It’s not meant to be taken seriously-it’s like the bitches are back and now they have knives! Instead of brushing their kids’ bad behavior under the rug, the adults are now brushing murders under the rug.” “It was a matter of taking it one step further. “It occurred to me that there are so many opportunities in that novel to have people die, because everyone is mad at everyone else,” she says. This was confirmed when she reread her original novel. “I have a sort of evil sense of humor,” she notes, “and I thought this would be a perfect opportunity to do a dark comedy-darker than the comedy that is already in Gossip Girl novels.” Von Ziegesar, who immediately loved the new concept, believes it’s a good fit for Gossip Girl. Cecily has taken a lot of the themes she explored in Gossip Girl and turned them on their side here, using her brilliant sense of humor.” Similarly, in Gossip Girl, Psycho Killer, these are beautiful, rich girls who supposedly have everything-but they go crazy, and, sardonically, killing becomes a competition between them. “It’s a satirization of the American dream that is totally twisted.

“I remember being addicted to the book-and also freaked out and repulsed by it at the same time,” she says. While deliberating a theme for a Gossip Girl mashup, Eagan recalled reading Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho when it was first published in 1991. We wanted to do something that hadn’t been done before-something over the top.”

But we didn’t want to do a zombies, werewolves, or vampires angle.

We thought it would be the quintessential mashup for Poppy to publish. Though not a conventional mashup in the vein of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or Little Women and Werewolves, since von Ziegesar gives the new twist to her own novel, the book grew out of the publisher’s interest in exploring the mashup genre.Ĭindy Eagan, Poppy’s executive editorial director, explains that she and Andrew Smith, v-p and deputy publisher of Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, had been talking for quite a while about doing “some kind of mashup of Gossip Girl. Little, Brown’s Poppy imprint, which has sold more than six million copies of its 13 Gossip Girl novels, will publish the new novel in October with an announced 100,000-copy first printing. Gossip Girl heroines Blair Waldorf and Serena van der Woodsen become trendsetting serial killers in Gossip Girl, Psycho Killer, Cecily von Ziegesar’s tongue-in-cheek reimagining of her 2002 novel that launched the bestselling series.

Psycho killer cecily von ziegesar