The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre by Philip Fracassi
Tor Nightfire (September 2025)
The Synopsis
Brimming with dark humor, violence, and mystery, The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre is a blood-soaked slasher sure to keep readers guessing until the very last page.
Rose DuBois is not your average final girl.
Rose is in her late 70s, living out her golden years at the Autumn Springs Retirement Home.
When one of her friends dies alone in her apartment, Rose isn’t too concerned. Accidents happen, especially at this age!
Then another resident drops dead. And another. With bodies stacking up, Rose can’t help but wonder: are these accidents? Old age? Or something far more sinister?
Together with her best friend Miller, Rose begins to investigate. The further she digs, the more convinced she becomes: there’s a killer on the loose at Autumn Springs, and if she isn’t careful, Rose may be their next victim.
(Interview conducted by Rick Hipson)
CEMETERY DANCE: Philip, I really appreciate you taking the time to chat abut your newest book, The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre, which may be a mouthful, but there’s a lot going on in this one. To kick off our conversation, and as someone who currently works in a long-term care facility, I feel compelled to ask if you set out to write this book because you happen to not like the elderly, or if there’s other motivating factors that fueled this story for you.
PHILIP FRACASSI: No. I mean, quite the opposite. I think the characters in the book have a lot of depth. They have a lot of desires and they’re very fleshed out. My lead character, Rose Dubois, is incredibly smart and tenacious. One of the themes of the book is actually about respecting the elderly and our elderly generations, and how we treat them. So, that’s one of the big underlying themes of the book.
At its top level, it is definitely a slasher. A lot of folks do get killed in horrific ways, so there is that element. But no, the initial idea for the book had really nothing to do with a retirement home. My wife and I were in Virginia, I was touring for Boys in the Valley. This was in the fall of 2023, and we were at this Marriott and it was sort of at the top of this hill. There were three or four old brick buildings and beautiful green rolling hills surrounding the area. As we were taking an evening stroll around this campus I made the comment: boy, this seems more like a retirement home than a hotel. For whatever reason, it just kind of clicked and I started thinking about, well, what if this was a retirement home? Maybe I could set the story here, and what would be a cool story? And, oh, what if it was a slasher? That’d be kind of fun. And the next morning I sent my agent a one-page summary called The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre saying this is my next idea. She loved it, and that became this book, two years later.
Fantastic. And, and the really cool thing, too, is, like with all of your stories, you put such a touch of humanity in them that no matter the supernatural or horrific elements that might takes place in your stories, you tend to make them so relatable by inserting your signature style of humanizing these characters so well.
I read on an Instagram post of yours about how this story was particularly personal to you. Assuming you don’t have any direct run-ins with any serial killers, what aspects of this story were you personally connected to?
I’m not sure where exactly I said that, but in the afterword I do address it and how I basically, like I just mentioned, came up with this idea.
I sent it to my agent, and then literally three days later, give or take, I was in New York City. I was continuing to tour. I pitched my editor the idea, and she loved it. When I pitched it to her, I saw the book being more of a dark comedy with ultra violence thrown in. I hadn’t really gotten too into it. Like I said, I just came up with the idea so I was beginning to imagine set pieces and how it would work and who the characters might be. But when I pitched it, I thought of it as being a little bit lighter, more of a fun slasher. I had never really written one of those. But during the writing process of the book, both of my parents passed away.
I’m so sorry to hear that, Philip.
Thank you. My father suffered from dementia, and I had to take care of him for a couple months in Detroit. Very shortly after he passed, my mother had heart complications, then she passed away. There was a lot that happened to me in that period of time. Not just the emotions of it and the loss and the hardships of it, but also the conversations that I had with my father when he was suffering from dementia, the things that he would say and the struggles that we had with the hospice care.
Then when my mother was sick and the struggles we had with, you know, with insurance and where was she gonna go and what options did she have? I was really immersed in all of these end-of-life conversations. A lot of that went into the book because it was so impactful to me and opened my eyes to a lot of what will happen to everybody. You know, we’re all hopefully gonna live long enough to get old and be infirm and then need to make those decisions. How do you organize the last years of your life? What do you want that to look like? How does that affect your family? And the whole idea of caring for someone who is very sick.
All of that stuff ended up in the book, and the book became thematically much heavier and much more intense and in-depth than I had originally anticipated. It’s still a slasher and it’s still pure adrenaline-fueled entertainment. There’s still some comedic moments, absolutely some dark comedic moments, but it’s also got this real beating heart to it now because of what I was going through while I was writing it.
Oh, that’s amazing. And, I’ve certainly seen quite a bit of that through my experience of working for a long-term care center. Actually, for the first eight months where I now am I worked in our only lockdown residential section where every resident there had advanced dementia and were also exit seeking, which is why it was locked down. That’s important that you decided to really tackle the beating heart of what it’s like to live in such a space. I think that in doing so in the style that you’ve tackled other difficult human turmoil aspects of your stories, I can see that approach as being cathartic for a lot of folks. As much as I’ve seen families going through that the end-of-life journey with their loved ones, going through the business end of dying and the obviously very emotional part of it, well, as much as you try to put yourself in their shoes, you don’t know what it’s like until you’re faced with the situation yourself.
It’s great that you’re able to translate your experience into part of the book.
Philip, in the synopsis of this book, your main character, Rose Dubois, is described as not being your average Final Girl. Suffice to say that we all get to a certain point when we’ve read and watched so many of the final girls, we start to we know what to generally expect from them. I feel there’s a certain spectrum they tend fit into whether they’re naïve and unequipped and make it to the end by sheer luck and willpower alone, or they’re youngish and physically fit or very clever and rise to the occasion despite the odds or somewhere in between. So, what is it about Rose, other than the obvious fact she’s in her seventies, that separates her from the typical average Final Girl?
Well, I think I that marketing copy is what it is, and I think the idea is that it’s not told from a trope perspective. It’s not your average Final Girl and it’s true that you don’t often have a final girl that’s in her late seventies, but you also don’t have a slasher set in a retirement home, so… In that sense, Rose is very much the central figure of the story. She’s very much the one who is playing the sleuth. The story, in addition to being a slasher and all the other things that I mentioned — thematically intense, having dark comedic moments and all that — and the ultra-violence, which it does have, there’s also a whodunit aspect to it ’cause you don’t know who’s behind these killings. Rose and her friends integrate themselves into the mystery of it. There’s even a chapter which plays into this a little bit, which questions how seriously the local detectives take the fact that old people, elderly people out of the retirement home, are dying? The way the killer is dispatching people leaves an ambiguity to whether they were killed or whether they died by an accident or otherwise. That’s a lot of what is at play.
Rose is an amazing character. I would say she’s not your average Final Girl in the sense that she, in addition to her age being unique, Final Girls a lot of times are sort of like the outcast. They’re the ones who don’t fit into the group, whereas Rose is very much at the center of everything and very integrated into the community. I think the way she deals with the killer — or killers because I’ll keep it super vague — I think when you read the book, you’ll get a really strong sense of what she had to go through to get to this point of her life. You learn a lot about Rose’s past during the course of the story and how it plays into what’s happening to her in the present. There’s a lot of moving pieces, a lot of characters in this book. Between the mystery and the slasher aspect of it and the whodunit aspect of it, I think people will have a lot of fun trying to figure out what exactly is going on at Autumn Springs.
I love the fact that if I were to pin any sort of style on you, it’s that most of your stories are written with a very layered approach, much like a melting pot with all these different tropes. I can think of a lot of writers who consider their setting first and then their story comes out of that. I’m curious to know if there were any advantages to the storytelling because of the setting, or if perhaps you uncovered some potential disadvantages or restrictions you had to be aware of that you maybe couldn’t get away with as a result of putting your story inside of a retirement home?
No. I mean, like my novel Boys in the Valley, I think one of the advantages of setting the story in a very tight community is that it’s a very contained story. I think that’s an advantage for me as a writer and also for the reader, because the story is very contained. 95% of this book takes place at the retirement home versus, like, my novel A Child Alone with Strangers, which is all over the place with different cities and all that stuff until it all kind of condenses. I like the idea of immersing the reader into this community, really giving the reader a sense of the place, a sense of the characters there. A lot of early reviewers have even commented, which makes me very happy, that they definitely felt like they were part of this community, that they knew these people and felt like they were at this facility.
So, I think that’s one of the advantages of doing a mystery or a slasher story set in a containing situation. Much like the movie The Thing or Alien, you can focus on that one thing and focus on the characters there and drill deeper into the ground of that place versus having to over explain. Even though there are 80 plus people who live here and there’s nurses and doctors and administrators and detectives and such, I tried to keep the focus on a small group of characters and the perspectives from a small group of characters so that the reader gets to be comfortable with those voices and gets comfortable with those characters when they start going through the book.
Certainly as a reader, I find when I get to spend a lot of time in that one place with a limited number of characters to focus on and learn about, I feel as if I am just as familiar with them as the other characters in the story are apt to be, which for me comes across very organic and engaging.
If I can touch back on what you bought up about how you blend various tropes into your stories, I think it’s fair to say that in less capable hands, having a whodunnit slasher tale with humour and thriller detective aspects set in a retirement home would likely get weighted down by confusion and cluttered plotlines. Yet, you have evidently pulled it off once again which many critics have chimed in on with agreement.
By incorporating such a richly layered storytelling style in your work, what value do you find that having that layered approach gives to you as a writer, and to add to that, what value do you think this approach provides your readers based on how their feedback might compare with your intentions?
Yeah, I do write stories — the way you phrased it is pretty good — that have layers. I’ve even made the comment before that there are different ways to read some of my stories, even the short stories. In a lot of ways, I write the stories so if you wanna read it as like a page-turning thriller, you can read it that way. If you wanna slow it down and get more into the nuts and bolts of what’s happening or maybe some of the themes of what’s going on, you can read it that way. An example would be my science fiction novel The Third Rule of Time Travel. If you wanted to dig deeper into the physics of time travel or the scientific aspects of that story and really start down the rabbit hole of how the time machine works, you could. Or you could just read it as a straight thriller. I wrote a story called “Mandala” which is in my story collection, Behold the Void. It’s kinda like a thriller, and it’s kinda like a ghost story, but you can read that story a couple different ways. Even the ending of that story, you could read it as one way or another way depending on how much time you really wanna spend thinking about it or dig down.
I wrote a story once called “Murder by Proxy” which is in the No One Is Safe book, and it’s a sci-fi story set in the future. It’s also a noir detective story. So I mashed together a fifties pulp detective story with a future sci-fi story which was fun for me because I like the idea of having this wise-cracking, fedora-wearing detective who talks in this very old timey way. It’s all set in the future and there’s all this technology happening.
I do enjoy slipstream or cross-genre, however you wanna phrase it. With my stories I’m a big fan of at least trying to subvert expectations for readers. I try very hard with my books and stories to give the reader an experience they haven’t had before. Obviously, it’s hard to do because we all stand on the shoulders of giants, as it were, but that’s what I shoot for. I think I do that two ways. One is by mixing genres, like having a dark comedy that has incredible violence that also has like incredible heart. I did that a little bit with Boys in the Valley. I think a lot of people commented about how emotional they got reading that book which is really a possession horror novel.
I like movies that do this too, and I’ve read a couple of screenplays that do this. Like Barbarian, which is a great example, where you have a movie that you think is gonna be one kind of movie and ends up turning it on its head halfway through. You think it’s a crime movie and then it turns out to be a horror film. A Child Alone with Strangers is a little bit like that. The first couple hundred pages of that book is really a crime novel. In the last 300 pages — it’s a 700-page book — it’s a full-blown creature feature. That’s really fun for me to do and I do it for myself because it excites me as a writer. It keeps my blood flowing and keeps my excitement level up. The idea is that the reader is experiencing something very unique and, if nothing else, something they maybe weren’t expecting.
Sometimes it comes back to bite me a little bit. I’ll let people read my book and think it’s gonna be about this, and they’re ready to read a book about that, then it ends up being something different. I think sometimes it disappoints them in a way ’cause they’ve kind of just wanted what they thought they were getting. But I don’t mind that because I’d rather surprise somebody and excite somebody and subvert expectations, like I said, than just give them something they’ve already read a hundred times.
I’m sure the few people that are disappointed are probably exactly that, just a few people who will hopefully try something else out down the road. I also love the idea that, by you creating all these layered tropes, it creates all these sneaky little gateways to other subgenres. For example, I never knew I enjoyed reading science fiction until I read science fiction stories from Richard Matheson, who I love for all his dark stuff. That opened me up to trying out other science fiction-adjacent tories from other authors. To parallel that example, my table neighbor at the last Scares That Cares Author Con, her husband picked your book The Third Rule Of Time Travel because he loves science fiction but wasn’t much of a horror guy. Her husband was glued to the book for the rest of that weekend and seemed incapable of putting it down. Chalk that up as another reader roped into the dark side by way of your science fiction layer.
The science fiction book was an interesting experiment. I think I have fans who love my horror stuff, love Gothic and Child Alone with Strangers and Boys In the Valley. And I feel like, you know, there’s been some pushback from that side of things. They’re like, oh, The Third Rule of Time Travel is really a science fiction thriller. And even people who have read The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre are like oh, this feels kind of more mainstream than his other stuff. And so, they want that same dark horror, and I personally think that Autumn Springs is pretty dark. So I get that, but it’s one of those things where I can’t really worry about how I’m categorized or how I’m marketed or how I’m received from different readers. I just write the stories that I wanna write.
The novel that my agent is shopping right now is a mystery. I’ve written a children’s book. I’ve written a poetry book. I’ve written a book about depression and anxiety that’s totally non-genre called Don’t Let Them Get You Down. I do definitely lean dark, and I definitely lean horror, and horror is sort of my home base because I love writing supernatural fiction. It’s my absolute favorite thing to do, but I also like to experiment. I like to flex my writer muscles a little bit, and I like to expand my horizons, and I do that a lot with my short fiction.
I’m beginning to do it now more with my novels. I would like to write a crime thriller one day soon. My next book is Sarafina, which is definitely that old-school horror vibe. I’m working on a sequel to Gothic right now which will be old-school horror. After that, I’m not sure what’s gonna happen. I might write a thriller, I might write it a science fiction novel. I might write…I don’t know, I’ll write whatever I wanna write that excites me as a writer and then hopefully that excitement carries over to readers. I think if it’s a good story, (readers) are willing to go with you on those journeys. It’s just a matter of creating something that’s entertaining and fresh and well written, and then you kinda hope for the best.
I believe writing with that honesty is going to keep you going for a very long time as well and keep that pool of your constant readers growing. I mean, as a reader — and I know other readers feel the same way — you can tell if you’re reading a book that an author just wasn’t that passionate about and that it was written for the sake of a paycheck or any reasons other than that’s the story the writer simply had to write.
And that’s what I don’t wanna do as a writer, you know? It doesn’t interest me. I know there are a lot of writers who have made amazing careers and are New York Times bestsellers and probably have nice boats and all that good stuff and they give people what they want and they give what they expect, and they do it over and over and over and over again. And that’s great. I’m super happy for everybody involved. But it doesn’t interest me. I’m always trying to write something wholly unique and something that hopefully is fresh and new. I love the idea of a reader picking up one of my books and not really knowing what’s gonna happen, you know? I like that idea and I think a lot of readers do too. You wanna let them know as much as you can in advance, this is a science fiction novel, or this is a YA novel, or this is not genre, but a lot of my core readership, the fans who I speak to a lot and who I engage with a lot, they like reading all the different stuff and it’s a lot of fun for them to take those journeys with me into these different types of storytelling. That’s the beauty of storytelling is that you can enter these new worlds and new characters and you can do things that you haven’t done before and that, to me, is what’s exciting.
A hundred percent. I mean, who wants to eat at fricking McDonald’s every day when you can go to an all-you-can-eat buffet and get all these amazing experiences. Maybe the menu changes on a weekly basis, so you’re never really getting the same thing twice and you can walk away with all these experiences as opposed to, yeah, I got what I expected. There’s no excitement when you’re not stretching your boundaries and your perspectives and that just ends up being boring. So, thank you for not giving us fast food stories.
Philip, I understand you started off your writing career as a screenwriter before you went on to write all these fantastic stories, collections, novels, etc. Fairly recently you had a film adaptation that came to fruition and got made. I think it’s in post-production, if I’m not mistaken, and came from a story which was published in your Beyond the Void collection. This seems rather full circle for you and I’m curious what this means overall to the future of your writing, for the business end of it as well as the creative end of it, or if maybe it’s just another feather in your cap of your many achievements as life-long writer.
It’s definitely cool. It’s definitely great when you have somebody adapt one of your stories into a film or a TV show. I’ve had a lot of starts and stops on that side of things. I think I currently have six or seven different stories under option with different producers and studios. I just announced a week ago my story “Fail-Safe” is being produced by Bad Robot and starring Brie Larson and directed by JT Mollner, who did Strange Darling and wrote The Long Walk screenplay based on the story by Stephen King. Brian Duffield wrote the script. And then Altar was produced by A24. That was filmed last year, in Canada, and it’s in post-production right now. They are currently targeting a 2026 release with that.
It’s hard to say how it affects my writing career. You’d like to think that it’s a boon. I don’t know if it is. I might have to get back to you. I’ll tell you what, it’s a nice paycheck. I’ll say that. It allows me the flexibility to continue writing full time, but I think it’s different for different people. I think every situation is unique. Take Bird Box, for example, my buddy Josh Mailman’s book, which was a huge book and did very, very well, but the movie was a zeitgeist, right? The movie was a cultural phenomenon. It was the biggest movie ever on Netflix. And so, Josh’s book became part of the fabric of the world because everybody knows the movie. Hopefully a lot of those people read the book. So that’s like one extreme.
I think the other extreme is that a movie comes out and some people see it, and some people don’t, and some people know it’s based on a book, but it doesn’t really impact necessarily a writer’s career. I don’t think publishers necessarily care all that much if you’ve had anything adapted, at least based on my limited experience. But like I said, it’s very cool. It’s very fun. Over the last four or five years I’ve worked with different writers, directors and producers.
I wrote a screenplay based on one of my own short stories that hopefully will get (made). It’s been in development forever. I’ve read screenplays that these great screenwriters have written based on my work. I’ve been to set and seen them filming my story these characters that I created. I see them walking and breathing.
That’s got be a huge kick.
It is! It’s very cool and fun and it’s something I hope to do a lot more of in the future. It’s not really something you can control. I have representation who handles that stuff, but to answer your initial question, I don’t know how much impact it has on a publishing career. It’s super cool when it does happen for a lot of reasons, but I don’t think it’s gonna necessarily launch my writing career into a different stratosphere or anything like that.
I think you can get lucky on that front, but for the most part, the writers who are successful, who have successful careers, are writers who are constantly putting out new books and new stories and working every day to create those stories. That’s the grind that writers have to be comfortable with because that’s the only way to maintain success doing what we do.
Absolutely. It definitely sounds like you are a working man’s writer in that sense and that it’s all about the stories and that you’re gonna keep doing that and that you don’t have some fantastical pie in the sky idea that you’re just gonna sit back and wait for these movies to come out.
God, no. I think the odds of getting a movie based on one of your stories actually made is probably about one in a hundred thousand.
It’s fun to get ’em optioned and it’s fun to have people messing around with them and stuff like that, but to get from “Hey, we’d like to make your story into a movie,” to a movie actually going into production is a very, very rare thing. I was very lucky that Altar got made by A24.
I’m really hoping “Fail-Safe” gets made. As for all the other stories that are battering around, you always hope. As Joe Lansdale said, somewhat famously, he’s earned a living on option money where he’s got so many books and stories that have been under option for decades and they just kind of keep rolling over and you can make somewhat of a living doing that. But you don’t ever wait for Hollywood. You gotta keep working, gotta keep writing, keep coming up with new stories, and that’s my focus.
Well, that’s music to my ears and no doubt to everybody else whose reading this as well. As much as we would love to know that you’re enjoying yourself on an island, at least you’re not staying on the island.
No, no island.
Stephen King, he’s got an island, but that’s, Stephen King, right? Maybe if you get a couple movies out you can get invited to the island.
Yeah, I would take an invite to the island. That’d be good.
I think we’ve done a good job of crushing that dream for budding writers.
Good. I hope I crushed everybody’s dreams who is reading. (laughs) I apologize.
I’m some of them just threw their pens out the window and are now questioning what the hell they even bothered to write their first paragraph for if they can’t have it turned into a movie?
Alright, Philip, before we totally crush everybody’s dreams here, let’s refocus on the positive stuff. The Autmn Springs Home Retirement Massacre is available just in time for Halloween.
Yeah, it’s out in the US from Tor Nightfire and, for folks who are reading from the UK or UK Commonwealth’s countries, it’s out from Orbit, and has a really cool, very different alternate cover. For the UK edition, it looks a little more more comical, a little more farcical, I guess. The US is kind of an intense cover. The UK one’s a little brighter and popular. I love ’em both equally.
Perfect. Thanks so much for all your time and being so accessible and open about everything today, Philip. I truly cannot thank you enough for this conversation. As a parting gift, a teaser if you will, for everyone reading this right now, please let everyone know what they should expect to come away with from their visit to The Autumn Springs Retirement Massacre?
I think readers come away with different things, right? Everyone has their own experience. My hope is that you come away having a great time. That’s my hope. My hope is that after you have closed the book, you’re happy that you read it and you’re happy that you spent time there, that it puts a smile on your face and you wanna turn around and tell your buddy or your loved one what a nice time you had or what an enjoyment the story was. I always want the enjoyment of my stories to be my number one priority. We talked about a lot of the themes and different genres, but my number one priority with all of my books and stories is to be entertaining and for people to have fun and to forget a little bit about the horrors of the real world and to just escape. The more immersed people can be and the more they can connect with the characters and all that good stuff, the more they will enjoy the story. That’s the hope.
Listen to Philip Fracassi read a sample chapter from The Autumn Springs Retirement Home Massacre
