1--What is the title of your latest release?
GLASS GIRLS
2--What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book?
Alice Haserot is a former child medium who has been free of her abusive family for 16 years—until her sister tracks her down in a grocery store and threatens her with an ultimatum: come back to Ohio and perform a seance on my daughter—or I will tell our abusive mother where you are. Alice is forced to confront the past she thought she buried and the betrayal she committed, the secrets she thought she left behind.
3--How did you decide where your book was going to take place?
I’ve always wanted to set a story in Kirtland, Ohio. I spent about 5 of my very early years living there, and I knew pretty much immediately that this book was the place to do that. The Midwest is a truly haunting spooky place that truly does not get enough representation in fiction.
4--Would you hang out with your protagonist in real life?
I think Alice and I would drive each other crazy in real life. She’s such a deeply internal person, processes things in quiet safety, copes with trauma by avoiding it as hard as she can, whereas I tend to be very open and wear my emotions on my sleeve. I would try to convince her to go to therapy, and she would turn up the volume on her police procedural so she couldn’t hear me.
5--What are three words that describe your protagonist?
Resilient, tender, fighter.
6--What’s something you learned while writing this book?
A truly unbelievable scope of things—this book was my constant companion for the past eight years. It’s taught me about processing trauma, about the security of community, how to stand up for my own body and identity. However, I think the most fun one the deep dive I did into the history of the American Spiritualist movement and Ancient Greek necromantic rites depicted in the Odyssey.
7--Do you edit as you draft or wait until you are totally done?
I tend to write my first drafts as fast as physically possible so I can’t get too in my own head. I think of that first draft as clay—first, I’ve got to see what I’m working with. Only then can I figure out what the actual story is in the editorial phase.
8--What’s your favorite foodie indulgence?
I moved to Paris about ten months ago, and it’s been a whole other experience when it comes to daily decadence in the culinary department. I swear I have a new obsession every month. Right now, my favorites have been croissants stuffed with raspberry jam or the lemongrass sausage rice box from this incredible Vietnamese lunch spot across the street from where I take French language courses. It’s a weekly Wednesday indulgence I cannot exist without.
9--Describe your writing space/office!
I tend to be more of a coffeeshop/outdoors writer! There’s something about the liminal transition of moving into a writing space that settles my brain into ritual, where the environment relaxes my brain into the story space. The bulk of Glass Girls was written in a coffee shop in Madison, Wisconsin called Michelangelo’s. For me, protecting my writing frame of mind is deeply ritualistic, steeped in sensory cues. Each story has its own notebook, its own playlist that I only listen to when I write, its own drink order. If Glass Girls had a taste, it would be the raspberry mocha.
10--Who is an author you admire?
ST Gibson. Her work is incredibly versatile, transcending settings and genres.
11--Is there a book that changed your life?
Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde. The first time I read it, I was fourteen, and it was electrifying. It changed the course of my life. I devoured all of Wilde’s treatises on aestheticism when I was perhaps a bit too young to understand them, and made them my personality for my teen years.
12--Tell us about when you got “the call.” (when you found out your book was going to be published)/Or, for indie authors, when you decided to self-publish.
It was an out-of-body experience. My book was set to go to auction the following day. We were done with meetings for the day, and all there was left to do was wait. I was deep in the depths of re-playing Fallout 4, which is my favorite comfort game to calm my nerves and systematically munching my way through a container of onion rings when my agent called. Zando had offered a pre-empt, and it would be with Gillian Flynn’s Imprint. I spent the whole night sobbing on and off. I was so entirely overwhelmed by the fact that it was real, that it was happening, that I would get to share this book with the world. I think it was the most profound moment of my life to date.
13--What’s your favorite genre to read?
Without a doubt, horror. I am an absolute fiend for anything scary. I’m particularly feral for a good gothic or a dark academia. I blame Picture of Dorian Gray. My favorite lately has been Caitlin Starling’s the Starving Saints, but I’m a perpetual Grady Hendrix fan and I’m in the middle of devouring the audiobook of A Good House for Children by Kate Collins.
14--What’s your favorite movie?
I would say Ramaa Mosley’s Lost Child. I was sobbing for twenty minutes at the ending. I had not had a movie affect me that deeply in a very long time.
15--What is your favorite season?
I used to love autumn when I loved in the Midwest and New England, but living in Paris is slowly converting me to the merits of spring. The way the city just explodes into a riot of color, with pink and purple and yellow blossoming trees just everywhere. There’s a street by my apartment that’s shaded by these massive purple flowering trees, and when you walk beneath it, you’ll later find the petals caught in your hair, your clothes, the folds of your bag. I could get used to this.
16--How do you like to celebrate your birthday?
It’s only rather recently (in the last two years) that I’ve started to really celebrate my birthday in any significant way, but I’m a fan of intimate celebrations. Last year, I visited my best friend in New York and she planned this entire day for me—fancy brunch at Balthazaar’s; walking around shops and checking out the MoMa store; dinner at the MET member’s lounge, followed by drinks since it was their live performance night. This year, my partner took me to a cat café, where we had dinner, and then we got hookah, while I subjected him to my favorite weird arthouse film. To be seen, to be loved—what more is there?
17--What’s a recent tv show/movie/book/podcast you highly recommend?
I am an absolute horror podcast fanatic, and my recommendations list is probably 20 deep right now. I will say right now I am absolutely devouring the Silt Verses which follows two pilgrims trying to worship their illegal river god in a capitalist hellscape where religion has been corporatized. It’s creepy, the world building is decadent, and the main characters are infinitely complex and deeply lovable.
18--What’s your favorite type of cuisine?
Out of cultural loyalty, I have to say Persian, even though I am very, very particular about it. It’s comfort food that reminds me of the summer dinners at my uncles where me and my cousins swarmed the table to fight over the tahdiq (which is this addictive crispy rice that forms on the bottom of the pan when you cook Persian rice) or the pita bread placed under the kabob, which soaks up all the best parts of the meat and roasted tomatoes.
19--What do you do when you have free time?
I’m pretty much constantly in motion. If I’m not writing or reading, I’m painting. If I’m not painting, I’m trotting around the town, looking for pretty and weird things to photograph. If I’m not doing photography, I’m studying a new language or making playlists for specific niche vibes or tumbling headfirst into a new and entirely random research spiral. Entire stacks of books on Anne Boleyn (who gets such a bad rep, by the way) and how she advanced the Protestant agenda? The difference between freeze dried and traditional taxidermy? The impact of relationship banking on Small and Medium Enterprise financing? The evolutionary adaptations of our bodies for social sleeping? I am a font of random knowledge, which makes me an excellent guest at parties.
20--What can readers expect from you next?
GLASS GIRLS was the heartbeat of my creative world for so long, that I have a veritable library of backlogged novel ideas. The book I’m working on now is about navigating spousal violence and the way the narratives others tell about us shape our reality. Without giving too many secrets away, I can tell you that you’ll be seeing dream figures physically manifesting in reality, flesh-eating scarabs à la the Mummy, and swarms of very violent blackbirds coming from me next.
When possession threatens to destroy the ones she loves, a former child medium is forced to face her deadly inheritance and the ghosts she left behind in this electrifying debut.
Girls for the gifts, boys for the grave.
Alice Haserot thought she’d escaped the curse. For sixteen years, she’s lived far from her family and the ghosts she used to conjure. But her past isn’t so easily left behind.
When Alice discovers she’s pregnant and her estranged sister, Bronwyn, turns up on her doorstep, her carefully built new life begins to unravel. Bronwyn offers an ultimatum: one of her daughters is trying to possess the other, and only Alice has the power to save them. If Alice refuses, Bronwyn will go to their abusive mother and expose her location.
Forced to confront the terrors of her childhood, Alice returns home to face the inheritance of her family curse. Tautly paced and gorgeously written, Glass Girls explores the deep, complicated bonds of family and the shadows that follow us, no matter how far we run.
Horror | Women's Fiction | Thriller [Zando, On Sale: June 24, 2025, Hardcover / e-Book , ISBN: 9781638931904 / eISBN: 9781638931911]
Danie Shokoohi is a Paris-based writer and 2020 graduate of the UW-Madison MFA. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Puritan, Glass: a Journal of Poetry, the American Journal of Poetry, New Ohio Review, Lake Effect, the Mississippi Review, the Cincinnati Review, and others. Danie is the Managing Editor at Half Mystic Press, which makes her fall in love with writing again every day. She is a devoted listener of pod-dramas, an avid tarot reader, and the queen of making too many playlists.
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