Kill Creatures

by Rory Power

A year after her three best friends vanished in the canyons near their town, Nan is still living with their disappearance—and the secret that she killed them. When one of those friends returns, Nan’s certainty about what happened begins to unravel in Rory Power’s dark YA thriller about friendship, betrayal, memory, and the stories people tell themselves.

Big Idea

The stories people tell about themselves can conceal responsibility as much as reveal identity. By studying Nan’s narration, students can examine how writers control information, complicate readers’ judgments, and turn uncertainty into suspense.

Discussion Questions

1.How does knowing Nan’s role in her friends’ disappearance change the questions you ask as you read? What mysteries remain even after that information is revealed?
2.Where do Nan’s explanations invite sympathy, and where do they raise doubts? How can readers distinguish understanding a character from excusing that character’s actions?
3.How does the canyon setting influence the atmosphere and the relationships among the characters? What would change if the story took place somewhere crowded and familiar?
4.How does the return of one of Nan’s friends challenge the version of events Nan has been living with? Trace a moment when new information changes your interpretation of an earlier scene.
5.What does the novel suggest about belonging, loyalty, and power within a friendship group? Which interactions best support your interpretation?

Lesson Plan

⏱ 55 minutes: introduction 5; reading and annotation 10; pacing map 10; drafting 15; peer response 8; revision and exit ticket 7.📦 Copies of the novel or legally provided excerpts, paper, pencils, highlighters or colored pencils, sticky notes, and a timer. Teacher preparation: preview the novel’s violence and disturbing themes for local suitability; the requested grades 7–12 span a wide developmental range, so select excerpts and offer an equivalent alternative text when appropriate.

Learning Goals

Analyze how Nan’s perspective shapes readers’ access to information and their judgments about events.
Explain how scene, summary, sentence structure, and withheld information influence narrative pacing.
Support an interpretation of suspense with specific textual evidence.
Revise a short narrative to create a deliberate change in pace without changing its central event.
Distinguish a character’s stated interpretation from what the text establishes or leaves uncertain.

Activity Steps

1.Introduce the premise and establish discussion boundaries: analyze fictional choices without requiring personal disclosures. Define pacing as the relationship among story time, textual space, and readers’ experience of anticipation.
2.Read a short, teacher-selected passage from students’ current reading involving Nan’s uncertainty or a tense encounter. Students mark external action, internal thought, sensory detail, and information that remains unresolved.
3.Make a paper pacing map: divide the passage into beats, label each beat as scene, summary, or pause, and use arrows to show perceived acceleration or slowing. Compare interpretations using textual evidence.
4.Give students a non-graphic prompt: a character who believes a friendship is permanently over sees that friend waiting near a canyon trail. Students first summarize the encounter in 40–60 words, then expand it into a 120–180-word suspense scene.
5.Exchange drafts. Partners identify the moment of greatest tension, underline one effective pacing choice, and suggest one place to compress or expand.
6.Revise one section and complete an exit ticket explaining how a specific change affects pace and how that choice connects to Power’s handling of Nan’s perspective.

Standards Connections

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.7.1 / RL.8.1 / RL.9-10.1 / RL.11-12.1: Support literary analysis with textual evidence, distinguishing explicit information from inference.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RL.7.3 / RL.8.3 / RL.9-10.5 / RL.11-12.5: Analyze interactions among story elements and the effects of structural choices, including suspense and the ordering of events.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.7.3 / W.8.3 / W.9-10.3 / W.11-12.3: Develop narratives using effective technique, well-chosen details, and purposeful event sequences.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.7.5 / W.8.5 / W.9-10.5 / W.11-12.5: Strengthen writing through planning, revising, and feedback.
CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.SL.7.1 / SL.8.1 / SL.9-10.1 / SL.11-12.1: Participate in collaborative, evidence-based discussions that build on others’ ideas.

Pace-Write-Read Study with Pace-Write It!

Rory Power’s Kill Creatures offers a useful reversal of the usual mystery-writing problem: readers learn Nan’s devastating secret early, but that knowledge does not make the story predictable. Instead, the return of a friend she believes she killed opens new uncertainties. A Pace-Write-Read study can therefore begin with a central craft question: when a writer reveals something enormous, what new questions keep readers moving? Students should track what Nan says, what observable events establish, and what remains unresolved rather than treating every statement as equally reliable. The novel also helps students separate speed from suspense. A passage can slow down to dwell on a perception, memory, or hesitation while making readers more anxious to know what happens next. In selected scenes involving the canyons, Nan’s past, and the returned friend, students can examine how much space Power gives an event and where she releases or delays information. Attention to voice matters as much as counting short sentences: Nan’s interpretations affect how readers experience every disclosure. Use the workshop as a cycle of noticing, trying, and testing. Students annotate a passage, borrow one craft move for a non-graphic fictional scene, and read their writing aloud to hear its effects. The aim is not to imitate trauma or sensationalize violence, but to make deliberate decisions about emphasis, uncertainty, and narrative time. Choose excerpts appropriate to the class, establish spoiler boundaries, and provide an alternative prompt or passage when needed.

Element	How to notice or teach it in the novel
1. Pacing	Compare a passage that compresses the year after the disappearances with a passage that closely follows a tense encounter. Ask how much story time each occupies and how much reading space it receives.
2. Plot	Map the causal disruption created when a friend Nan believes she killed returns. Distinguish events that change Nan’s situation from revelations that change readers’ understanding.
3. Prosody	Read a short passage of Nan’s narration aloud, marking stress, breath, and hesitation. Compare two readings to test how vocal delivery can emphasize certainty or doubt without changing the words.
4. Word	Select a verb or descriptive word from a passage about Nan’s friends or the canyons. Try a neutral substitute and discuss how the original word influences threat, intimacy, or judgment.
5. Concept	Use the premise—a returned friend who should not be alive—to distinguish a compelling concept from a complete plot. Ask what additional questions about Nan’s account are needed to sustain a novel.
6. Voice & Worldview	Track how Nan describes herself compared with how she describes her friends. Discuss what her explanations reveal about the beliefs through which she interprets loyalty and responsibility.
7. Point of View	Separate Nan’s observations from her interpretations in a selected scene. Rewrite a few lines from an external observer’s perspective to show what her narration adds—and what it cannot independently verify.
8. Setting & Place	Examine how the canyons make the disappearances and Nan’s memories inseparable from place. Identify details that establish physical conditions before interpreting their emotional or symbolic effects.
9. Original Characters	Discuss how giving Nan both responsibility for terrible harm and control of the narration complicates a conventional protagonist. Ground claims about her distinctiveness in her choices and language rather than diagnostic labels.
10. Dialogue	Choose an exchange between Nan and another character and annotate what is said, avoided, or answered indirectly. Ask how the gap between speech and private interpretation generates tension.
11. Details	Identify a small detail that Nan notices during a tense moment and ask why it receives attention. Revisit it later to determine whether it functions as evidence, atmosphere, characterization, or misdirection.
12. Descriptions	Compare a description of a person with one of the canyon landscape. Examine how descriptive passages can slow external action while sharpening the reader’s sense of danger.
13. Firsts	Study readers’ first introduction to Nan’s secret and their first encounter with the returned friend. Ask what each introduction establishes, withholds, and encourages readers to expect.
14. Immediacy & Engagement	Locate a moment when readers closely follow Nan’s perception of an unfolding event. Identify how action, sensory detail, or immediate thought brings the moment closer than a retrospective summary would.
15. Story Scenes, Summaries & Structures	Color-code one excerpt for dramatized scene, compressed summary, and reflection. Discuss why Power might devote more space to a brief encounter than to a longer stretch of Nan’s year after the disappearances.
16. Tension / Suspense / Surprise	Use the returned friend to distinguish surprise at an event from suspense about its consequences. Identify the competing pressures Nan faces after the return rather than equating suspense only with physical danger.
17. Flashback, Flash-Forward, Cliffhanger	Track how information about the earlier friendships and disappearances enters the present storyline. Identify actual examples of temporal shifts or cliffhangers in the assigned reading; do not assume every listed device appears.
18. Page Turns and Chapter Breaks	Examine several actual chapter endings and record the question, threat, or changed understanding each leaves behind. Distinguish intentional chapter breaks from page endings that vary by edition.
19. Pace & Creativity	Rewrite one non-graphic story beat in two ways: immediate disclosure and delayed disclosure. Compare which version better serves the intended effect, using Nan’s disrupted certainty as the model.
20. Play	Play with the order of three student-created information cards: the disappearance, Nan’s secret, and the friend’s return. Discuss how rearrangement changes the reader’s questions, not the underlying events.
21. Performance	Perform a short exchange twice, first with confident delivery and then with uneasy pauses. Discuss which interpretation is better supported by the surrounding narration.
22. Personality	Collect evidence of Nan’s characteristic ways of explaining, noticing, or reacting. Ask how those habits shape pacing by making her linger on some experiences and move quickly past others.
23. Humor	If students identify irony, sarcasm, or dark humor in an assigned passage, examine whether it creates distance, reveals a relationship, or briefly releases tension. Do not require a humorous reading of the novel’s violence.
24. Pause	Locate a hesitation, reflective interruption, or moment of stillness near a tense interaction. Explain how a pause can delay an answer while increasing anticipation.
25. Poetry / Poetic Devices	Look for figurative language, sound patterns, or concentrated imagery in descriptions of the canyons and Nan’s relationships. Explain the effect of a specific example rather than assuming the landscape always represents the same idea.
26. Repetition	Track repeated words, assertions, or remembered details in Nan’s narration. Ask whether repetition reinforces certainty, exposes strain, or gains a different meaning as new information appears.
27. Rhythm	Compare the sentence-length patterns in a reflective passage and a tense scene. Read both aloud to test whether their rhythms accelerate, interrupt, or prolong attention.
28. Punctuation	Inspect punctuation in an actual paragraph of Nan’s narration and mark how it groups or interrupts thoughts. Repunctuate one student-written sentence to test a different pacing effect.
29. Questions	Maintain a question ledger with columns for what happened, what Nan believes, and what readers still need to know. After each revelation, note whether a question closes or produces a more consequential one.
30. Compare-Contrast	Compare Nan’s understanding of a friendship before and after the friend’s return. Use evidence from both points to distinguish changed circumstances from changed interpretation.
31. Objects	Choose an object actually present in an assigned scene and trace what attention it receives. Ask whether its placement contributes to action, memory, atmosphere, or evidence before assigning symbolic significance.
32. Threes	Begin with the premise’s three missing friends and map what the text reveals about each relationship. Separately investigate whether a selected passage uses three-part phrasing; the number of friends alone does not establish a recurring stylistic pattern.
33. Lists	Where Nan accumulates observations or explanations, examine whether the sequence feels controlled or overwhelming. Students can test the effect by arranging three details about an unsettling encounter in different orders.
34. White Space & Negative Space	Examine paragraph and section spacing in the classroom edition alongside information the narration leaves unstated. Distinguish visible blank space from narrative omission, then discuss how each can make readers pause.
35. Art & Graphics	Treat cover art and other edition-specific design as paratext, not as evidence that the novel contains interior illustrations. Compare the cover’s expectations with the textual presentation of Nan, secrecy, and the canyon setting.
36. Interactives & Gamification	Use a classroom evidence board with categories for established events, Nan’s claims, and open questions. This is an instructional adaptation, not a claim that the novel includes interactive features; reward justified revisions rather than guesses about violence.
37. Placement	Choose a revelation and consider what readers know immediately before it arrives. Discuss how moving it earlier or later would alter sympathy for Nan and the balance between curiosity and dread.
38. Form	Study how the novel’s chaptered prose form sustains access to Nan’s account while controlling disclosure. Test the difference by converting a brief event into an invented incident report that cannot directly present her private thoughts.
39. Dummy	Create a folded-paper mock-up of a suspense sequence, placing one narrative beat on each panel. Borrow the book’s premise-level progression—certainty, contradiction, urgent question—to experiment with the position of a reveal.
40. Passion	Ask which question about friendship, accountability, or self-deception students find most compelling in Nan’s story. Use that investment to guide revision while avoiding unsupported claims about the author’s personal motivations.

Pace-Write It!

20-minute task: The Friend Who Shouldn’t Be There. Minutes 0–3: Revisit a short, already-read passage connected to the returned friend and identify one way Power delays information or focuses Nan’s attention. Minutes 3–5: Plan a non-graphic scene inspired by that disruption: a character sees someone whose return contradicts what the character believes; students may invent both characters and circumstances. Minutes 5–10: Write 100–150 words that expand roughly ten seconds through two concrete details, an internal reaction, and a delayed identification or explanation. Minutes 10–13: Retell the same event in a 35–50-word summary without changing the central facts. Minutes 13–17: Read both versions to a partner, who marks where anticipation rises and explains which version makes the uncertainty more compelling. Minutes 17–20: Revise one sentence or move one disclosure, then add a two-sentence craft note naming the pacing choice, explaining its effect, and connecting it to the selected Kill Creatures passage. Evaluate deliberate pacing and explanation, not the intensity of disturbing content.

Classroom Activities

The Canyon Secret: One Moment, Two Speeds

Students create a paper pacing map of a teacher-selected passage involving Nan’s secret, the canyon disappearances, or a returning friend. They then write the same fictional encounter twice—once as a compressed summary and once as a suspenseful scene—and annotate how sentence length, detail, pauses, and delayed information change the reader’s experience. Students may use an invented character rather than imitate Nan or depict violence.

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