Knowing how to capture a reader’s attention in just a few words is what Joelle Wellington does best. A copywriter by day and author by night, Wellington explores societal fears tinged with racism in her debut novel, the campy, dark, contemporary YA horror-thriller Their Vicious Games (Simon & Schuster). The story shows how one Black teen navigates social inequality as she watches the affluent class morph into raging sadists.
The novel centers on Black middle-upper-class teen Adina Walker, who attends the prestigious Edgewater Academy, where her parents also work. She has had to endure her share of belittlement, and when she finally decides to stand up for herself, everything she has worked so hard for is snatched from her by a classmate from a wealthy, scandalous family.
Unwilling to let her dreams of Yale go without a fight, Adina takes her fate into her own hands and hatches a scheme to infiltrate the social circles of the most powerful and influential family in town—the Remingtons. As Adina grabs the attention of the Remington boys, she gets invited to the Finish, a secretive, cultlike annual event in which teen girls compete against each other for status, marriage, and wealth. Adina quickly finds herself mired in gore and carnage with only her survival instinct as a weapon.
Wellington’s path to publication has been a unique one. PW reported in July on her eight-house auction deal, something that is extremely rare for first-time authors, let alone first-time Black authors. Reflecting on some of the things she has experienced and what her first book taught her, she says, “Throughout my debut year, I felt like I had to say yes to everything, so I was running myself ragged. I learned how to say no, or when to say it’s enough. I think so often, especially for Black women, we feel the need to work and not rest. So I learned to rest.”
She credits her team, which includes agent Quressa Robinson and editor Alexa Pastor, for “always having my back.” When Wellington submitted her manuscript to her agent, her story wasn’t edited down or changed. She recalls just the opposite.
“I know a lot of people talk about how their books have been cut by their editors,” she says. “None of that happened to me. It was so much more of like, ‘I think you can do more. I think you can dig deeper, and you can get weirder,’ which is fun.”
Wellington doesn’t take her publishing success for granted, which is why she says she is always reading crime fiction and thrillers, to hone her skills as a writer. “I try to read a healthy mix of YA and adult, and I think that helps me in terms of my craft and how I address young people,” she says.
As Wellington continues to carve out space for herself in YA, she wants to keep writing for teens who remind her of her younger self: voracious young readers who want to be challenged. She notes that teens are not as clueless as adults may think they are, and that they are capable of handling “harder pieces.” She also admits that she was a precocious reader as a child and found solace in getting lost in books that she couldn’t fully understand at first, such as the works of Megan Abbott, Michael Buckley, and Lemony Snicket.
When writing Their Vicious Games, Wellington turned to her own life as inspiration. “I didn’t think about any current tropes at all, because it was an exercise of my personal catharsis,” she says. She began writing it in summer 2020, “when there was a big racial reckoning happening in America.”
The concept for her book also came from her experiences at school. “I had attended predominantly white institutions almost my entire life,” she says, “and in the summer of 2020, somebody made an anonymous Instagram, where they recounted these racist events at my previous school.” Wellington adds, “So many of the things that were being recorded in that Instagram, I remember similar versions happening to me, and I remember minimizing those incidents just to be able to function at that school without basically falling apart.”
Those details that Wellington recalls from growing up in majority-white spaces are the key ingredients she sees in the new renaissance of Black girls in the horror genre. While she believes that “horror, in general, is on the rise,” she also says that Black girls now feel like they can be the main characters in the horror space, and credits directors Jordan Peele and Nia DaCosta for the much-needed representation. “There were rarely any Black people in the horror movies I watched growing up. It is so rewarding that now I can write my own horror stories where someone who looks like me can be the star and survive against evil.”
And Wellington is doing just that. Her forthcoming book, The Blonde Dies First (Simon & Schuster), is scheduled to be released in summer 2024. She says the book “ties into some horror tropes I want to unpack and subvert.”
Wellington is also appreciative of the feedback she’s been getting from book influencers on TikTok. “I hope that it reaches more and more people and makes them think, even if they don’t particularly like it, because I’m not really in the business of everybody liking my book,” she says. “As long as it makes them think, that is what’s most important to me.”
