A Horror Novel Got Canceled. What’s Coming Next Is a Bigger Nightmare.

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Guest Essay

A Horror Novel Got Canceled. What’s Coming Next Is a Bigger Nightmare.

March 25, 2026,

5:02 a.m. ET

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Anna Haifisch

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By

Andrea Bartz

Ms. Bartz is a novelist whose latest book is “The Last Ferry Out.”

When readers ask questions about my thriller novels, I love to discuss the themes and characters in them and the inspiration for my writing. But as generative artificial intelligence worms its way through the publishing industry, I’m bracing for a stomach-turning query:

Did you actually write this?

The worry has been at the front of my mind since last week, when

Hachette canceled the forthcoming U.S. publication of the horror novel “Shy Girl

”

after readers and journalists flagged prose that sounded like A.I. slop. (The author maintains that a freelance editor is to blame for any prose penned by a large language model.)

Though I’m against the use of generative A.I. in creative writing, not everyone feels the same way. What does seem clear, however, is that most readers want disclosure when A.I. has been used, and they are quick to note the telltale rhythms and patterns of popular large language models.

But as A.I. models continue to improve, I’m concerned that it will become difficult to distinguish between something written by a human versus a bot. As more A.I.-generated writing is put out in the world, more readers will question whether or not the text they are poring over was penned by a human. We’re barreling toward a rapid erosion of trust between authors and readers, and the publishing industry is unprepared to deal with the consequences.

Already, with a little fine-tuning,

chatbots can be eerily good mimics of published writers

, nailing their word choices and go-to grammatical patterns. James Frey, an author who’s no stranger to controversy and who has proudly admitted to using A.I. to write,

has noted

, “I have asked the A.I. to mimic my writing style so you, the reader, will not be able to tell what was written by me and what was generated by the A.I.”

Shortly after ChatGPT was publicly released, I entered the prompt “write a short story in the style of author Andrea Bartz.” The output was an uncanny facsimile of my prose — the actual scenes it generated made little sense, but the rhythm and sentences themselves mimicked some of the deliberate stylistic choices I make in my books.

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