Photo by Henriette Lazaridis

Bestselling author Rory Power’s latest YA novel Kill Creatures (Delacorte) is a tour de force of teenage friendship, crushes, and revenge through the riveting perspective of Nan, who is hiding the fact that she killed her three best friends. This sounds like a massive plot point, but Power’s book is no less suspenseful for this early reveal as she thrillingly teases out what happened that summer night when Nan entered Saltcedar Canyon with Luce, Jane, and Edie, and walked out alone. The other three were never seen again—until now, a full year later, when Luce reappears miraculously with no memory of the past 12 months.

In discussing the choice to reveal Nan’s misdeeds early on, Power says that it provided her an interesting way to challenge herself. “I think the who-done-it question is also a why-done-it question of like, we’re never just satisfied with knowing who did it. We want to know the whole story.”

Nan’s voice is by turns funny and fierce: “If I ever kill her again, it’ll be with my bare hands,” she seethes, aggrieved at her friend’s mysterious reappearance, which complicates her identity as a best friend in mourning but more, causes the sheriff to start poking around. Power considers the teen unique among her work.

“I felt like someone in her position—and especially that age where everything is the biggest thing that’s ever happened, so everything is also like the smallest thing that’s ever happened—I felt like she would respond in this wry way...that was really fun for me to lean into. Of the characters that I’ve written before, she’s unique in that fact,” Power says. “For most of the other protagonists I’ve written, they take things very seriously. And so it was fun to just kind of, like, poke a little bit at the absurdity of the whole thing.”

The book’s Utah setting of the fictional Saltcedar Canyon, revealing its vast secrets as its lake dries up, is based on Glen Canyon, where the Colorado River was dammed along Utah and Arizona to create popular vacation destination Lake Powell, also now decreasing in size as remnants of the past reemerge.

“That kind of resurfacing was really cool to me,” Power says, adding that while she’s wanted to set a book in a canyon for a while, Kill Creatures was the perfect opportunity. “This thing that [drives their] livelihood is kind of drying up and there’s this sense of dead-endedness to everything that I think kind of contributes to the way that Nan is like, ‘This might as well happen, like, okay. I’m going with it.’”

It’s a fun, layered novel, and Power hopes that readers take away a “thoughtfulness for memory and perspective,” saying “there’s so much to learn from other people and there’s so much to be curious about.”

And of that—no spoilers—ending of Kill Creatures, when asked if she would ever return to this world, Power says that while she is currently working on an adult project, “never say never.”