As a girl, Samantha Mabry was terrified of ghosts. “I would sleep with the covers up over my head,” says the young adult author with a laugh. She insisted on getting a cat to guard against ghostly presences, eventually moving on to the ghost stories of Edith Wharton to shake her fears and demystify the genre.

At long last, Mabry has poured her lifelong obsession onto the page. Her new novel, Tigers, Not Daughters (Algonquin Young Readers, March 24), follows three sisters on the one-year anniversary of their oldest sister’s death. There’s Jessica, trapped in an abusive relationship with her sister’s old flame; Iridian, a writer obsessed with the ghostly romance in Anne Rice’s The Witching Hour; and dreamy Rosa, content to watch the fireflies light up their San Antonio neighborhood.

Haunting them all, quite literally, is the ghost of Ana, who died one night while climbing out her window. In the year since her death, she’s become a local legend, described in loving and obsessive detail by a chorus of neighbor boys. “I had always wanted to write a book in this we voice,” Mabry explains. She eventually decided not to write the entire book as a choral narrative, “because it would so clearly be The Virgin Suicides 2.0.”

The chorus of teenage boys amplifies the legendary quality of the Torres sisters, reinforcing gossip handed down in the community and generating a kind of summoning spell. “If it weren’t for us, things would’ve turned out differently,” they lament. “If it weren’t for us, Ana wouldn’t have died...and her sisters wouldn’t have been forced to suffer at the hands of her angry ghost.”

Once the ghost arrives, Mabry conjures chills galore, but finding the right way to tell the story of the Torres girls and their grief wasn’t easy, she says. “I think there’s an element of people being haunted in every good human moment. There’s a sense of something pressing on you,” she says. “But for a really long time, I could not figure out what the ghost wanted.”

By returning to ghost stories she loved, like Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House and Sarah Waters’ The Little Stranger, Mabry envisioned a better purpose for Ana’s ghost: spurring her sisters to action. When the novel opens, the Torres sisters are a fractured unit, an experience Mabry—who grew up an only child—borrowed from her extended family.

“When I was thinking about these sisters, one of the reasons I wanted to write this story is my mother’s family,” says Mabry. “She’s one of three sisters and a brother, and they are a Mexican American family, like the Torres family. They pick on each other, but they don’t ever come together to say sorry. I always thought that was worth trying to fictionalize,” she adds.

By the time Mabry figured out why Ana was haunting her sisters, the pressure was on. Mabry had given birth to her first child and was under a tight deadline. “I had less than a year to finish the first draft,” Mabry recalls. “It was due in October, and I had a baby in April.”

A compressed timeline ultimately helped Mabry take bigger storytelling risks. “I stopped being timid with my choices. I was just trying to be a little bit more ruthless,” she explains. Mabry wound up falling in love with Jessica, the most complex of the sisters. Of the surviving trio, Jessica also expresses the most rage. “She’s just so mean,” says Mabry. “I really liked to invent the things that she blurts out. I was trying to home in on her anger.”

Now that her third YA novel is in the world, Mabry wonders whether she can write a book that isn’t so dark. Her debut, A Fierce and Subtle Poison, dealt with curses while her follow-up, All the Wind in the World, depicted a less-than-rosy near future in the Southwest desert. (It was longlisted for the National Book Award.) “I’m interested in unseen forces from the past that meddle in people’s lives,” says Mabry. “And I like the sense of helplessness that lends to a story.”

“I’ve always wanted to write a true adventure story,” she added. “Things work out. Romance happens. But I always somehow make it grim.”

Kristen Evans reviews fiction for Kirkus and writes about culture for BuzzFeed, the Los Angeles Times, the New Republic, NYLON, and elsewhere.