Grady Hendrix has a knack for finding the humor in horror.

The novelist burst onto the literary scene in 2014 with Horrorstör, set in an IKEA-esque furniture retailer; the book was a hit with critics and readers who appreciated Hendrix’s absurdist take on, among other things, consumerism and reality television.

Several more novels followed, including My Best Friend’s Exorcism, We Sold Our Souls, The Southern Book Club’s Guide to Slaying Vampires, The Final Girl Support Group, and, last year, How To Sell a Haunted House, which is currently being developed as a film for which Hendrix is writing the script. (He previously wrote the screenplay for the horror-comedy film Satanic Panic and co-wrote the screenplay for another scary movie, Mohawk.)

Hendrix’s latest, Witchcraft for Wayward Girls (Berkley, Jan. 14), follows Neva, a scared, pregnant 15-year-old who’s taken to a home for pregnant young women in Florida by her disappointed father. At the home, she is renamed Fern by Miss Wellwood, the stern house mother, and befriends the three other girls at the facility. The girls are miserable, at least until they meet Miss Parcae, a bookmobile librarian who gives them a copy of a spellbook called How To Be a Groovy Witch. The novel has its share of scares—but also of Hendrix’s trademark laughs.

Hendrix, who’s preparing to go on a tour with the novel, says he’ll be relieved once it’s out in the world.

“This book took me longer than they usually do, and there came a point where I was like, It’s never getting released,” he says. “This book is just my frenemy that lives in my office with me, and it’s never moving out.”

Hendrix spoke to Kirkus via telephone from his home in New York. Our conversation has been condensed for length and clarity.

What made you decide to set this one in a home for unwed mothers in 1970?

I have two older relatives who were both sent away as teenagers, and we didn’t know that until they were in their 70s. They kept it a secret, and one reunited with her son very late in life, and the other wasn’t able to reunite with her child. It always haunted me. These were women I love very much, women I thought I knew, and one of the most important facts about them is that they each had another child that I never had a clue about. I thought, There is a horror story here. These are girls who are teenagers, mostly, who’ve been told they’ve done the most horrible thing in the world, and then they’ve been locked up in a house and hidden away in the woods.

The research you did into these homes must have been pretty horrifying, I would imagine.

It was interesting because these homes have been around for a long time, and they run the gamut. There were girls who said, This was great, because instead of being hidden in my bedroom where everyone hated me, I was around other girls my age who were going through the same thing, and we really looked out for each other. Some people had really kind house mothers and support staff and social workers.

So it ran the gamut, and I wanted to be really careful to make this home not the absolute worst but not the absolute best. There were ones that offered nutritionists and social workers and all kinds of stuff, and there were ones that treated you like a prisoner. I wanted to be somewhere in between.

Did you start writing this book after the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade?

That happened while I was writing the book. When Dobbs happened, my editor and I were like, Oh, crap, we’ve got a book that centers on reproductive rights that’s going to come out in August of an election year. This is not going to be good. Then I blew that deadline, so it’s coming out [six days before Inauguration Day], which is also going to be a very strange time. I don’t know if there’s a not-strange time for this book to come out.

Your books frequently have women protagonists. Do you prefer writing women characters?

It really started as a way to put the characters at arm’s length. If I write a character who’s a dude, they just feel like different shades of me. But making them women, which is radically different from me, I had to step back and look at them as full human beings rather than what I want people to see when they look at me. Some of the stories really lent themselves [to women characters], like My Best Friend’s Exorcism. Friendships in high school were so much more demonstrative and ran so much hotter between girls that I knew than between boys.

We Sold Our Souls started out being a book about a guy. After the 2016 election, I was coming back from a really depressing election party, and I thought, If I’m writing a book about a character to whom the world has said, “You are worthless,” it has to be a woman to feel convincing right now. Immediately the book clicked into place. With this story, it had to be a woman, and with The Final Girl Support Group—there are some final boys but, really, final girls are a more resonant image.

How do you balance the humor and occasional lightheartedness in a novel with a subject matter this serious?

Horror and comedy have the same kind of mechanism: setup, setup, payoff; setup, setup, payoff. I’d be hard pressed to find a horror movie that didn’t have a fair amount of comedy in it, even some really dark ones. I just feel like our lives aren’t one genre. You have amazing sex, and then you get a phone call that your mom died in the middle of it. You walk out after getting fired, and you slip on a banana peel. This stuff sits next to each other, and I really want my books to reflect that. Just getting people to lower their guard and move their attention in another direction so that I can set something up where they’re not looking—humor’s really helpful with that.

A lot of your books have been set in your hometown, Charleston, South Carolina, but this one you set in St. Augustine. What made you decide to move a couple states away for this one?

Because I was talking to one of my sisters and complaining that people from Charleston are obsessed with Charleston and that all they talk about is Charleston. And she said, “Yeah, OK, Mr. I-Write-All-My Books-and-Set-Them-in-Charleston.” And I thought, Oh, dammit. What’s another city? I’d written some stuff set in Savannah, so I was like, OK, moving further south, what’s another historical coastal city with a heavy tourist business? St. Augustine! There you go.

So it wasn’t that the Charleston tourism board was upset at you for scaring people away? Like, You’ll never eat shrimp and grits in this town again?

I wish. I don’t even think the Charleston tourism board knows I exist.

Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.