The Borough Press pre-empts Emma Cleary's 'Rosemary's Baby'-style literary horror debut

HarperCollins UK, Canada and US have pre-empted a literary horror debut, All Those Strangers by Emma Cleary, a "dark, unsettling queer horro story about motherhood", dubbed Sally Rooney meets “Rosemary’s Baby”.  

World English Language rights were sold in a deal brokered by Evan Brown and Amanda Orozco at Transatlantic literary agency in Toronto. Suzie Dooré, editor at large for The Borough Press, acquired for the UK alongside Jennifer Lambert, editor-in-chief at HarperCollins Canada, and Liz Velez, assistant editor at Harper/HarperPerennial in the US.  

All Those Strangers begins when Brooke flees a broken romance and arrives in Vancouver to help her older, estranged half-sister Izzy to recover from reproductive surgery. But inside Izzy’s crumbling apartment building, "its halls haunted by an elderly long-time occupant known only as ’Medusa’, new frictions and old, unhealed wounds emerge".

Cleary said: “I wrote this story about sisters, art and the uncanniness of the body with my whole, terrified heart.” 

Dooré said: “As someone who grew from a creepy, horror-loving child into a creepy, horror-loving adult, I fully embrace literary horror’s renaissance (not that it ever went away for some of us) – and this book is exactly what I have been looking for. Beautiful writing, utter originality and an unforgettably haunting plot – I had to have it, and am so glad my North American colleagues agreed.” 

Cleary is a writer and editor from Liverpool, now living in Vancouver. Her short fiction and essays have been published in Best British Short Stories, James Baldwin Review, and Canadian Literature, among other journals.

She is editor-in-chief at Geist magazine and former managing editor of literary magazine PRISM international. She holds a PhD in literature and recently graduated with an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia.