Author Lauren Willig on "What Happens at Nightfall" and Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery
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A modern-day visit to an historic cemetery in Brooklyn collides with a Gilded Age curse in a new novel by best-selling author Lauren Willig. She's written more than a dozen books of historical fiction. Mary Calvi talked to her about "What Happens at Nightfall."
Willig told Mary that the idea for the book came during a visit to Green-Wood Cemetery, a National Historic Landmark founded in 1838 covering 478 acres in Brooklyn.
"This book happened entirely because one day my editor said to me, 'Guess what, I got my hands on the keys to the family tombs,'" Willig explained. "I hauled myself off to Brooklyn, and there she was waiting for me with coffee and the largest keys I have seen outside a Vincent Price movie. We opened them up. Her husband's family has two tombs in Green-Wood Cemetery. You should hear the clanging noise the keys make in the lock."
Willig opens "What Happens at Nightfall" with her main character on a reluctant visit to the cemetery.
"My character is newly unemployed," Willig said. "She's feeling like she's always done everything right in her life. She's made the responsible choices. But she is 37, unemployed, and single. Her married, very successful best friend with four kids drags her on a nighttime cemetery tour of Green-Wood. And you can actually do these. These are a real thing. And while she's there, there's this horrific screech. A group of preteen boys barrel past, knocking her bag off her shoulder. That launches us into the mystery."
Mary remarked there's also a meet-cute at the cemetery.
"One of the incredibly cool things I learned while I was there with my editor was as we passed this amazing gothic house with a widow's walk, gingerbread eaves," Willig recalled. "I was like, oh my goodness, who lives here? And my editor said, that's where the hot arborist lives. I thought, hot arborist? I have to write about this. Though I would like to point out no actual arborists were objectified in the making of this book. My hot arboist is entirely my own imagination and not in any way related to the real director of horticulture who lives in Green-Wood with his wife and family."
Willig adds a demon to the story.
"The whole plot is basically about the idea is that there was an ancient evil contained in one of these tombs and the hot arborist's 11-year-old son accidentally unleashes it," Willig said. "That ancient evil is a demon."
The annual Nightfall event at Green-Wood inspired the title of the book. Willig is a fan. "That's a celebration of life, death, and the macabre," she said. "It's so cool because you get to be in the cemetery after dark. There are lights. There are performers, and it's different every year."
You can read an excerpt from "What Happens at Nightfall" below.
Club Calvi books may contain adult themes.
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"What Happens at Nightfall" by Lauren Willig
From the publisher:
In the sprawling Gothic expanse of Brooklyn's Green-Wood Cemetery, some secrets refuse to stay buried.Recently laid off and searching for purpose, Jess reluctantly joins her best friend on a supposedly fun nighttime cemetery tour. Separated from her group by accident, she discovers a bunch of terrified boys and a strange, ancient key. Both lead to Green-Wood's surprisingly handsome resident arborist, Adam Chervinsky.
Recently widowed, Adam has more to protect than the leafy residents of Green-Wood. His children, still dealing with the loss of their mother, are acting strangely. A haunting is afoot, and Jess seems to know more than she's letting on. Sparks fly between Jess and Adam—and the unquiet spirits of Green-Wood rise from their century-long slumber.
As Jess and Adam delve deeper into the cemetery's haunted history, they uncover a Gilded Age curse, a ghostly socialite, and a demonic pact that stretches across generations. What lies hidden in the Green-Wood's splendid Vanderwilt mausoleum? As the line between the living and the dead blurs, and the shadows of Green-Wood begin to stir with malevolent intent, Jess must confront not only the supernatural forces but a shocking connection to the past if she and Adam truly want to live happily ever after.
Lauren Willig lives in New York City.
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Excerpt: "What Happens at Nightfall" by Lauren Willig
It all began, as so many of these stories do, with a dare in a graveyard.
It began with a key that should not have been used and a door that should not have been unlocked. It began with a pair of eyes blinking open in the darkness and a voice rasping, "Why, hello." It began with three terrified boys dropping their flashlights and bolting pell-mell into the night, tripping on gravestones.
But Jess Waters didn't know any of this. She didn't know that she was on a collision course with destiny.
All Jess knew was that her old pointy-toed flats had raised a blister on her left heel. They'd been great for the stretch from subway to office, back when she still had an office. They were less suited for a stroll in a graveyard.
A stroll. Ha. More like a hike. It had been an hour since the tour group had passed under the great Gothic gate of Green-Wood Cemetery with its echoes of Young Frankenstein. The fact that it had been a half-mile walk from the street to the gate ought to have told Jess something about what she was getting into.
Or if she had, you know, bothered to google it.
Once, Jess hadn't gone out to dinner without googling. Due diligence, she'd called it. Her due diligence had bitten her in the backside. If she'd been a little less diligent, she'd still have a job, instead of being unemployed and unemployable.
But this time a bit of googling wouldn't have gone amiss.
How big could a cemetery in the middle of a city be?
Apparently the answer was "very." So far, they'd passed a monument to the Brooklyn Theater Fire, a statue of DeWitt Clinton, and a weeping willow that had grabbed at Jess's ponytail as they'd ducked beneath, dutifully following their guide.
This, like so many dubious decisions in Jess's life, had been Kimmy's idea.
Other dubious decisions, Jess had made all by herself.
The problem was, Jess's life choices had all seemed so sensible at the time. Because Jess was nothing if not sensible. By the time she was eight, Jess was the one who made sure the fridge was stocked and the alarm was set for school mornings when her mother was distracted by the exigencies of running a small art gallery and didn't always remember things like dinners and bedtimes. In high school, she was the one who had called a halt to Kimmy's crazier schemes, like the underwater production of The Tempest in the school pool. "The good-influence friend," Kimmy's parents jokingly called her. Or maybe not so jokingly. Jess had been voted Most Likely to File Her Taxes on Time in the school yearbook.
So how had she wound up here?
Following Kimmy. Through a graveyard. Behind a woman wearing a bustle and too much purple eyeshadow.
"Ladies and gentlemen," trilled the guide. "On your left . . ."
Their tour guide held aloft a parasol instead of the traditional umbrella. Her outfit was part steampunk and part Old West bordello: purple satin, black lace, and a jaunty hat with a veil that kept poking her in the eye. The parasol was constructed of purple silk, edged with black jet that jangled as she bustled backward.
"Here we have the final resting place of Charlotte Canda, who died tragically in a carriage accident on her seventeenth birthday." The guide's breathless tone might have been dramatic effort or a too-tightly-cinched corset. "Note the seventeen roses—one for each year of her short life. The monument is seventeen feet high and seventeen feet long and includes tributes to her various interests and talents."
Some members of the group nodded sagely; others whispered and giggled. They were an ill-assorted collection. There was a group of twentysomethings in thrift shop chic, passing around a forbidden flask; two Australian tourists, looking tolerant; and a long-suffering woman in her sixties with her husband, who sported a leather jacket and a badly dyed mustache à la early Tom Selleck.
And then there were Jess and Kimmy, Jess in plain black pants—most of her wardrobe was plain black pants—and Kimmy in an exuberantly flounced nap dress strongly reminiscent of the covers of the vintage eighties romance novels they used to pass back and forth in high school, except that Kimmy was standing upright and not bent backward over the arm of a man in a shirt that appeared to have lost all its buttons in a high wind.
Jess sidled up to her best friend, who had a notebook and pen out and was scribbling down mathematical pearls of wisdom. "How much longer?"
Kimmy looked sideways at her. "You sound like my kids."
"Are we there yet?"
"Don't make me take away your iPad."
"I don't have an iPad." It had belonged to the office and they'd taken it back when they terminated her employment.
"Just relax. Enjoy. Take in the scenery."
"And by scenery . . . you mean tombs?" They were everywhere, some freestanding, some built into the hillside like bizarre hobbit houses of the damned.
"Tombs of men and women who wrote the history of this city!" Kimmy gestured with her notebook, pages flapping. "We've got Horace Greeley, Leonard Bernstein, Lola Montez—do you know she was rumored to have affairs with everyone from Tsar Nicholas to Alexandre Dumas?"
"Père or fils?"
"Show-off," said Kimmy. "Père. I think. But you're missing the point. Think of all the ambition, all the stories, all the talent."
"This sounds like the prologue of one of your books." In between raising her four precocious children, Kimmy wrote popular nonfiction. Very popular nonfiction. Her paperbacks had become a staple of airport bookstores. "Is it the prologue of the new book?"
Kimmy ignored her. "And what about the artists? There's Tiffany—you know, that Tiffany, the glass one. Basquiat is buried here."
"My mother is the one who likes the moderns. I'm more of a Gustave Moreau girl." Another reason, among many, that Jess had applied to business school instead of art school. Symbolist paintings had gone out with horse-drawn cabs. "I don't suppose he's buried here."
"I don't know where he's buried. Probably Paris." Kimmy gave Jess a quick, one-armed squeeze, engulfing her in ruffles. "Stop sulking. It's a beautiful night, I've got a babysitter, and we're in a massive park in the center of the city. Did you know that Green-Wood was one of the city's major tourist attractions in the nineteenth century?"
"That was because they didn't have TV." The rest of the group shuffled forward, Kimmy and Jess in the back.
"The TV can wait. This is an experience. You've had nine months to get through your Netflix queue. It's not like there's anyone waiting for you at home." Kimmy stopped short, an expression of sheer horror on her face. "I didn't mean—"
"Uh-huh," said Jess. "You said the quiet part out loud."
This was why she hadn't wanted to come out with Kimmy tonight.
Not because it was a graveyard—she'd never been superstitious—but because when she was with Kimmy, she couldn't hide from the fact that she was thirty-seven, her career had imploded, and the only thing waiting for her at home was a dead plant. And possibly a mouse, but she and the mouse weren't on calling terms yet. Jess had left peanut butter, but the mouse was playing hard to get.
"Jess . . ."
Jess tried to smile, but it came out as a grimace. "It's not like you're wrong."
"I want to be wrong."
"I know." Jess's throat was a little scratchy. Clearly from all the random flowering stuff around them. Pollen. Or something. Never mind that she'd never had even the slightest trace of hay fever. "Did we just miss something? Your guide is glaring at us."
"Everyone!" By everyone, the guide meant Jess and Kimmy. She jabbed her parasol at them, jet jangling. "No lagging behind! It is imperative that the group stay together!"
One of the twentysomethings giggled. "Why? So the ghosts won't get us?"
Glass smashed in the distance. A cold wind swirled past them, yanking at the veil on the guide's hat and making Kimmy's flounces dance.
The twentysomething's mouth dropped. "Was that—"
That was when the screaming started. Not a movie starlet scream, but uninhibited howls of pure terror.
Excerpted from WHAT HAPPENS AT NIGHTFALL by Lauren Willig. Copyright © 2026 by Lauren Willig. From William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.