This Stays Between Us

Host Poppy discusses This Stays Between Us with author Margot McGovern.

This Stays Between Us is Shortlisted for the 2026 CBCA Book of the Year Awards for Older Readers.

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Margot McGovern's homage to 90s horror films and final girls will keep you on the edge of your seat.

Four girls share a cabin on their school retreat - in an abandoned town where the ghost of Smiling Jack is known to haunt the isolated campers.

Shelley is the new girl with her own haunted past.
Mack made things awkward by kissing her best friend.
Priya thinks she's ready to take the next step with her boyfriend.
Raffi has a flair for drama, and convinces them all to hold a seance.

But when you call on the darkness, sometimes the darkness replies . . .

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:14

Hello and welcome to the CBCA Shadow Judging Podcast, where young readers share their thoughts on the shortlisted books. My name is Poppy Holden and I'm the host for today's conversation. We will be discussing the 2026 shortlisted title This Stays Between Us by Margot McGovern. We aren't joined by readers this week, so instead I will start with some of my thoughts on the book and then ask some follow-up questions to Margot. I'll just begin with a small summary. This book is about four teenage girls on their last school camp before year 12 starts. Shelly is completely new, attending this camp before transferring to their school the following year. Priya seems to have it all together: good grades, a life plan, and a long-term boyfriend. Mac is openly gay but regretting acting upon her crush on Rafi. Rafi has a boyfriend, but is now questioning her feelings. What begins as an unassuming camp quickly turns into a life-threatening horror that forces the girls to grapple with personal conflicts and work together to survive. I loved this book. My favorite part was actually the genre. I read quite widely in YA, but I read very few horror books that were as suspenseful and genuinely terrifying. It's written in slit perspectives, with each chapter alternating between one of the four main girls, which added to the creepiness, particularly when the characters are separated or disagreeing, which is often. I also found that the point of view stayed clear despite this change. I think this was due to how distinctive the characters' lives and reactions were. Unlike other books I've read where the characters blur or it feels unnecessary to have those separated perspectives, I felt it gave every character room to breathe and amplified that horror. Each character remains genuine throughout the book. They all have their own problems that feel authentic while connecting to the wider plot line. I felt like I could understand and empathize with each character in different ways. A theme I really enjoyed in the book was the presentation of high school. The female friendship group felt very authentic and honest in its portrayal of the issues they were experiencing without falling into any stereotypes. I also found the more confronting themes like sexual assault relevant and well-written. I really loved the setting of the novel as well. While the 2000 time period isn't relatable to me, I thought it was a clever technique to get around the use of phones, which furthered the isolation and therefore frightening nature of many situations. Also, just the landscape of it being in this old mining town in Australia and this slightly dodgy camp was relatable to me. I felt like many high schoolers could understand the experience of going to a camp that is run down and faintly terrifying. One of the most memorable scenes for me was when Priya was returning from her boyfriend's cabin and Smiling Jack appears. Like the rest of the novel, it didn't actually feel like I was reading a book. I wasn't conscious of getting to the end of a sentence, turning pages, or finding out another plot point. Instead, I could see and hear everything they could. Nothing felt overexplained, yet at the same time the setting was vivid to me. The fear felt real. In many ways, this book, particularly this moment, was an equivalent level of suspense and immersion to a horror movie. In this scene, I was running with prayer and genuinely terrified for my life. Now we're joined by Margot McGovern, author of This Stays Between Us. Firstly, I wanted to ask if my thoughts on your novel were what you intended.

Speaker 3:45

Oh thank you so much for having me and for I think giving such a beautiful insight into the book. I need to take you on tour with me. Yeah, I think I'm so pleased that the four characters and their voices sort of came through as distinct and strong. You know, obviously it's a horror novel, but I wanted to make sure that within that it was very character-led. And this was my first time writing a multi-perspective novel. So that was definitely one of the big challenges was making sure that each character had her own things going on and that those characters remained very distinct. And I'm also really thrilled that it, you know, it read kind of like watching a horror movie. That was definitely something that I was going for. You know, films were such a big inspiration for the book. So I'm really glad you got that sense of like watching a teen horror movie from it. Definitely.

Speaker 1 4:40

As I mentioned, I found this book an awesome presentation of horror. But this genre choice is very different from your first YA novel, Neverland. Why did you decide on horror apart from movies? And how are you able to create this story so effectively?

Speaker 4:56

Well, I think I've always been a really big fan of horror and but a bit nervous to, you know, to try writing it because I sort of wasn't sure if I could pull it off, really. But I think I really enjoyed writing the darker elements of Neverland. And so when I was looking for my next project, it was during the pandemic, and I think I was drawn to reading a lot of horror, and I could sort of see that there was a bit of a gap in that there wasn't a lot of Australian young adult horror out there. So I was like, I feel like there's a gap here and that I could fill that. And then I was just drawing on my love of the genre and particularly going back to the 90s teen slashes that I loved growing up and wanting to kind of embrace that, but then also sort of bring it into the 21st century a little bit and create a story that spoke to teenagers today. Yeah, I think that does it very effectively.

Speaker 1 5:47

It is so immersive and it does feel very relevant. The characters were obviously part of that, they're all very real. And as you mentioned, it's the first time, your first time doing that, which is I find very impressive. It's done so well. How challenging was it to develop all those different characters and create the distinctions and their different voices as well?

Speaker 6:08

Yeah, it was a big challenge. And when I first outlined this book to my agent, she's like, This is going to be the big thing that's tricky with this book. So I kind of knew going in that that was something I needed to focus on. So with each girl, I kind of thought about what are the challenges that she is going to have to overcome in this story, so that each girl had like specific things that they would need to work through. But then I also thought a lot about the relationships that each girl had with the other girls and the other characters beyond that as well. So before I started doing anything, I really sat down and plotted those out. And that kind of became the backbone of the story. So I had, yeah, this very clear idea of who these four people were and what all their challenges were going to be. And then I had to sort of build the story around helping them through that. Cool. So I guess the bigger plot line around like smiling jack and stuff all came after the characters. Yeah, I guess they were kind of it's so, you know, when you talk about the writing process, it's like it's never quite as clear-cut as you know, you'd like it to be. So I think I knew I wanted to write this kind of slasher, and but then I wanted to make sure that it was very character-driven, which slashes sometimes aren't. So that felt like a big challenge as well. I kind of in my head, because the book is set in the year 2000, in my brain, I was like, I want this to feel like a scream movie, but also a Dawson's Creek episode. So I was like, how do I bring all of the kind of the drama and the depth, but then also have the kind of the fun and the, you know, running around chase scenes in the dark and things like that. So yeah, there was kind of that trying to marry those things and trying to make sure that the challenges that the girls were facing were kind of being, I guess, symbolically represented through the horror in the story as well.

Speaker 1 7:51

Yeah, I definitely got that. And I feel like that also comes through with all the themes that are in the novel, with how they appear from the friendship groups, the sexual orientation, consent, and the self-defense. So, what inspired those choices specifically?

Speaker 8:06

Yeah, I think coming to horror, because I've loved it for so long, I was like, what kind of horror am I going to explore here? And I really wanted to write about the horror of being a teenage girl, I guess. And, you know, the you know, the different aspects of that. And also sort of looking at, because the book is set, you know, a quarter of a century ago, and sort of looking at what kind of challenges teenagers faced in the past and how has that changed and how has it not changed now? And also, I like I grew up reading Carrie by Stephen King, you know, which is about a teenage girl who's got a whole lot of things going on. Um, and it's kind of, you know, that sort of remains, you know, over 50 years later, the kind of gold standard of like teenage girl horror. But Stephen King has talked about how difficult it was to create that character and how he found it really hard to relate to her and how he, you know, had to get his wife to help him and stuff. And I was like, I love Stephen King, I love that book. But I was like, as a girl, I think I can probably address some of these things and talk about things that sort of concerned me when I was a teenager and that I think are still relevant for teenagers today. So yeah, that was kind of where I started. I was like, what is the horror of being a teenage girl and how can I explore that? No, I love that.

Speaker 1 9:20

In exploring those, particularly the confronting themes. Did you have concerns about if that would narrow your audience? As you mentioned, Neverland, your prior novel, had those serious themes as well. So, how was the audience for that book? And yeah.

Speaker 9:35

Yeah, look, it's, I mean, when you're writing mature content, I'm always very conscious of how I'm framing that for younger readers. But I do really think that anything teenagers experience has a place in the stories that we are telling for them. And I think, you know, I'm not trying to appeal to everybody with my books. You know, they are books for readers who are looking for something that is a little bit darker and a little bit more mature. And I do think the books should be challenging for readers as well. You know, they should take us that little bit further than we've maybe gone before. But yeah, I guess it is always about how am I contextualizing this and keeping in mind that it is for teenagers and trying to make it appropriate for them. But I have found we put a content warning on this book, and I was sort of like, I don't know how it's going to be received, but the response has been fantastic and the audience I think has actually been a lot broader than I thought, which has been wonderful. So yeah. Awesome.

Speaker 1 10:33

Going back to the book and the writing of the plot, you mentioned that setting it in Australia was important to bring sort of those influences to a context that was relevant to Australia now. But is there other ways the setting was important that camp? And what was the goal for the reader in that way?

Speaker 10:53

Oh, that's a good question. Um, I think so. The book is set in the fictional ghost town of Bayton, but it's inspired by a real ghost town called Inniston, uh, which is on Naranga Country or the York Peninsula, which is where I went on a school camp when I was in year nine. Um, and it was terrifying. It was exactly as it is in the book, pretty much. So, you know, we were kind of taken, it was all girls, and we were taken to this town, put into these old mining cottages that have been like not really done up, they were pretty rustic. And our teachers were staying in another hut that was like a kilometer away, and we had these two knights just out in the bush, sort of semi-fending for ourselves. And it was, it was terrifying. And I, you know, it made such an impression on me. I thought at some point I would love to write a story that sort of explored this. And, you know, I think because it was a long time ago when I came to write the book, I'm like, surely it wasn't kind of as as you know, bad as I remembered. And I went down to the town to do some research, and it was exactly as I remembered it. It was, it's so remote and it's such a strange, eerie place, but also a very beautiful place. The York Peninsula is stunning, it's it's very wild and rugged. And not a lot of people have been there. Like, even it's in South Australia, and even within South Australia, there's just not a lot of people that have heard of this place. And I was like, oh, it's such a shame that there aren't that many stories set here. It's it feels like this incredible place to explore in a story. So I really wanted to bring that in. And for me as well, I think so much of the horror that I read growing up, and even the horror I read now is set overseas. It comes from the US or the UK a lot of the time. Um, and certainly I think for authors in Australia, there is increasing pressure to set your stories overseas because then they will, you know, you'll sell international rights and you can make a bit more of a living from writing. But for me, it's I think it's really important that we have stories for young people that are set in, you know, a familiar environment and with characters that could be characters that they're going to school with and that we have that familiarity.

Speaker 1 13:01

Yeah, it was definitely familiar. Year nine camps are horrifying. And also with that setting and the descriptions in the book, I mentioned it before how it didn't feel like it was oversharing at any point or like over-describing, but it all felt like I could visualize the cabin exactly and I like knew the layer and I knew everything.

Speaker 13:21

I just wanted to know how you managed that, how you did that. Yeah, well, so I did do this research trip where I went and spent two nights by myself in this town to just see what it was like. And I made myself, you know, walk around in the dark and like took lots of video and photos. So I had sort of lots to draw on. And then I also the lodge where the four girls are staying is not really based on any one particular lodge in that town. I made it up and I used some like floor plan software to like draw it up. So I had a big map on my wall so I could sort of map where everything was and where everyone was. Yeah, so it was it was a lot of research and having maps of the town up on my wall and sort of looking at, you know, what plants there were around, what animals there were around, what does the wind sound like down there, like you know, if someone screams, how far away can they hear it? You know, those sorts of things. So there was a lot of really practical research, which was so much fun to do.

Speaker 1 14:15

So that's awesome. And you mentioned, just for a final question, you mentioned that you were inspired by horror films from that time, but were there other influences for this novel? I did notice at the start the quote from Frankenstein and obviously naming character Shelley, but yeah, is there any other influences?

Speaker 14:32

Yeah, I think, you know, I love horror movies and 90s slasher movies are my favourites, but I read very broadly within the horror genre and sort of more generally. So I was I was also looking back towards, you know, from right from Frankenstein through to where we are now. I'm very inspired by the Gothic. Um, the town, as I said, it's called Bayton, which was named after Barbara Bayton, the Australian Gothic writer. And I think there's, you know, there's a lot of kind of horror references sprinkled throughout the book, which are there for readers who might pick up on those. So it really, it's a love letter to 90 slashes, but also just to the horror genre, which was so important for me as a teenager. I think like it felt like this place that I could go to and kind of figure things out. So it felt very special to start writing into that genre and contributing to it.

Speaker 1 15:20

Thank you. Before we finish, I wanted to share why someone should read this book in one sentence. This Days Between Us is a thrilling horror that is suspenseful and frightening throughout while presenting genuine, relatable characters. It's simply a must-read. A big thank you to Margot for joining us today, and thank you for listening to the CBCA Shadow Judging Podcast .