Gretchen McNeil Books in Order

If you want a classic locked-room slasher: Ten → Relic → They Fear Not Men in the Woods
If you want high school revenge and mystery: Get Even → Get Dirty → Dig Two Graves
If you want dark satire and near-future horror: #MurderTrending → #MurderFunding → #NoEscape
If you want paranormal or speculative suspense: Possess → 3:59

Gretchen McNeil was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, and that background still echoes through her books. A lot of her stories begin in familiar teen spaces, school hallways, sleepovers, weekend trips, and then slide into something much stranger, darker, or deadlier.

Before she was publishing novels, she was training to perform. She studied vocal performance at UCLA and later earned a Master of Music in opera from the Maryland Opera Studio at the University of Maryland.

The opera career she pictured for herself never quite happened. She moved back to Los Angeles, worked in television as an animation coordinator and then a producer, picked up voice-over work, and even performed with the circus troupe Cirque Berzerk. Somewhere in the middle of all that, she started writing fiction. By her own account, the first novel was bad, the second was better, and the third was the one that finally sold.

Possess, her 2011 debut, introduced Bridget Liu, a San Francisco teen who can hear demons and send them back where they came from. It set up several McNeil trademarks right away: a smart young heroine, a fast-moving plot, and horror that never loses sight of character.

Then came Ten, the book many readers still point to first. It traps ten teenagers on an isolated island and lets paranoia do the rest. The novel was later adapted as the Lifetime movie Ten: Murder Island. McNeil followed it with 3:59, a parallel-world thriller about two girls who switch places, and Relic, which turns a trip to a forbidden mine into a grim survival story. Readers who like closed-circle suspense, shifting loyalties, and a steadily rising sense of dread usually feel at home with her work.

She also knows how to make ordinary school politics feel like a full-contact sport.

That shows up clearly in Get Even and Get Dirty, where four girls at an elite prep school form a secret group called Don't Get Mad to push back against bullies and cruel authority figures. Those books later became the screen series Get Even and Rebel Cheer Squad. In I'm Not Your Manic Pixie Dream Girl, McNeil moved into contemporary comedy, following a math-minded teen who tries to solve popularity like an equation. Then #MurderTrending, #MurderFunding, and #NoEscape pushed her further into satire, building a near-future world where punishment, fame, and social media have collapsed into one very ugly spectacle.

More recent books show how comfortable she is borrowing the bones of classic thrillers and rebuilding them for modern readers. Dig Two Graves plays with the idea of a murder pact. Three Drops of Blood turns an office window into a front-row seat for a killing. Four Letter Word brings danger right into a family home. In 2025, she published her first adult novel, They Fear Not Men in the Woods, a folk-horror story set in the forests of rural Washington.

Across all of it, McNeil keeps returning to outsiders, secret grudges, girls who are underestimated, and systems that reward cruelty. Her books are scary, but they also move quickly and often carry a dry, sharp sense of humor.

She is based in Los Angeles and has been publishing since 2011. Whether she is writing YA horror, mystery, or a darker adult tale, she tends to ask the same question in different forms: what happens when the rules of everyday life stop protecting you?