Rachel Harrison is back with Kiss, Slay, Replay, a darkly playful new horror novel that further establishes her as one of the genre’s most distinctive voices.
In a genre where history has a habit of repeating itself (pun intended), it takes plenty of guts to lean into familiar conventions — but Harrison does so with a fresh, incisive sensibility. Rather than shy away from the clichés, she exploits them to the full, turning a familiar wedding-from-hell setup into a bloody, darkly playful meditation on survival, déjà vu, and the nightmare of being trapped in the same story on repeat.
In Kiss, Slay, Replay, Willa Sullivan’s best friends are getting married, but the dream wedding quickly becomes a nightmare when a masked killer tears through the reception. Then Willa wakes up to find herself back at the start of the wedding day. As the same events begin to unfold again, she realises she is trapped in a murderous time loop – condemned to relive the wedding, and its bloody aftermath, until she can find a way out.
To celebrate the release of the book, CinemaChords’ Howard Gorman sat down with Harrison, who reflected on the challenge of putting a fresh spin on the time-loop horror premise, the comparisons the novel inevitably invites with films such as Happy Death Day, Final Destination, Until Dawn and Palm Springs, and her decision to centre the story around characters in their late 30s rather than the younger protagonists more commonly associated with the genre. Harrison also discussed the creation of the novel’s uniquely unsettling killer and the way Willa’s anxiety and OCD give her scepticism about the déjà vu she is experiencing a convincing psychological grounding, keeping readers fully locked into the unfolding time loop.
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