Benjamin Dean on Bury Your Friends
"When you’re thinking up different ways for people to die, your search history starts to look very suspicious."
What was supposed to be a lowkey exam results day celebration became a bloody murder scene in Bury Your Friends. What’s worse — the killer is demanding the friend group to evict one person from the house every hour. Bury Your Friends is not for the faint-hearted but if you can stomach the bloody scenes, you will find yourself on a thrilling. ride
Bury Your Friends is set in a sprawling mansion and it’s making us a little scared of big houses. Why do you think the locked-room murder mystery trope continues to be so effective?
I’ve always loved and hated big houses for the exact reasons you’ll find in Bury Your Friends. I went to stay in the middle of nowhere in this huge country home just before writing the book and I was obsessed…until it got dark and then I just wanted to go home! I think it’s losing control that makes the locked-room trope so effective. The idea that something bad is going down in such a contained space and you can’t escape it? Yeah, that’s terrifying!
What did your search history look like while writing Bury Your Friends? And what’s it like coming up with all these gruesome ways to die?
It looked very alarming. When you’re thinking up different ways for people to die, your search history starts to look very suspicious. I’m always ready to use the I’M AN AUTHOR I SWEAR alibi at a moment’s notice if a swat team kicks down my door!
We love how the book opens with conflicting statements. It’s so compelling that we could imagine the whole novel written like this. What was it like crating that prologue, and what drew you to that structure?
It was actually pretty late on in the process when those statements came to fruition. I’ve always loved that kind of dialogue-only, reality TV/true-crime documentary confessional interview style format in books. I think it enables a bunch of different (and conflicting) perspectives on the same situation. I knew I wanted the opening to be about two boys going missing and only one of them coming home, and I think on that day I was struggling to get the tone right, so I just started making notes that I was planning on turning into prose. Then I just wrote the ‘everybody loved Patrick’ and ‘everybody hated Patrick’ lines and it hit me that this was how I should start the book. I would love to do a whole book in a similar format in the future.
Can you also share with us how you balance dropping hints while still keeping readers guessing?
It’s a tricky tightrope walk every time you write a thriller – you need to give just enough away without spoiling the twists too early! For me, I like to map out various reveals and the clues that hint to them, then dive in and start writing to see what happens. The polishing comes later on in the editing stage, so I just focus on what I think will push the story forward while maintaining pace and excitement.
Bury Your Friends explores how friendships can unravel after a certain point in life. Without giving anything away, do you think Noah and his closest friends would remain best friends after everything that happens?
Oh my god, I’m torn! I think they would, which surprises me to be honest. There’s a line near the beginning of the book where Noah wonders if the group as a whole would still be friends if they woke up as strangers or if they’re just sticking together as a nod to their shared nostalgia, which I think happens to everyone at some stage. People grow up and grow apart, even when you’re close friends. But I think they have a tight bond and despite going in different directions, I like to think they’d remain close.
In fact, do you often imagine what your characters’ lives are like after the final page?
Not really to be honest! I get scenes in my head of certain characters years after the story takes place which gives me a small idea as to what I think they would be up to long after the story ends, but I much prefer to hear a reader’s take on what they think the future holds for them. It’s a real insight into what they’ve taken away from the book.
