DEMON SUMMER: How Two Animators Brought the Snax-verse to Life in Book Form
DEMON SUMMER arrives March 25th PRE-ORDER NOW >>
It all started with Christopher Pike.
As teens, we were obsessed. Christopher Pike was our gateway into YA horror, leading us to devour everything from R.L. Stine and Diane Hoh to Anne Rice and Stephen King. We loved stories that were scary, twisted, fantastical, or just plain soapy. Add in a deep love for fast food and B-horror—those campy, over-the-top supernatural slashers of the ’80s and '90s—and that’s the exact DNA of our first book, Demon Summer.
We attended NYU for film and art in the late 90s, and have been creating art ever since. In 2012, we made our first animation, White Widow: A Psychological Thriller, a silent 30-minute animated film set to a haunting score by GRAMMY®-Winning artist Carla Patullo. That film introduced the world to Paradise Falls, a strange little town that would go on to be the backdrop of all our future Snaxtime projects, including Cheese Dog: The Movie and our award-winning fan-favorite, Pizza Face. We call it the Snax-verse.
As filmmakers and graphic artists, we’ve always been drawn to saturated colors and bold, retro aesthetics—think Suspiria, Beetlejuice, Ghoulies, and the unforgettable horror VHS covers that lined the video store shelves we grew up in. Our cover art was just as important as the story itself.
We’ve spent years making digital collages, blending textures, colors, and imagery to create worlds. For this cover, we designed each character, setting, and detail, carefully arranging them into a single, dynamic composition. It had to feel pulpy and irresistible, like a lost cult classic waiting to be rediscovered. Every element, from the neon-infused palette to the stylized typography, was chosen to pull readers into Paradise Falls before they even cracked the spine.
The story? That was brewing for over a decade.
Demon Summer started as a feature-length movie script, but the reality of financing and production meant that it got shelved. Then, a few years ago, we started a Christopher Pike book club. Re-reading those stories as adults hit us with a wave of nostalgia and excitement. What if we took our abandoned script and turned it into a YA horror novel? What if we wrote the book we would have devoured as teens?
We thought it would be easy.
We were seasoned storytellers. We’d written screenplays, made films, and, hell, we even had ChatGPT! But very quickly, we realized that we couldn’t rely on AI. The prose it generated was too mechanical, too purple. Instead, we developed our own voice, one that carried the cinematic energy of our movies into the pages of a novel.
It took two years to get it right. It was a lot of work for what’s meant to be a breezy, fun, popcorn-munching beach read. But it had to be perfect.
We created Snaxtime as a love letter to pop culture and junk food, and Demon Summer became an extension of that world, built on everything we loved growing up—like junk food-fueled sleepovers binging on scary movies.
We’re so proud of this book. If you grew up reading Fear Street, Christopher Pike, or Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, or if you spent your youth collecting Garbage Pail Kids and watching USA Up All Night and Tales from the Crypt, we wrote this for you.
And we’re just getting started.
- Justin & Jamie (J.J. Buffet)