Mary Berman: Every Edit Felt Surgical
In this interview, author Mary Berman discusses how a busy wedding season inspired her debut horror novel, Until Death.
Mary Berman is a Philadelphia-based writer. She earned her MFA in creative writing from the University of Mississippi, and she also holds a BA in writing seminars from Johns Hopkins University. Her short works have been published in Cicada, PseudoPod, Fireside, and elsewhere.
In this interview, Mary discusses how a busy wedding season inspired her debut horror novel, Until Death, the strange experience of a story finally being out in the world for readers, and more.
Name: Mary Berman
Literary agent: Stephanie Delman and Allison Malecha at Trellis Literary Management
Book title: Until Death
Publisher: Little, Brown
Release date: May 19, 2026
Genre/category: Horror
Elevator pitch: “’Say Yes to the Dress’ meets Rosemary’s Baby” (Margie Sarsfield) in this fresh, darkly funny horror novel in which a woman finally agrees to marry the man of her mother’s dreams. . . only to discover that wedding planning will eat you alive.
What prompted you to write this book?
I had the idea for Until Death in the summer of 2023, when all my friends were getting married or engaged, and all their friends were getting married or engaged. What surprised me about that summer was not just the density of weddings — although that too — but the fact that it seemed like suddenly, weddings were all we talked about. The venues, the dresses, the menus, the expense, the mothers-in-law, all this travel to Oklahoma or Italy. I assure you that before this summer, most of my friends never talked about weddings, and now it felt like all we care about. I could feel the obsession worming into my brain and making me crazy.
So obviously I was like, I should write a horror novel about that.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
As I said, the original idea started to germinate in the summer of 2023, and the novel will be released in May 2026. So, the novel will have taken almost exactly three years to go from concept to publication.
I’m a big outliner, so—possibly disappointingly for the readers of Writer’s Digest—the idea didn’t change too much after I brought it to the page! Between myself, my literary agents, and my editor, the novel was edited many times, but every edit felt surgical; the bones of the novel always remained true to my initial conception of the thing.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
The biggest surprise came after review copies were released about six months before publication. There’s something very alien feeling about the sensation of knowing lots of strangers are reading your work.
I’ve been in creative writing workshops since I was 18, so I’m used to having my work critiqued; I’m very used to rejection; and I’ve published short fiction and essays, all of which have also been read by a (very small) public. I would have expected all that to prepare me for the shock of having my work widely read and reviewed—and it did not! It turns out to be uniquely bizarre to just ... offer something you’ve made to the universe and have more than, like, two strangers pick it up and form an opinion on it. It’s thrilling, it’s aspirational, but it’s also intensely strange.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
The best surprise was when I landed on the first line. I had written the full manuscript, and I was almost finished with my own pre-agent edits. And then that line came to me. That’s all I’ll say.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
I want them to have fun reading it!
I also think this book will really resonate with a certain type of reader, and I hope those readers find it. The main character is pretty spiky and also a people-pleaser, but over the course of the novel she gets better at putting herself first (well, eventually). I’d love for people who are on the same journey to find the book and connect with it.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
I’ve got a mercenary one: I think writers should use comp titles much earlier in the writing process, long before they think of querying. Comp titles—or “comparative titles”—are typically thought of as a tool to tell an agent (or, later, an editor) which books your book is like. I argue that writers should think of this as they’re formulating the book: not in a hackish way, but if the books you perceive as akin to yours all have something in common—word count, point-of-view, verb tense, whatever—then it’s worth knowing that before you start.
