book that I want to write next. Like the isolation one-by-one thing. I knew that I wanted it to have a survival/working/playing element to it. I start with just that and I usually have a notebook and I write by hand, just free writing pages and pages circling around what that could look like.

PopHorror: Wow!

Kate Alice Marshall: So, I’ll work up a few sentences about maybe half a dozen ways that idea could go. Do I want to set it in the real world? Does it need to be horror so I can do something fantastical and get them isolated? Is it going to be a cold setting? I’m just testing myself to see what I am drawn to. What sparks. Once I have more of a narrow path, I start to go about it a little more logically so I ask myself questions about who is the main character of this story and what sort of character questions need to be at the core in order to make that initial spark of an idea feel thematically rich? If it was going to be this story of survival and isolation with a group, I wanted a character who already had the wrong sense of what survival is and actually a kind of negative sense of her own survival so that she’s reclaiming her own desire to survive and embracing her ability to survive in a way that she can be proud of. I just go down, who is that, what happened to her, what other characters do I need to provide a counter to her or to be a contrast or an ally? And a lot of it is just like, how many people need to be in this so I have enough people to kill off but not too many people to juggle in a book? So you sort of start narrowing down the possibilities based on what the book needs, and then I just start feeling my way forward and seeing as I go, does this feel like it has enough tension or does there need to be something else going on? Am I getting the tone right or do I need an element here that’s going to be funnier or scarier or is this too on the nose with Damien Dare? Nah, he can be on the nose, that’s fine. So for me, it’s just lots of pre-writing stuff.

PopHorror: That’s impressive that you do a lot of it by hand!

Kate Alice Marshall: Yeah, it’s one of my tricks for working fast because I love fountain pens and I love putting different fancy colored shimmering ink in my fountain pens and so if I write enough that I run out of ink, I get to try a new one.

PopHorror: I love that! I have just one last question for you today. What is your favorite scary movie?

Kate Alice Marshall: Okay, so, I love the genre but the little subgenre of things where one normal thing is forbidden or the monsters will get you, like Bird Box you can’t look at them and A Quiet Place you can’t make any noise. I like the book Bird Box better than the movie, but I really like A Quiet Place for the logic puzzle combined with the fear of that. And it’s a show, but the recent The Eternaut show on Netflix where there’s snow falling that will kill you so you can’t go outside, would fall under that for me. I really loved that.

Thank you so much to Kate for taking the time to chat with us. We Won’t All Survive arrives in bookstores Tuesday, July 29, 2025!