Here at Electric Lit, we’re suckers for a good bookshelf. Any kind of bookshelf! Alphabetized shelves, color-coded shelves, shelves that were once organized but have since devolved into a chaotic pile with no rhyme or reason to where anything is placed. Even book stacks can be shelves if you’re determined enough. There’s no wrong way to organize your books (except bookshelves with the spine facing in. That one’s objectively wrong). If there’s anything the entries into our #ShowYourShelf contest showed us, it’s that all shelves—organized or random, tidy or haphazard—are perfect in our eyes. We loved seeing your shelves, and wish you all so many books that these beauties turn into an unmanageable mess that ultimately grows into a second bookshelf (and a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, and…)
Below are some of our favorite entries into the competition.
We kicked off the contest with this photo from books editor Jo Lou, who is clearly team color-coded shelves. Look at this rainbow bookcase! This one deserves to be lingering on bookstagram for years to come as aspirational shelf inspo.
And she wasn’t the only vote for color-coded shelves. @Jennyshoe submitted color-coded shelves with colorful decorations to match.
Commuter editor Kelly Luce’s woodland aesthetic featuring a historic stone mill and window view full of trees is the epitome of CottageCore.
We kick off our book stacks submissions with our editor-in-chief, Denne Michelle Norris whose TV space has the feel of an altar devoted to literature.
We love an organized chaos, like these books piled (very neatly, we should say!) on top of contributing writer Laura Schmitt’s shelf.
And we can’t help but include one more submission from Jo Lou, featuring our all-time favorite fluffy employee, Billy, all dressed up in a matching bookish bandana (Thanks, Riverhead, for the swag).
For Sam Hopkins, the best cat perch is a book stack!
Ten Speed publicist Felix Cruz’s vibrant shelves are painted in cobalt blue with a red trim as an homage to Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul.
We stan a giant bookcase, especially one bursting at the seams like this one from Debutiful’s Adam Vitcavage (which happens to be one of four)! We’re also into this combination of vertical AND horizontal shelving—like a hybrid bookstack-bookshelf!
Executive director Halimah Marcus has a similarly giant bookcase, though this one’s a little more organized (no offense, Adam—we love the mess!).
This shelf from publicist Kathy Daneman is proof that books and plants make the perfect pairing.
A spiky spiral moment from Dawn Poon.
Floor space = more room for books, as shown by @mikelindgren51
Writer Rebecca Turkewitz’s spooky bookshelf, full of horror novels, gothic fiction, and ghost stories, matches the haunting energy of her short story collection Here in the Night. And we’re obsessed with the miniature bookshop, tucked in the corner, casting a warm glow.
We love the personalization on Jenn Baker’s bookshelf, including the face-out of her book, Forgive Me Not! Also, do we glimpse a photo booth pic from last year’s Masquerade of the Red Death peeking out too? 👀
Sofia Åmark is giving us cosy hygge vibes. And we spy avery cool Lord of the Ring poster.
Novelist Anara Guard’s shelfie has the charm of an old library.
How will we solve the problem of how Father sleeps on his right arm? He is not comfortable, his arm is under him, it hurts him as it presses into his ribs, and it is hurt by the weight of his body pressing down on it. He tells us this, with a gentle smile, as though to say it is not important, and not our problem.
Father died many years ago. But the problem is still there on my mind, unresolved, even though Father no longer tries to sleep comfortably and in fact no longer has an arm.
Wise Old Men
In our society, old men are not considered to be wise, but, rather, eccentric, opinionated, sloppy, foolish, stubborn, weak, confused, etc. This old man in front of me in line, that old man over there trying to open the door, what a bother, get out of our way, with your slow shuffling feet and your hesitation and your uncertainty, we say. Can’t you get all the way across the street before the light changes? In another society, it is different. He is an old man, they say, ask him.
The Stages of Womanhood
It was in the midst of these days when I was struggling to complete the—what would it be?—seventh, no, sixth stage of my growth as a woman, being a year late already with that, according to the (ineffective) anthroposophic doctor I had consulted about my persistent ear infections, when I was awoken yet again during a particularly restless night of being awoken, first, by my child, then by a mosquito, then by my child again, then by the tickling in my ears, then by my child again—when I was awoken yet again, this time by the high-pitched wail of an air-raid siren that I mistook at first for a malfunctioning fan in one window and then a fan in another, going around turning off and unplugging the fans one by one, then finally making my way downstairs and out the back door to stand in the yard looking up until the sound of the siren died abruptly, the wail descending. Of course I thought of war, since our country was in conflict yet again with another country. I thought maybe the mosquito that had been bothering me would live longer than I would. I thought of calling the local police station. I wondered if my husband had heard the siren through his ear plugs. He was sleeping downstairs so that he would not be bothered by me, since I was sleeping so badly these days, or by the child, who was waking so often. The doctor had told me that the next stage, the last stage of womanhood in which a woman is reproductive, was very important creatively. The stage that came after that was very different—also wonderful, she said, but very different. But I had not yet completed this stage, which was supposed to be a growth into full womanhood. As far as I could see, I was exactly the same this year as I had been last year and the year before.
Writing about pop culture and current technology is always a gamble, pitting critique of the present against longevity, a story that will still feel relevant after we’re gone. But for novelists (present company included) who were exposed to the Real World before the, um, real world, reality TV is hardly a trend. We’ve grown up seeing ordinary people use the medium to solve myriad problems–or create them. And who among us hasn’t considered how we’d fare on Survivor, or snarkily judged a dish we’ve only watched being prepared? The past year has seen a notable wave of books that incorporate television—and particularly reality TV—into their premises, though examinations of the medium go back farther than you might expect.
In my novel, The Invisible World, Eve and Ryan Hawthorne suspect their house is haunted, and they reach out to a reality show first. It’s the mid-aughts, the height of paranormal TV fever, and among the glut of shows they end up on one of the more middling options, Searching for… the Invisible World, a late addition to the mix. Perhaps too late—it’s on the verge of cancellation. But Eve and Ryan aren’t looking for renown, only answers. For Eve, who has been experiencing paranormal events her whole life while never fully trusting her perceptions, a little confirmation would go a long way.
Unfortunately for Eve, the TV crew brings with it a confrontation with oneself, as Eve and Ryan are forced to consider how they’ll look to an audience, how the footage of the haunting in their home will stack up against the uncapturable feeling of being in the home. It’s rare for anyone to get a fully objective perspective on their own life, and one of my conjectures is that seeing ourselves on TV can offer a bit of that perspective. But TV is made by folks with their own agendas, and as the following list of books shows, confronting one’s image head-on may not offer solace, but rather create new, previously unconsidered problems. Below, eight novels about characters who are on TV, want to be on TV, or use television to in some way figure themselves out.
While plenty of other novels incorporate found footage, trial transcripts, etc., alongside narration, DiLouie cranks it up to 11—Episode Thirteen is all found footage/found documents: the lost tapes and journals of the crew of Fade to Black, a paranormal investigative show. Fade to Black’s crew is scrappy, and in need of some new stories as they embark on an investigation of Foundation House, a building used in the 1970s by researchers to conduct experiments in the paranormal, metaphysical, and hallucinogenic. The house has never been fully investigated, and it’s on the verge of being torn down. As the team spends more time inside, extending their shoot and the number of episodes they need to air their footage, their findings loop back to the crew themselves in seemingly impossible ways. A found-footage novel in 2023 ought to be self-aware of genre tropes, and one character confirms to the audience that the urge to document, even as their situation grows ever more frightening, persists.
A highly anticipated release of 2023, Adjei-Brenyah’s novel takes place in a near-future in which the most popular form of entertainment is “hard action-sports”: literal death-matches between incarcerated individuals who trade in the remainders of their sentences for the chance at freedom, purchased in Blood Points accumulated by killing one another in gladiator-style battles. Participants, known as Links, team up in Chains named after prisons to fight Chains from other prisons. The matches themselves are ticketed events, only viewed live. But the Links spend days marching between Battlegrounds, trips that are livestreamed via small, floating drone-like cameras/microphones, so that conversations, meals, even baths are captured and viewed by millions. The novel is layered with chapters from the perspectives not only of Links but also those of viewers, protestors who believe that action-sports are inhumane, and board members who oversee the regulations of matches. The narration is sprinkled throughout by footnotes that provide facts and statistics on the prison system, reminding readers of the very real human costs of entertainment.
In Allen’s lively satire, the final four contestants in The Catch, a Bachelor parody, travel to a remote island in the Pacific Northwest for the final eliminations and, hopefully, a union. The novel shifts between perspectives: Amanda, the influencer; Vanessa, set up by the show to be the villain; Lilah-Mae, the Christian girl; and Renee, the final Black contestant who is told, on the ferry ride to Otters Island, that the producers are essentially keeping her on for the optics. Renee is exploring her sexuality, and as far as the Catch himself (a social media investor who has made a yellow tracksuit his entire personality) goes, she’s over him. Meanwhile Casey, The Catch‘s producer, is working to maintain drama between the girls, and she doesn’t have to work too hard. Otters Island has secrets, and the book moves from satire to horror as the contestants and crew are forced to confront something far worse than Instagram vitriol. Everyone has their own reasons for being on the show, whether in pursuit of followers or a corsage, but the book ultimately asks if the most important things in life are the ones that are seen not by millions, but by hardly anyone at all.
Jiménez’s novel also shifts perspectives, between the mother and two daughters in a Puerto Rican family living in present-day Staten Island, more than ten years after the middle daughter, Ruthy, has gone missing. Ruthy was thirteen the day she didn’t come home from school, and despite the family’s tireless efforts to locate her, seems to be gone for good… until her younger sister sees her on a reality show. Whereas in some of the other books on this list, characters grapple with their own identities through the lens of TV, in What Happened… the family of Ruthy has to reconcile the image of the girl they knew with that of “Ruby” on Catfight—a trashy, sinister take on the Real World in which young women live together, perform together, and are encouraged to fight each other physically, with the loser getting booted out of the house. Jimenez’s novel addresses poverty, misogyny, and the ways that people of color bend themselves backwards for acceptance in white society, all while keeping the family at the center of her story.
Perhaps one of the earliest examples of a fictional character appearing on reality TV, D. G. Compton’s 1974 novel (reissued by New York Review Books Classics) centers around a woman living in a future in which no one dies from old age. When Katherine is diagnosed with a terminal brain condition brought about from “information overload,” she is approached to appear on Human Destiny, a show that broadcasts, in nearly real-time, the final days of anyone who is going to die. Katherine turns them away, but the network is unfazed. A new technology, tiny cameras implanted inside eyes, allows a network employee named Roddie to surreptitiously follow Katherine around during her final weeks of life, watching her, filming her, sending footage back to be cut into twenty-four minute chunks to be broadcast. The book shifts between perspectives as Katherine’s symptoms set in and Human Destiny rolls into action. The novel anticipates not just the public’s hunger for witnessing people at their worst, but an omnipresent technology ready to share, with millions, the suffering of others. Nevertheless, the sci-fi elements are a background to the very real relationships between characters, and feels fresh fifty years after publication.
Less about reality TV than one of the many ways television seeps into our consciousness, Hutson’s novel is about Bonnie Lincoln, who wins the lottery and with her winnings constructs a meticulously detailed recreation of the set of Three’s Company in a remote, mountainous area. Her set can turn over with the show’s seasons and she fills it with as many period-appropriate clothes, furniture, and accessories to decorate it as she can find. Bonnie then assumes all the roles on the show, one at a time, including building owners the Ropers. Coming out of a difficult childhood and recent trauma, Bonnie wants to be left alone in her fantasy, but all the money in the world cannot protect her from other people and her own past. Hutson’s novel is reminiscent of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder and recommended for anyone who falls asleep to The Office and wonders what it would be like to really live inside a show—be warned, it may not be as comforting as planned.
While Hutson’s narrator recreates the entirety of a series on her private campus, Bachelder’s 2016 novel centers on a group of men who meticulously reenact just one play from Monday Night Football in 1985: when the Washington Redskins’ Joe Theismann catastrophically collided with the New York Giants’ Lawrence Taylor and Harry Carson, fracturing his tibia and fibula. In The Throwback Special, twenty-two men meet up every year at a motel to bond, then hold a lottery to see which man will play which role on a local school’s football field the following day. Bachelder’s book addresses masculinity, race, middle age, and is engrossing even for folks such as myself who are uninterested in football, as the build-up intensifies to a moment that lasts just a few seconds, but represents something different and powerful to each man on the field.
Scanlon’s novel, out of all the titles on this list, probably has the least to do with actual TV, as the characters in the book watch very little. In an apocalyptic Seattle emptied out by the destructive effects of climate change, Blake has stayed behind to take care of his mother, who has a terminal cancer diagnosis. While his neighbors take anything useful or worth trading and clear out, Blake explores a city populated by an angry Indigenous population and a sort of cult formed around a man named Russell. Russell wants Blake to rewrite the history of Seattle, in a way that will give its survivors hope, with Twin Peaks’s Special Agent Dale Cooper as its central figure. Cooper functions as a symbol for the Guild, his “memory and passion and wonder” values they can cohere around. As Scanlon’s metafictional novel reboots itself mid-stream, Dale Cooper moves from a symbol to a very real person, edging ever closer to Blake and his loved ones as they await disaster.
As we move into the fall reading season, deeply imagined short stories and inventive linked essays are having a moment alongside novels. What’s thrilling about the books coming out from small presses is the breadth of range—there are intentional and accidental murders, family drama and polycules, medical calamity, geopolitics, and a whole lot of finding one’s way through it all. It’s a marvelous time to be a reader.
Ways to Disappear is the rare short story collection that reads with the same weight of a novel while concurrently leaning into the short form. The characters are illuminated and linked through careful description, and tethered together with a desire for connection and for solace. A woman tells her mother-in-law she is leaving his son, and finds unexpected support; a teenage couple is committed to their young love until the hardness of the world undoes them; a sister waits for her brother to die. Each story revolves around a critical moment, which adds up to a compelling collection—Lancelotta has her finger on the pulse of how life consumes us, from moments large to small. A compulsively readable and emotionally affecting book.
Equal parts love letter and lament to Dearborn’s Lebanese diaspora, this collection of short stories chronicles everything from terrifying post-911 ICE raids to a father and son stuffing money into frozen chicken carcasses to avoid the IRS. One story follows a collective of husbands and wives as they size up a mustached and very well-endowed Speedo-clad new patron of their local athletic club; the women are titillated and the men are jealous, but they’re all transported to the 1970s when they were young and living in the village of Sofar. In another, a married woman who is conflicted about her neighbor’s new marriage offers refuge to the abused bride. In this portrait of Arab America, Zeineddine’s scenes are sometimes deadly serious and in other moments, laugh-out-loud funny. Through masterful dialogue and careful characterization, the stories in Dearborn stand in excellence.
Across a dozen stories, Good Women explores the lives of twelve Black women in the Appalachian South. A wife knows her husband is angry and disappointed that she is not pregnant yet, but she hasn’t stopped taking her birth control in secret. A sister tries to help her brother connect with the married man he is seeing; the brutality that follows only brings them closer. A preacher’s daughter finds her father’s stash of pornographic magazines and evidence of an affair after his passing, and in these revelations, discovers something about herself. Good Women surfaces the power of blood and chosen family, the consequence of place, and the sheer power of women acting for themselves in a society that defines them in relationship to men and whiteness. A talented writer to watch.
Penelope lives in a vast and crumbling family estate in England. For twenty years, she has worked as an archivist, eventually partnering with one of the estate’s owners. They live a quiet life, and Penelope continues to catalog the holdings of the property, even though it is scheduled for demolition. As the climate crisis escalates, the trees and gardens have died around her, and the razing of the estate—her partner and his brother’s childhood home—has triggered a visit from the brother, who sexually assaulted her two decades earlier. Landscapes is deftly textured with journal entries, narrative, art history and criticism. What emerges is a hypnotic novel that meditates on loss and violence. A gorgeous and accomplished debut.
After the author of the beautifully layered memoir When My Ghost Sings has a stroke at the young age of 32, she creates a persona for the person she was before her brain betrayed her. Tara’s present ego and her before-ego, who she names Ghost, often battle one another: Tara in the now, trying to thread her frayed memory, and Ghost in the prior time, sure in her own grasp of history. What emerges is a split image of two women who are both right, and both wrong concurrently. As Tara excavates her bodily trauma and reconciles her two egos, her romantic partner is navigating a transition of their own as they begin gender affirming hormone treatment. When My Ghost Sings is detailed, introspective, and reads with a narrative force that asks soul-searching questions about who we are, who we were, and who we could be.
In this memoir-in-essays, Samih-Rotondo juxtaposes her own story with the stories of her matriarchs against the backdrop of forced migration. Just as her grandmother had to flee Palestine during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, Samih-Rotondo, her mother, and her siblings escaped Kuwait as Iraq invaded in 1990. Her parents have divorced and her father stays behind. At just six years old, young Nada is in Rhode Island, and already beginning to see the expectations placed on women, and especially Muslim women. Yet, for as much family history that she knows, there are also secrets. As she grows up in 1990s America, she learns her mother has an estranged son from a first marriage in Saudi Arabia; by the time Samih-Rotondo has a one-year-old of her own, she discovers her grandmother was also forced to give up a son. All Water Has Perfect Memory touches on war, ancestral homes, and the fierce connections between mothers and daughters, but mostly it touches the heart.
A woman finds someone living in a secret room in their apartment building, a neighbor’s chocolate chip cookies cross-contaminated with peanuts causes a death, a wife announces divorce to her husband via a sticky note. Set in the Pacific Northwest, this collection of stories has some linkage through characters who work at the same company, overlap in polycules, or have mutual friends, but the strongest connection in the stories is in the theme of chosen family. Sleep Tight Satellite is also an entry into post-pandemic literature, with many of the stories capturing the terror, and sometimes the hilarity, of lockdown life. Guess beautifully executes on the tension between surveillance culture—which includes camming and Zoom—and the human desire for wanting to be not just seen, but known. Guess shows her depth as a writer, in stories that are topically, structurally, and linguistically innovative without losing sight of emotional impact, and fans of her work will note that she’s never been better. A truly stunning collection.
In these nuanced stories, often told from a child’s perspective, death is right around the corner and is just as predictable as wintertime snow. Six years after their father’s suicide, a trio of brothers go get milk while their mother is on a date and find a valentine for the oldest boy in the grocery store; a wife and husband reunite after his terminal cancer diagnosis; the ghost of a long gone sister appears to purchase a chair from her living sister; war breaks out over the Illinois cornfields. What Unexpected Weather Events speaks to as a collection is the fragile hold we all have on the scaffolding that props up our lives. Despite the often bleak premises, moments of hope and even joy manage to shine through. Though Pringle’s characters do not always find transcendence, her storytelling does.
Yesteryear by Stephen G. Eoannou (Santa Fe Writers Project)
During the 1930s Depression, radio writer Francis “Fran” Striker has too many mouths to feed on a meager salary, but at least he’s still employed. As the final notice bills pile up on his desk—and his wife’s parents move in with them after losing their home—Fran knows he needs to make more money. Yet, after being robbed and assaulted after a visit to a speakeasy, he can’t get anything down on the page, which is the only way he knows how to get paid. Yesteryear is a wild ride told in the style of radio dramas of the era: Fran is cursed by a madam, the gangsters keep tommy guns stowed in trombone cases, diamond rings are stolen. A gravedigger, bowling pin setter, and prize fighter are pivotal characters. Still, it is Fran, the real-life creator of the Lone Ranger series, that steals the show. Eoannou gives readers a novel that is just as dramatic as it is fun.
In the Missouri Ozarks, Daisy lives with her boyfriend who is an insect breeder—and fetishist—while she works at a chicken processing facility, snipping through dead bird after dead bird with a pair of pneumatic scissors. Though she has left the Pentecostal church, she has not been able to leave behind the feelings of judgment; her religious mother isn’t helping. After a series of heart-aching miscarriages, none of which she received appropriate physical or emotional care for, Daisy is pregnant again. She needs this baby to validate her body, her relationship with her boyfriend, and to get a different kind of attention from her mother. Yet, when her old friend Sloane reappears in her life, the very tenuous threads that hold Daisy’s life together start ripping apart at the seams. With her trademark psychological complexity and unflinching centering of the human body in all its grotesqueness, Deliver Me is Elle Nash at the height of her powers. Riveting from beginning to end.
In these 17 stories set in Virginia lies a sinister undercurrent. A girl at a grown-up party narrowly misses a kidnapping, a toddler nearly drowns in a hotel pool, an insular neighborhood witnesses a murder. Yet, What Makes You Think You’re Supposed To Feel Better also strikes a tender note as the characters work through their heartbreaks and repair their relationships. One misguided man purchases a life-sized M&M statue thinking it will be the perfect gift. There is tension in the collection; it is never clear when the plots will turn toward something better or worse, but Hobbs Hesler ties the stories together with a sense of longing—for stability, for comfort, for lives that could have been. Written with compassion and rich detail, this is a memorable debut.
The River is a rural area in Pakistan that struggles daily with water access in the face of climate disaster. When Badaal leaves his family for The Town, he opens a wound in a family accustomed to loss. Told from different voices over a 30 year period, this family saga coalesces under the theme of hunger—for food, for love, for connection—and freedom, from bad relationships, grief, family strife. As his parents’ marriage crumbles, Badaal marries a much older woman and moves to The City. He quickly becomes estranged from his mother, who is trying to process her own lifelong trauma around the deaths of her siblings and her daughters—and now she faces losing Badaal. The River, The Town is a novel that exists in the intersection between intergenerational trauma and climate change, with The Town and The City as twin tributaries. A complicated and rewarding novel.
Mike Kovacs, an economics professor, has one too many beers. Instead of just going home to his quiet Kalamazoo neighborhood, he takes a long drive—and hits a tandem bike, instantly killing both of the riders. Protected by his own idea of privilege and in a haze of justification about what he deserves (not prison, in his estimation), Mike cleans up the murder scene and doesn’t turn himself in. Even as he recognizes one of the victims as his neighbor Claire’s daughter, he refuses to come clean, choosing instead to forge a relationship with Claire, whose marriage is buckling under the weight of grief for a lost child. Mike is a uniquely terrible person, but under Andy Mozina’s sure hand as a novelist, even a very unlikeable character becomes compelling. This book forces readers to ask: what would you do?
Set mostly in Harare, the capital city of Zimbabwe, Ndima Ndima follows the stories of the four Taha sisters and their mother through the 1990s. The youngest sister, Nyeredzi, has a strong bond with her mother, Zuva, who left her family, two decades earlier, to fight in the civil war, and returned to find she had been betrayed by her fiancé and her siblings. Instead of acting in anger from the violence she has witnessed, Zuva raises her girls—and especially Nyeredzi—with a sense of righteousness and to know their own power. When Nyeredzi sees her brother-in-law touching a woman who is not his wife, she speaks up. When Nyeredzi sees her cousins disrespecting the dwelling of a powerful spirit, she speaks up. In telling stories of the bonds between mothers and daughters, from the playful to the profound, Mapepa delivers a novel with profound emotional resonance.
Once part of a family of five, Beena and her father are the only survivors. A bombing in Bangladesh kills Beena’s mother and middle brother; her youngest brother died as a child years earlier after a car accident when the family was living in Iraq. As Beena completes her studies in literature in Houston, she mourns for the loss of so much of her family and worries over her stubborn, aging father. In the wake of the violence that has left Beena motherless, she marries—in part because she cares for the man, but also to avoid being set up with a Bengali businessman who works for a corporation that profits from war-time conflict. As the 2003 invasion of Iraq escalates, Beena struggles to balance caring for her father, her grief, her new marriage, while wondering where she fits into it all. Told in dual perspectives from Beena and her father over decades, The Children of the Madness captures the destabilizing impact that geopolitical forces have on actual people. Against a backdrop of loss, migration, and an exploration about what it means to find happiness, Wahhaj’s novel is unforgettable.
As a kid confused about gender expression, I found the idea of trying on another body very appealing. Growing up in the eighties meant I had a few stories of people inhabiting other bodies to watch and rewatch—the original Freaky Friday, Big, and Like Father, Like Son. And whether one finds the premise of body swapping as appealing as I did, terrifying, or something in between, it undoubtedly makes for a compelling story. And Isle McElroy’s new novel, People Collide, is a body-swapping tale unlike any I’ve ever seen.
Newly married Eli is living in Bulgaria on a fellowship his wife Elizabeth received when he wakes up one day and discovers he’s in her body. But she (in his body) is nowhere to be found. As Eli searches for his missing wife in a foreign land, he not only contends with gender in ways he’d never considered, but also must appraise himself in the confines of their marriage.The novel somehow manages to be one of ideas—examining identity, sexuality, desire, and marriage—while delivering a strong plot. Like Isle McElroy’s debut, The Atmospherians, this novel is a biting look at gender and performance, with their trademark humor and grace on the line level.
I spoke to McElroy over the phone about the body swap trope, sexuality and desire, and the idea of fate.
Rachel León: Were there any body swap movies or books you were drawn to, even if that was well before coming up with the idea for this novel?
Isle McElroy: I’d seen Freaky Friday growing up, and I returned to it again when I was writing this book. I really liked the movie Freaky with Vince Vaughn, as well, which was a nice take on the genre. But the premise has always interested me—brief moments where you get to experience another person’s body. I think about it especially in relationship to my gender identity, how pleasant and amazing I imagined it would be to swap into another gender without consequences. So a lot of the inspiration for the book was from thinking about my own gender more than it was thinking about the tradition of the body swap. Often, body swap films tend to swap people of the same gender. Freaky Friday, our most prominent one, is more of an age swap. Overall, what really sparked my imagination are the questions at the core of the novel: How would I actually begin to live as this other person? What if I didn’t want to change back?What are the things that I can actually accept and enjoy about this other life? Especially as a trans person, it was something I had been thinking about my entire life. Like how great it would be to have some magical moment that would bring me what I wanted. The book is a fantasy in that manner; it gave me space to engage with that childhood idea.
RL: Yeah, I can’t think of any other body swap story that deals with characters of different genders. And the fact the characters are a couple creates a fascinating dynamic and allows for a deep exploration of how identity factors into a relationship, and how the burdens of being in our bodies can influence how we relate to others. Were those ideas you wanted to explore, or did they rise organically as you wrote it?
The more in touch that I’ve become with my gender identity, the freer I feel to understand my sexuality.
IM: I’m really curious about the level of intimacy that we have with people who are so close to our lives. These are characters who know each other’s bodies intimately. As Eli remarks early on in the book, this is the face that he’s seen every day, but would he be able to identify it before now?
I wanted to explore what would happen with two people who are this close to each other, if they do end up switching roles in their lives, how that intimacy would play out, would that rekindle their curiosity for each other? Or would there almost be a droning sense of familiarity between them because they know each other so well? In some ways they’re the perfect people to switch bodies because of the intimacy they share. But in doing that they must confront how separate and detached they are from each other, which is the thing we often say about being in a relationship—no matter how well you know someone you can never really, reallyknow them. And the book grapples with that question—if this is as close as you can get, what remains unknowable?
RL: I also can’t think of a body swap story where the characters don’t know where the person in their body is, but when Eli realizes he’s in Elizabeth’s body, he has no idea where she/ his body is. And he’s in a foreign country.
IM: Yeah, he’s in a place where everything is unfamiliar to him and he’s still getting the hang of how to exist, even as himself. Not only does he have to learn how to be in Elizabeth’s body—different in scale and height from his own—he also needs to navigate a country where he’s lived for only three months. However, it helps the book plot-wise because he’s able to hide in ways he wouldn’t be able to if he was surrounded by people who know him. The biggest threat to Eli isn’t going unnoticed as Elizabeth, it’s the people who have an understanding of Elizabeth, such as her parents. So it made things a little easier for me as a writer because it gave me more space to allow for mistakes he might make. It gave Eli room to exist in Elizabeth’s body and come to terms with it. But it was also exciting to think about those different levels of unfamiliarity—the physical and the geographical.
RL: One recurring idea in the novel is that Elizabeth is too good for Eli, that in some ways he’s beneath her. The idea that certain people are better than others is one I resist, and yet also can’t argue with in terms of partnerships—people can be on different levels, or rather: different places in their lives. I wondered about your decision to create this dynamic in their relationship.
The idea of a soulmate doesn’t seem true to me.
IM: That dynamic is important because Elizabeth must have something that Eli wants. He feels really insecure and unaccomplished in this relationship, so there are reasons for him to be excited about this transformation, to potentially reap the benefits of existing in Elizabeth’s life. So it was really important for there to be a big distance between the two of them. Whether or not Elizabeth is actually better than Eli is a question that the book asks and tries to unravel. It is a myth perpetuated inside their relationship. Relationships often fall into a narrative that might not be beneficial, and this is the one shaping theirs. It’s a dynamic that’s also played out elsewhere in the book—it shows up a little between Desi and Kiril, and how Eli’s mom thinks of his dad, even though his dad is no longer in the picture, and it comes up between Johanna and Henry. It’s so loud in the relationship between Eli and Elizabeth, but the reverberations reappear in every relationship in the novel.
RL: I loved the way the novel explores sexuality and desire. It’s filtered through the lens of Eli, who has had some bisexual experiences and has wondered if he was asexual. As common as sexual fluidity is, I don’t see it represented much. Why do you think our culture is so fixated on binaries and slow to recognize there’s often a spectrum?
IM: Spectrums are threats, they undermine stability, whereas binaries are safe. Binaries make it easy for people to assume who they are. They oftentimes make it easier to fit into a hetero-patriarchal norm of you’re either this or you’re that. And the book attempts to unsettle that a little, even though it falls into the binary—neither one of these characters ends up being in between. But Eli exists inside Elizabeth’s outside of a traditional gender and sexual spectrum. I wouldn’t say that Eli even has a real grasp of his sexuality, it shifts over the course of the novel, it’s something he questions. But in Elizabeth’s body, he thinks about how he relates to men, and his past experiences, and his relationship to Elizabeth. There are moments when he begins to see women differently, no longer thinking of them romantically but aspirationally, as people to model his appearance after. I didn’t want Eli to simplistically take on Elizabeth’s sexuality once he inhabits her body. Or to suggest his sexuality is rigid and remains exactly how it was. But there is something really unsettled about his sexuality and his gender.
RL: Yeah, the novel beautifully illustrates how our gender and sexuality can shift our identities.
IM: Eli is constantly navigating how this transformation has not only changed his gender but how it’s shifting his sexuality. Both of those are reliant on each other, nothing is fixed in place. It’s something that I’ve thought about a lot. The more in touch that I’ve become with my gender identity, the freer I feel to understand my sexuality. It’s almost as if I’m able to see something that I was unwilling to look at before I was more comfortable with my gender identity. I don’t think that one necessarily leads to the other. But there’s a holistic sense of acceptance that can come out of being more stable in, and thus embracing, them both.
RL: Eli says no one marries for love, that it’s always for some other (pragmatic) reason. I wondered if his feelings on marriage were more generational or situational?
IM: That’s one of the moments in this book where you can’t really take Eli seriously. He is extremely unreliable. His opening line is, “I’m not a responsible man.” He’s not trying to hide the fact that he cannot be trusted. So when he’s making these statements about marriage, about love, the reader shouldn’t take it as dogma. He does think of his marriage as pragmatic, but love is not pragmatic. He believes marriage itself is separate from being in love, but he’s also willing to take advantage of the institution. That seems like a very millennial thing—trying to exploit a system that is already exploiting you. Eli understands that marriage is a pragmatic institution that can fortify or validate love. He’s seen a lot of marriages end in his life, so his cynical understanding of marriage comes out of his own character and his history. Whether or not he’s right, the book doesn’t know, but it is something that he is grappling with: what is this institution that he’s entered? What does it do for the love that he already felt? Does it change it?
RL: One of my favorite paragraphs includes the line the title comes from. It rejects the idea of fate and that people aren’t meant for one another; instead lives collide. I can’t decide if that’s liberating or depressing—maybe it’s both?
IM: I’m going to get very Instagram-therapist right now, but the idea of a soulmate doesn’t seem true to me. That’s something that the book is trying to ask: are these people soulmates, were they meant for each other? They kind of were and they weren’t. And that’s what they have to accept—it is both fate and it’s pure accident. Not the accident of We were meant for each other, but the accident of they could have completely missed each other. So many of the most important relationships of my life weren’t dutifully planned. There were accidents that came about, they were incidental run-ins, and that’s what made them so important and magical. That is what the book is questioning—does it need to be a fated event for it to matter, or can it matter even though it’s an accident?
About the recent tragic and mysterious events here in your outpost, I can now relate this:
Thirty-four days ago, in the middle of the night, I was woken by a loud noise coming from the Korean settlement. It sounded like a drum or a tree falling. Or so I thought because I was dreaming of Father, who you may recall liked to bang two sticks together to keep rhythm when your family played music after dinner. In the dream, however, he was not young but looked the way I imagine he would look if he were with us today: a trim, gray beard and missing his jaw from the Ottoman bullet, but very much alive.
Did you know in other dreams I find that jaw and carry it? Do you dream of such things about your brother?
In any case, I threw on my coat, grabbed my rifle, and hurried down the hill. I was concerned one of their fanzas might have collapsed, or that a bear had come, or both. They are ingenious, those houses—they are, as I learned, in the traditional style of their country with covered windows that protect them from the million biting flies that have altered my skin, and they contain a heating system that keeps the floor and seating area warm during the winters. But a bear, of course, if provoked, could tear down the door or a window and get in.
There was no bear that I could see. I counted all the rooftops as I kept going. The moon was high and bright and everywhere. Grass sparkled. All the fanzas were there. It was when I was closer that I noticed a door open to the one nearest to the river. A crowd of about thirty had gathered in front but no one had gone closer yet.
I made my way through them easily and spotted the man of the house lying halfway out of the space—he was shuddering a little like the last moments of those fish you used to teach me how to catch, and he was clutching his throat. Someone was trying to help and clutching his throat as well.
In the moment I understood what was happening and saw that his body was covered in a dark wetness, I heard more footsteps behind me, more doors opening—the sound I had heard was of a door banging open—and the man stopped shuddering and went completely motionless. There was a collective gasp. The night air cold enough at the start of spring for our breaths to appear in the moonlight.
Then the man’s wife appeared from the house, stepped over her husband’s dead body, and walked out to the grass and faced everyone and lifted the bloody knife she was holding and said in Korean—the neighbor next to me translated as best he could—that her husband tried to take advantage of her as she slept and hit her when she refused him, and hit her again, and she got so tired of it, all of it, every night, every single night, so tired of it, and there, it was done. She threw down the knife. She stared at everyone. And then at me. Her hair was wild. But she wasn’t scared.
“You’re married,” someone shouted at her from the crowd. “What’s there to take advantage of, you bitch?”
There was silence. And then the man who had been trying to help save the husband, his arms all covered in blood—he turned out to be the man’s brother—walked up to his sister-in-law, picked up the knife, and struck her in the head with the handle, once, but hard enough for her to crumple like an ancient twig.
I rushed toward him, or tried to, but I was held. I reminded the men holding me that I was the police to this settlement and that they were under Russian governance, but whether they understood me or cared I didn’t know. They gripped harder the harder I struggled as the brother waved the knife at me and approached and said, in broken Russian, that I had no business here, that this was a family matter, and when I reminded him of who I was, he said, “You are a useless Cossack who is young enough to be drinking his mother’s breast milk, who has done nothing here and will do nothing here, ever, and if you say another word we will do to you what I am about to do to my bitch sister.”
He said this and spat and took my rifle and yelled, or it was more of a bellow. He headed to his house. He came out with a large rope meant for an animal and wrapped one end around his sister-in-law’s neck. At the weight of this and the motion, she woke, but before she could struggle, he was already pulling her toward the tree by the river.
The rest happened quickly. I shouted. I tried to break free once more, but I was no match for the men holding me. The brother threw the rope over the thickest branch, and with the rope over his shoulder he began to walk away from the water. The woman was dragged into the water first, submerged for a moment, and then was lifted. I thought our eyes met again until I realized she was looking just beyond me.
So I looked away in that direction as she died, to where her daughter of around twelve years had come out, the daughter who would later gesture to me, as I knew she would, that she had heard nothing, didn’t know what had happened, because she couldn’t hear, was born unable to hear, she was asleep, she was dreaming.
“What were you dreaming about?” I said in Russian. She had stopped crying and was reading my lips.
Music, she gestured, pretending to play a stringed instrument.
That was the beginning. I was never given my rifle back, but I was let go and told to leave them alone, that I was no police here.
“Leave us in peace,” they said.
“What peace?” I said, pointing first at the man with his throat slit and then at the body hanging from the tree.
Still, I went back up, peering down on occasion at what had transpired below, which alternated between shadow and the moonlight.
Am I a coward for staying up there for the rest of the night? For doing nothing to stop this from happening? Do you think me a coward, Uncle? Your orders after my preliminary years were to dispatch me to this remote region a world away from you where I would report on the goings-on of a) a newly formed Korean settlement of about fifteen houses, and b) the area in general.
And when I asked what exactly you meant by the “goings-on,” you didn’t respond. You passed me the reins of one of your horses, which I know you weren’t supposed to do—was that an act of kindness, or love?—and handed me a matchlock rifle, told me that every thirty or so days a messenger would come to pick up my report, and finally thanked me for my honorable service.
So here is my report, my third, and yet no messenger has come.
I am Andrei Bulavin, twenty-two years old, your nephew and son of Petro Timofeyevich, who died valiantly in the Balkans, and this is my fourth year of service under your command. I have received the highest level as a marksman and as a swordsman, in leadership, penmanship, cartography, languages; I can save a horse’s life a dozen different ways, can build shelters, estimate wind speed, build a fire faster than anyone else in the barracks. . . . Is this a punishment?
The body remained hanging in the tree all night.
The body remained hanging in the tree all night. Then, in the morning, I watched the daughter use an ax to cut her mother down. She plummeted into the water and for a moment the daughter, as though unprepared for what to do next, watched her mother float and twist and roll down the water until she got tangled in an old beaver dam. Then she dragged her mother out and proceeded to dig two graves near her house. No one helped. She grew tired. She kept digging.
I dressed in my uniform and came back down, this time on Timo, and I helped her as my horse drank the river water and grazed. Neighbors watched but did nothing. We wrapped the bodies in blankets but the daughter changed her mind, I think because she would have no more blankets. She covered her parents’ faces with some of their clothes instead and we buried them and I said that I was sorry.
But I forgot she couldn’t hear me, so I faced her and said it again, in Russian, and then in Korean—I had been learning as much as I could—and after a moment she drew what I believed was my matchlock on the dirt. I shook my head. I said, “Someone here has it. There are too many of them.” She considered this. I nodded and said that I was indeed in a predicament, but I didn’t think she knew I was talking.
Timo came up to her and softly pushed his head against her. This made her smile. She was thin and short for her age and I could not read her at all, what held her now, what passed through, whether it was sadness or anger or both or none of this. I knew she wanted little to do with her uncle, and her uncle wanted nothing to do with her. She was an orphan and was now living alone in a fanza that her parents had built a world and a lifetime away from where she was born, a house that was now hers.
My third month here, and I had already forgotten her name, had seen her twice perhaps before last night, was too embarrassed now to ask for it again. I had spent these past months speaking to as many of these settlers as I could, as many as would speak to me, but my picture of them wasn’t complete: I gathered that most had come from a province just across the border that had been suffering from drought. There were no children—except the daughter who had just lost her parents—though it wasn’t clear whether there had once been children in their community elsewhere and whether there were plans for families to begin. Many of them were older than I thought they would be, in the latter half of their lives. Two were wanted thieves who had escaped from a penal colony in Manchuria, a man of an ancient age mentioned matter-of-factly, offering me some of the tobacco he was smoking.
No one cared. Just as no one cared at first why I had come here and what role I was to play for them as long as I wasn’t a hindrance to their daily lives. They resided together peacefully and worked together and grew barley and buckwheat and corn. It wasn’t technically their land; they were tenant farmers for a Russian landowner who now lived in Vladivostok and who had given up trying to cultivate this land.
They weren’t the only ones. There were pockets of them all over, these small Korean settlements scattered up and down the valley.
Are these the goings-on you would like to know about? That they are entirely self-sufficient, seem to be immune to these dreaded flies that have scarred my face, that they have built better houses than ours even in the Cossack lands or those belonging to the indigenous tribes? That they have succeeded where Russians weren’t able to by cultivating this land, that they ferment vegetables by digging down far into the earth? That they are private and say little, but many of them already know Russian, and that there seems to be a school being built somewhere north at a larger settlement?
There is even a missionary who moves from one settlement to the next, selling products from a horse-drawn cart and briefly saying a sermon before he moves on. I have spent time with him, have bought wares from him, a pot of honey, a hammock I can hang over the stove in the winter to sleep in warmth.
That was where I was when the next disturbances started. The cold came back for a few days, and I had hung the hammock back up above the stove and was drifting off when I heard someone scream. In my disorientation and tiredness, I forgot what had befallen the settlement and the mess I had made of things. I put on my boots and flung on my coat, reached for the matchlock that wasn’t there, remembered, hurried down.
Timo the war-horse, whom I had left with the daughter to keep her company, upon recognizing me grew excited, but I told him to stay where he was in front of the house. The screaming was coming from elsewhere. Other members of the settlement had come out. Together we headed into the brother’s house, the one who had hung his sisterin-law.
We found him clutching a blanket and staring off into the distance somewhere beyond his wall. His skin was as pale as ash.
“She’s not dead!” he shouted, and bit the blanket like a child.
I attempted to lead the investigation into this matter, which in truth I thought of as no matter at all. The drunken murderer was having nightmares. I thought: perhaps if he kept having them, he would eventually depart. Good riddance. He was no uncle, either. I should say I had yet to see them interact. More than once, I have heard him call her “the runt” or “the deaf bitch.”
I know in my heart that with one stab of my saber, he is gone swiftly and efficiently, but I feel ill at ease doing so without your permission. Do I have your permission? Will you ever read this? Have I entered a lawless land only to eventually become lawless myself? What is it that you want me to do?
Have I entered a lawless land only to eventually become lawless myself?
The settlement wanted me at first to do nothing. They decided to take charge themselves and at sunrise they helped the brother dig up the bodies once more. They were both there, the bodies. Already rotting. The clothes the daughter had used to cover their faces ruined now from the digging up.
The brother began to shake. “I swear to you,” he said. “She came back.”
As far as everyone could tell, the case was closed. Everyone returned to their work. The following evening, just as the sun set, more screaming was heard. This time from another house. Another man was clutching his blanket and staring at his wall and shouting, “Oh please, oh please, oh please, this isn’t happening.”
When one of the farmers asked the man to describe what exactly he saw, he said “a woman with brightness like fire” and “full of vengeance” approached him before vanishing. (Again, someone obliged and translated this for me.) I wanted to ask how one saw the manifestation of vengeance, but I kept my mouth shut. I thought: someone was playing a cruel joke. Or perhaps it wasn’t cruel at all. I quite liked it, in fact. I was impressed. Good riddance.
I also considered that they were eating too much of the “drunken” bread they make and were having a collective delirium propelled by guilt. They had punished a woman defending herself and sided with the actions of a rapist.
I sneaked away as they kept talking and headed to the daughter’s house. Timo was by the front door, standing guard. I nuzzled his face. I slid open the door slightly to find the girl in deep sleep, wearing her nightclothes, her hair fanned out across the wooden floor, the room undisturbed.
Now it is day thirty-five after the deaths of the parents. Almost every member of the settlement has been visited by what they are calling the apparition. It’s never the husband, always the wife. They describe her in the exact same way. A moving brightness. Anger. The same height and shape as the hanged woman.
It has gone on long enough that I believe other settlements have now heard about it. The missionary has stopped visiting. I no longer see the faint silhouettes of riders on a far ridge. Not even, it seems, the bears want to tread here.
Only the birds keep coming. Hundreds of them. Silent until something startles them and they explode from the river tree as if all the branches have burst.
The day I left for this post, you said, “Be aware and afraid of bandits.”
There are no bandits here. Maybe there were once. Probably someday there will be again. For now, it is only ourselves.
You see, we seem to have become the fear. The settlers try to stay up, afraid to shut their eyes. The settlement has also assigned rotating sentries and they all take turns making their rounds at night. It doesn’t matter. Someone always sees the woman. Now it has been long enough that some have seen her more than once.
They have formed a council of some kind to talk about this ghost, but also, I infer, to discuss other matters pertaining to the land and their homes.
I find these two-headed strands of conversation fascinating. They want to solve the present situation but also to solve, apparition aside, the never-ending hurdle that is the future here for them.
Even through all this, they seem determined to enter it.
Sometime during the unease of these days, my matchlock vanished. I know this because the brother approached me and accused me of taking it back. I almost reached for my sword. I almost brandished it and pointed it at him the way he pointed the knife at me. I told him that he could check my house if he wanted, but he waved his arms, walked away, and then turned.
I expected the burst of anger I was accustomed to from him, but to my surprise his face had grown soft and sincere and broken, and he said calmly, “Please leave us alone. We are trying to live in a land no one wants or thinks about. Everything was fine until you came here, wanting it again.”
I find that hard to believe. That everything was fine.
I have deduced that it is possible someone is lighting the fuse of my matchlock to present a “brightness.” That there is impressive trickery here. But who is it?
I have tactfully begun to speak to those willing to speak to me, the way I began to do when I first came here, but there are few who believe this is not a supernatural event. They believe they are being punished for their role in the woman’s death and this is now the way of things.
“So we scream,” they say. “We lose sleep. There’s still the next day, isn’t there?”
When I ask them if perhaps they should leave a haunted place, that I would be happy to search for another plot of land, that they have all left once for somewhere else and succeeded—when I ask them all this, they all respond with some three-hundred-year-old story about a Japanese invasion and then the history of temples and missionaries and European ships and that a ghost is nothing.
They say, “So we scream. We lose sleep. It’s not killing us. Why should we leave?”
“You’re the police,” they say, finally. “Get rid of the ghost.”
Only two people have remained untouched by this: myself and the daughter. The settlement seems to think this is logical. Why would the mother haunt her daughter? Or haunt the one person who attempted to defend her? No one seems to consider me as the perpetrator for obvious reasons. But the fact that no one seems to consider the daughter is curious to me. I know that neither her height nor her hair length match her mother’s. But perhaps she has figured out a way to alter her appearance so that the settlement believes she is her mother. That is possible.
No one attempts to speak to her. No one acknowledges her as she passes to work her bit of land on her own or to visit her parents. Has it always been this way, all these years, long before I came? In their discrimination, have they failed to see her intelligence, her maturity, and that in a month’s time she has lost both her parents? If she is tormenting them, I do not blame her. But for how long will she do so? I have tried many times to bring it up in a way I feel is appropriate but have failed to do so every time.
So it is a great surprise when one afternoon she walks up to my post, leading Timo. She unwraps the blanket she has been using as a bag and places food she has prepared into tiny bowls and scatters them around us on the floor like a game we are about to play. She begins to eat. She gestures for me to join her, so I do and I eat with her. We eat it all. Every last spoonful. Then she lies down and shuts her eyes. I poke her and point up to the hammock and she climbs up and in, and I light the fire underneath, and she falls asleep. I lie down on the floor and listen to her breathing, thinking that she cannot hear herself ever.
What is a heartbeat to someone who cannot hear it? What is breathing?
Could Father hear himself before he breathed his last breath?
A buzzing flashes over me. For a moment I brace myself, waiting for the woman to appear for the first time in this house, but it is only a bee that has managed to find its way inside. I watch as it flits about, on the scent of something, and then it settles into my teacup where I used the last of my honey today.
It is then I realize, privately, that today is my birthday. Did she know this, and therefore visited and shared a meal with me? That is impossible.
I know nothing. That is how I feel just then. I know fire and horses and how to write and I miss my father.
I am wondering when this will end—and what will be here in a season, a year, ten years—when I hear another scream. The girl shifts in the hammock as I feed the fire. The night is full.
Early next morning, a few of the farmers are outside when I step out to relieve myself. A woman and three men. The woman speaks Russian. A man translates for the others. She shakes her head at me and says that I am a disgusting man for taking to bed with a child and that I am no different than the murdered man.
She says, “Have you no shame?” and then says that it is clear to them I am the cause of all of this. That I am a demon and that I am wreaking havoc and that I have one hour to leave before they set fire to my post. If I refuse to leave, they will come for me, all of them as a group.
She says all this very quickly, and they return down the hill. In my shock, I remain motionless until I feel the wetness in my trousers and realize that I have pissed myself. The daughter steps out, yawning, then looks curiously down at the three settlers marching toward a group of older gentlemen who are the council and who have gathered by the tree.
“It’s nothing,” I say, and smile. “Come. I want to show you something. I learned it from the missionary. We haven’t seen him in a while, yes?”
The daughter eyes my trousers, then yawns once more and nods. I retrieve my teacup where there is a little honey left, and I walk toward the perimeter of the woods and hold it up. I hear her coming up behind me, the slow rustle of her skirt in the grass, but I don’t turn.
A few minutes later, a bee appears, hovering, circling, then dips into the cup. Then it flies away into the woods. I follow it. She follows me. When I can’t see it anymore or hear it anymore, I stand still and hold up the cup and wait for the bee to come back. Which it does. So we move on, and as we head farther into the woods, I tell the daughter that it is a trick I learned from the missionary. We’re creating a trail.
“To the hive,” I say. “And the honey.”
And then I hold the cup out for her to try. Without hesitation she lifts it up, and after the bee leaves the cup, she begins to walk steadily and purposefully. She doesn’t notice that I have stopped and that I am watching her.
The sun has entered the forest and the spaces between the trunks are alight. It is as if the trees vibrate. For a moment, there is no sound. And I know it is a trick of the light, but the farther away she goes, holding the cup in front of her, the taller she becomes. Not once does she turn. Her shoulders widen. Her hair grows long and pale. And then I hear a distant scream coming from behind me and I say out loud, “So it really isn’t you.”
I wonder if the hour has already passed. Whether they are all climbing the hill to burn down my post.
I try to imagine where you are now, Father. And where I should be. Why someone will refuse to leave a cursed place.
She is in the distance now. All sunlight. Only a sliver. The bee comes back from its hidden kingdom, and then it doesn’t.
Queer people have been writing historical fiction since before queerness existed—by which I mean, since before it was hammered into an antithesis to heterosexuality during the long nineteenth century. By the turn of the twentieth, queers looking to write about the past had to grapple with new, rigid identity categories that didn’t necessarily reflect how they saw themselves or their histories.
That’s why I’m so interested in queer historicals from the first half of the twentieth century. My novel Dry Landopens in 1917, twenty-two years after Oscar Wilde’s trial and two before Magnus Hirschfeld founded the Berlin Institute of Sexology. It was a time of fluidity and fear, expansion and repression, at least in Wisconsin, where Dry Land is set. Robust networks of self-identifying queers existed in cities like Milwaukee and were forming in rural areas; the boundary between gay and trans was murky, crossed joyously or dangerously depending on wealth, race, and location; and in the US Army, where my protagonist Rand gets drafted, sodomy (but not, technically, homosexuality) could land you in prison.
Queer writers working in this era and the decades that followed turned to many different pasts to understand their paradoxical present. Some, like Langston Hughes and James Baldwin, examined the immediate history of their own childhoods to chart the origins of the restrictions they faced as adults. Others, like Mary Renault and Bryher, sought the distant past, exploring eras where social constraints on sexuality felt freer because they looked very different.
Today we’re lucky to be living in a golden age of queer fiction, which is especially rich in historicals and SFF (Dry Land is mildly SFF too, since it’s about a man with the magical power to grow plants). In terms of what they offer readers, queer SFF and queer historicals are two sides of the same coin. If queer SFF carves new exterior possibilities from the existing strictures of politics and culture, queer historicals unearth hidden interiors, turning over the stones of the past to find a riot of life, fiery salamanders and jewel-colored beetles. Like their contemporary descendants, the novelists in this list, writing in the muddy margin between the social construction of homosexuality and the formalization of queer rights as a political movement, found great beauty under great pressure.
Glenway Wescott is not well-read today. It’s unfortunate, as he’s an impeccable prose stylist whose 1927 novel The Grandmothers is a closely-observed, semi-autobiographical story of queer ancestry in rural 1800s Wisconsin. Each chapter is told from a different family member’s perspective, but the heart of the book is the kinship that develops between the young, gay Alwyn Towers (a barely-disguised Wescott) and his queer uncles: Hilary, who died in the Civil War; Leander, a veteran bachelor; and Evan, a deserter from the Spanish-American war who takes a new name and adopts Alwyn after reflecting that “he was going to resemble Leander when he grew up.” The book shows how found families are as complicated as biological families, fostering relationships of identity and recognition but not necessarily comfort.
Hughes’s vibrant first novel is, like Wescott’s, a semi-autobiographical bildungsroman. It follows Sandy Rogers, an ambiguously queer black boy growing up in 1912 Lawrence, Kansas. Through Sandy’s eyes, Hughes documents the complex interplay of gender, sexuality, and colorism in poor black communities of the Midwest. Raised by his grandmother and sharing her feminine-coded aesthetics—“He liked to clean things, to make them beautiful, to make them shine. Aunt Hager did, too”—Sandy finds the world of masculine posturing he discovers in barbershops, barrooms, and hotel lobbies jointly disturbing and alluring. The book concludes with Sandy’s move to Chicago, where he’s propositioned by a “womanish” man and admits he’s curious, but declines because “he was afraid.”
Sarah Waters, grand dame of the literate lesbian historical, has called Warner one of the “great under-read British novelists of the twentieth century.” Nowhere is her brilliance clearer than in this exacting, intellectual novel. Set during Paris’s 1848 February Revolution, the warp of Summer Will Show is the romance between Sophia, a fallen English aristocrat, and Minna, a Jewish performer. But the novel’s weave is an unsparing study of different revolutionary temperaments. Even though it seems to retell Warner’s own life-long romance with communist poet Valentine Ackland, the book is mostly an ambivalent account of how those who see revolution as romantic are bound to feel lost when it succeeds. As one barricade-defender remarks, “Whatever one wants, one always has to accept a great deal of rubbish along with it.”
Mary Renault is best-known for her meticulously researched gay novels set in ancient Greece, including The Last of the Wine (1956) and a hagiographic trilogy about Alexander the Great. Her WWII novel The Charioteer(1953) was beloved by gay men at midcentury. The Friendly Young Ladies (or The Middle Mist, its original UK title) is her only book about queer women. Set in the 1930s, the novel’s central couple, gentle Helen and butch Leo, live on a houseboat in the Thames. There they ward off the advances of various slimy men and play disgruntled babysitters to Leo’s runaway sister Elsie. At the book’s striking climax, Leo, who has always considered herself a boy, falls for her cowboy best friend. He writes her a manipulative love-letter claiming he must kill the man in her—“he is you, and has the immortal part of you in his keeping”—in order to love the woman.
In the kind of restrained prose you’d expect from the man who edited The New Yorker for half a century, William Maxwell tells a story of teenage infatuation among college boys in 1920s Illinois. Weedy nerd Lymie Peters falls for oblivious if good-hearted jock Spud Latham. The moment Lymie realizes that what he’s feeling is love is quietly devastating: “Something had burst inside of him, something more important than any organ, and there was a flowing which was like blood.” Lymie’s jealousy over Spud nearly ends in suicide. We don’t normally consider Maxwell a queer writer, and while he disclaimed queer readings of this novel, he also said that “the whole of my youth is in it” and could not complete it until he underwent extensive psychoanalysis. Hmm.
Marguerite Yourcenar was the first woman elected to the Académie Française. Memoirs of Hadrian is her masterpiece, a rigorously researched meditation written from the perspective of the Roman emperor as he awaits death. Its central drama is Hadrian’s love for Antinous, a beautiful Bithynian youth who dies at nineteen, devastating Hadrian and shaping the course of Roman art history. Their love provides occasion for a series of elegant reflections on love, death, and beauty. “That mysterious play which extends from love of a body to love of an entire person has seemed to me noble enough to consecrate to it one part of my life,” Hadrian remarks. “Reason stands confounded in presence of the veritable prodigy that love is.” Such meditations comprise most of the novel, and they’re so comprehensively imagined it’s hard to remember they’re fiction.
Baldwin’s most famous queer novel is the sublime Giovanni’s Room(1956), followed perhaps by the frank, rhapsodic conclusion of Another Country(1962), where Baldwin’s lovers reflect on how men—even straight men—are destroyed by the lack of male touch. The desire in Go Tell it on the Mountain is more sublimated, but still smolders. Baldwin’s first, semi-autobiographical novel recalls growing up in 1930s Harlem beneath the thumb of an abusive father. John Grimes, the Baldwin character, feels at one stymied and electrified by his Baptist faith, which blends with his longing for Elisha, a young preacher at his family’s church. The book’s climax is a hallucinogenic dream vision where John frees himself from his father’s control by opening himself to a religious ecstasy that’s finally indistinguishable from erotic desire: “The light and the darkness had kissed each other, and were married now, for ever, in the life and the vision of John’s soul.”
Gate to the Sea by Bryher (1958)
Bryher was the life-long partner of modernist poet H.D.; in an iconically trans move, she renamed herself after an island. After two early autobiographical novels about feeling like a boy trapped in a girl’s body, Bryher turned to historical fiction. She wrote eleven historicals, all scrupulously researched and set in the distant past (she and Renault were mutual fans). Gate to the Sea follows Harmonia, the temple priestess among the Greek citizens of conquered 4th-century Poseidonia, as she tries to escape her devastated home. Like several of Bryher’s novels rooted in her experience of WWII—she helped refugees flee the Nazis until she had to flee herself—it’s about watching a beloved world become unrecognizable. It’s also notable for including a character who insists on his pronouns: “‘My name is Myron, not Myro,’ the girl said firmly, stressing the masculine form of the name. ‘I am a boy and I am going to be a sailor.’”
Morris’s only novel, this historical travelogue about a fake mid-20th-century European country is rendered with such verisimilitude that when it appeared in 1985, people tried to book tickets. The book is queer in the expanded sense adopted by literary theory in the ‘90s. Hav has refused, on a national scale, what Lee Edelman terms reproductive futurity. It ignores the siren call of historical purpose, ambling on in “its own entirely separate plane of existence” while cultivating its colorful, idiosyncratic traditions (a wild rooftop race; snow raspberries; a thousand-year-old Iron Dog). Hav is a brilliant travel writer’s extended meditation on the queer project of history itself. Near the book’s conclusion, Morris imagines this exchange: “‘What are you running away from?’ Magda asked me once. I said I wasn’t running away from anything. ‘Of course you are,’ she said. ‘In Hav we are all running.’ Perhaps we are, too, each of us finding our own escape in this narrow sultry cul-de-sac. Like many another cage the peninsula of Hav offers its prisoners a special kind of liberation.” So too history: sanctuary and trap, foreign and familiar, the mirror into which we peer and find more self than we bargained for.
When I turned eighteen, I started going to a Lincoln Heights music venue called Low End Theory a couple times a month. Hosted every Wednesday, the spot was a hotbed for experimental hip-hop producers. I’d pick up my friend David in Anaheim’s fringes, and then we’d make the hour-long drive to the venue. We’d met online six or seven years earlier playing Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland, which at the time was the most recent installment of the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater (THPS) series. The “Wasteland,” of course, was Greater Los Angeles. The game’s open-world design was innovative for its time—players weaved through the palm trees of Beverly Hills’ Rodeo Drive, carved the banks of the Los Angeles River somewhere near Low End Theory, or popped over to Orange County for a session at the Vans skatepark, where David and I had first met up in middle school.
The tiny subcommunity of Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series taught me how to read like a writer, to appreciate decisions made and not made
David and I didn’t see each other much during high school, mostly because neither of us drove. But we talked almost daily, and when we turned eighteen, we were suddenly making the fortnightly pilgrimage together a few times a month. David was simultaneously a stranger and a brother; for years he was the only real friend I had who also loved reading. He introduced me to the dense brilliance of Gene Wolfe, while I can proudly claim introducing him to Borges. Whenever there was a lull in conversation during those first few car rides, we turned back to books. In describing an author, we’d look for metaphor in our shared native language, that of THPS’s online community. At first, this was a kind of joke. I’d say something like, “You see that new video by team tRM? Very Jonathan Franzen. Masterfully crafted, ambitious in its scope, but who gives a shit?” And David: “That video by Nonsense was really ahead of its time, holy shit. This is our Moby Dick. People are going to be watching this fifteen years from now, I swear.” (He was right.) For a long time, I thought that this was simply how David and I had learned to bond. But as I became older and grew more serious about writing, I realized my love for reading and THPS came from the same place, exercised the same muscle. The tiny subcommunity of THPS that David and I both belonged to taught me how to read like a writer, to appreciate decisions made and not made. It gave me a working language to talk about craft in. Above all, it introduced me to the joys and frustrations of practicing art. Without that community, I doubt I would have become a writer.
THPS could not have become an art without its community, and even though THPS1 and 2 were wildly popular, it wasn’t until the release of the game’s third installment, which had an online feature, that a serious community started to form. There were various mini-games you could choose from while playing online, and “Trick Attack,” which awards you points for doing tricks, remains the most popular. To rack up a high score, you need to string together a “combo” of tricks. Here’s what this looks like: You grind an actionable part of the landscape, manual (the skateboard equivalent of a wheelie) to get to a quarterpipe, and so on. If you’re able to maintain a combo after the time runs out on the session, you’re allowed to keep skating until your combo ends. On THPS3, you played a Trick Attack, the game ended, and then the host of the virtual room started another. It got old fast, and the underwhelming size of the online community reflected this.
Tournaments with judges, each with her own, wholly subjective idea about what prov should constitute, were held regularly.
Not long after THPS went online, hardcore players grew tired of the endless Trick Attacks. Rather than following repetitive “robot” lines guaranteeing maximum points and easy balance—and thus “winning” a game devoid of incentives—these same players started prioritizing artful trick usage and general elegance. Early language surrounding this phenomenon varied, but a common term—improvisation, “prov” for short—concretized. Players started making videos and posting them to new, community-run forums whose domain names were paid for by one of the handful of players older than eighteen: Bens0nn, Nacho, Cio. The zeitgeist was changing, expedited by the release of Tony Hawk’s Underground (THUG), the first game in the series that allowed you to observe players still holding combos after the time in the session expired. The “best” players were no longer on the Trick Attack leaderboards. They were those who, for one reason or another, were uniquely watchable after your own combo had ended.
Tournaments with judges, each with her own, wholly subjective idea about what prov should constitute, were held regularly. Some of these tournaments are permanently embedded in prov’s collective memory. There are 15-year-long running jokes about so-and-so being robbed, about clandestine arrangements between players and judges. The community has since moved from a constellation of forums to Discord, and in that migration, countless videos fell through the cracks. KC and Diz’s first transfer video, once canon, is thought to be unrecoverable, and Brazbox’s hard drive, the greatest collection of videos by any one player, bit the dust. Despite these losses, the community has a strong sense of history.
Slowly, these Trick Attack sessions stopped being win-lose mini-games and instead became the most convenient way for prov players to show off. In a prov lobby, nobody cared in the slightest about winning, and the repeated matches literally became pointless. This is why casual players were so flummoxed at watching a combo stretch on for minutes at a time when that player had already won, and why it was so difficult for me to explain prov to my friends. It was like trying to explain the nuances of a sport without being able to agree on its basic rules. But to call prov a type of sport, or an eSport, even, would be misguided. Prov is purely expressive, there’s no winning or losing. A real-world parallel might be capoeira, that mesmerizing Afro-Brazilian martial art that is, at its core, an art. As soon as players stopped trying to win Trick Attack games, THPS prov became something more than a game.
There was a Platonic ideal, and the best provers perfectly adhered to canonical trick usage.
To say that multiplayer THPS became pointless is not a condemnation. Real-life skateboarding is similarly pointless, answering only to internal and perpetually morphing conventions. Curt Lindgren (or Rodney Mullen, depending on whom you ask) came along and kickflipped, something hitherto absent from skateboarding’s collective imagination. Like skateboarding, all innovation within the closed system of THPS’s laws and physics is fair game. Strapping a board to your thigh with an exercise band and skipping around erratically in public is not yet part of what falls under the umbrella of skateboarding, but it could be—skateboarding is mutable in a way that a sport like basketball is not. JM Coetzee’s words about the modern conception of the novel in his genre-bending book Elizabeth Costello make for an apt comparison here: “When it entered the languages of Europe, [the word novel] had the vaguest of meanings: it meant the form of writing that was formless, that had no rules, that made up its own rules as it went along.” Prov was similarly disinterested in defining its own parameters. While this was initially an oversight—the result of a bunch of teens not knowing what they had stumbled upon—this looseness and openness toward aesthetic change has become one of prov’s defining characteristics.
In chaotic and horizontal fashion, THPS prov continued to evolve. Early prov prized “style”—the use of certain skateboarding tricks in harmonious, agreed-upon patterns—as more important than interesting decision-making or originality. There was a Platonic ideal, and the best provers perfectly adhered to canonical trick usage. This early philosophy of prov was a harmonious, total system, but there was little room for innovation. Players seen as having particularly novel or unconventional trick usage—see Jens, who resembles a whirling dervish with his dizzying, maximalist playstyle—were understood to merely be better at representing Perfect Trick Usage in its totality. It was mimetic rather than creative, akin to early landscape painting.
In the end, the question is about the extent to which prov must truly be improvised.
As the years have gone on, opinions on how to evaluate prov players have only become more fragmented and nuanced. Some think that “flow” is among the highest indicators of a skilled prover. In this philosophy, a player’s ability to gracefully maneuver through all of a map without losing momentum is prized. Each map is its own “complete library” to borrow Jorge Luis Borges’s idea, replete with endless permutations and potential decisions.
Flow is prioritized in the videos of early prodigies like Ksk and Gonzo, whose playstyles would seem risk-averse if judged by today’s standards. On the opposite end of the ideological spectrum, some players value unpredictable movement above all else. Silent, whose Downtown and East LA video holds a special place in my heart, is probably the most important name here. His willingness to change direction and break a combo for spontaneity’s sake pushed the boundaries of prov and marked a major turning point. Even though he hasn’t played seriously in years, you can see his influence in contemporary videos. At any given point in prov’s history, public opinion has favored either flow or unpredictability to varying degrees. A flow-oriented player is likely more skilled at keeping a combo after a Trick Attack session expires because, ostensibly, they’re taking fewer risks. Likewise, flow-oriented players are consistent, and they often perform well in tournaments. A recent history of winners—Konek in the famed i5 tournament, which I judged in 2020, Voyage in the tLTourney—bears this out. In my opinion, the best players synthesize both polarities of these philosophies, carrying combos into deep waters while making daring, innovative choices.
Within this question of flow versus unpredictability, there are more unresolved issues. Do you value large, difficult stunts pulled off during runs, or are you instead attuned to the small, interesting decisions made at every turn? Particularly bombastic players might incorporate stunts called “transfers” into their runs. It’s a slippery term, but I’d define the transfer as a unique move that gets a player from one part of the map to another in a creative way—exploiting a ramp with glitchy physics to grind an impossibly high scaffolding, for example. The community’s tolerance of incorporating transfers into prov runs depends on what’s trending. It’s a question of subtle economy vs. absolute vitality: do you prefer, for example, the restrained quietude of Marilynne Robinson’s writing, or the maximalist intensity of Thomas Bernhard’s?
Like a photograph, a certain player’s prov either punctures me or it doesn’t.
Debates about the place of transfers in prov are contentious, but in the end, the question is about the extent to which prov must truly be improvised. Some think that doing a logistically difficult maneuver during a run is the pinnacle of improvisational skill, while others think it is lazy lip-service to the real art of improvisation and, if it seems like a player has planned a particularly interesting move in advance, those observing might voice their displeasure with the player’s brazen disregard for true improvisation. Some players are now polarizing because their playstyles are so transfer-heavy—so glitzy and showy—that many think it can no longer be called improvisation. There’s a delicate balancing act here between doing interesting things during runs, but not having them be so interesting that they’re obviously premeditated. I feel this same tension when watching a dance like samba or forró; I’m captivated by how dancers are simultaneously capable of technical mastery and utter nonchalance in real-time.
Discussions about the true nature of improvisation aren’t unique to THPS. When I started regularly playing the game, debates about freestyle rapping in hip-hop were at their height, and freestyle purists would flock to the internet, indignant that, in a freestyle cipher, their favorite rapper had recycled lines from an earlier session. The more moderate camp argued that part of a freestyle rapper’s genius is her ability to seamlessly stitch together disparate elements or verses, a skill closer to collage than divine inspiration. Maybe jazz is the best comparison: successful improvisation requires a fantastically broad skill base and understanding of the art to begin with. Some take issue with how far away from true improvisation certain players are, but nobody doubts their raw ability. I would not be surprised if this playstyle returns to fashion one day.
It is, I’ll admit, unsurprising that formal THPS criticism among provers has never quite taken off in the way I hoped for. When trying to articulate to other critics in the community why I find a particular player special, I’m often forced to resort to the same vague language used to describe a writer’s unique “voice.” “They have a unique ______; they play in a way that is distinct and wholly their own.” Among the most unique players, their “voice” (or whatever word you’d like to use) is like a watermark permanently stamped on their skateboarder’s forehead. Even if an innovative player assumes a different alias and created skateboarder, it’s entirely possible she might be recognized by other provers. Every so often a prov phenom comes from nowhere, and just like fans and journalists alike pored through the syntax of notable Italian authors to unearth Elena Ferrante’s identity, the prov community might perform a close reading of this new prodigy’s playstyle to confirm that they aren’t, in fact, an already-established player in disguise. We have, too, our own outsider artists, provers who, partially disconnected from the community’s influence, make increasingly bizarre and innovative videos that have little in common with the contemporary canon. Many of these outsider artists come from countries without a strong tradition of English-language education. This fact has hindered the players in some ways, but it has also allowed them to flourish without the anxiety of influence, to borrow a phrase from the literary critic Harold Bloom.
To a novice prover, videos of notable early players—the aforementioned Ksk and Gonzo—might seem banal in the same way that a casual movie-watcher might find Citizen Kane boring. If their playstyle seems unremarkable now, this is because players who came after them have already digested and internalized the way they changed the game, and that foundational link has been lost. There was a before them and an after; they have permanently changed the trajectory of our little art. “I like the way he plays” is neither insightful nor meaningful, so I’ll borrow from Roland Barthes and his words on photography instead. Like a photograph, a certain player’s prov either punctures me or it doesn’t. I am sometimes unable to describe certain aspects of prov in the same way that, as someone chiefly interested in prose, I feel incapable of saying anything intelligent about a poem or painting. “I like the way it makes me feel” is my lone recourse.
I’m also unable to explain why I was considered an innovative THAW prover, but nothing more than average on earlier installments like THUG and THUG2. In the maps of these earlier games—Moscow, Berlin, Manhattan, Barcelona—I feel unsure of myself, far from THAW, far from Los Angeles’s great sprawl. The games are basically the same, save minor differences in physics, map design, and balance meters. But maybe the reasons were sentimental: I am from Southern California, and so the opportunity to prov right under the Hollywood sign or grind the rails on the Santa Monica Pier or Downtown’s famed Alameda ledge remains a deeply personal affair. Or maybe it’s a question of translation, maybe I find myself mediocre at earlier games in the series for the same reasons I find the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector beautiful in Portuguese but saccharine in English despite diligent, faithful translations of her work. But this isn’t a perfect metaphor, as THUG was actually released before THAW. Perhaps, as Borges says, the original is unfaithful to the translation.
Years removed from having seriously played any other video game, I still feel the same sense of exhilaration starting a Trick Attack prov run as when I start a creative essay. In both instances, I have no idea where I’ll end up, no idea what art I will have arrived at. Neither will live up to the Edenic, idealized expectation I have before starting, but I will have at least done something new. I thought seriously about the craft elements of improv before I did so with literature, and without THPS, I doubt I would have ever started writing. Prov gave me a critical vocabulary for thinking about the importance of imitation; it helped me identify one artist’s influence on another. It helped me appreciate the nebulous qualities of a work—voice, mood, tone—that, while anathema to writing 100 students everywhere, make close reading worth the effort. Whether video games are art is an old discussion that I’m not particularly interested in; the question is so broad that it’s meaningless. Prov is an art, and there is meaning in total dedication to an art. Even a minor one.
A few years back, Mona Awad found herself in the grips of a skincare addiction. Hauling her laptop with her wherever she went, she watched video after video about Retinol and exfoliants, spellbound by the soothing voices and gently glowing faces of the skinfluencers on her screen. And she bought; she bought; she bought, whatever it was they were selling, whatever the price. This endless diet of Youtube tutorials and impulse buys left her “totally enchanted, but also suspicious and filled with dread,” Awad told me by phone from her home in Boston. “Which is always a good sign for me and means that I’m probably going to write a novel about it.”
That’s exactly what she did. Rouge, Awad’s fourth novel, captures all the false hope and real self-hatred propagated by a beauty industry whose chokehold on women’s souls only tightens with each passing year. The story’s protagonist, Belle, has learned from a tender age that girlhood (and especially mixed-race girlhood) means loathing one’s own reflection. Her chief instructor in this lesson is her mother, a glamorous but frosty woman who models with her obsessive skincare routine the expensive, endless swim against the tide of wrinkles and sagging that will soon be Belle’s inheritance. When her mom dies under suspicious circumstances, a now-grown Belle begins to investigate the regimens and lotions that kept her mother’s skin preternaturally fresh. The literal cult that Belle discovers behind the scenes is equal parts dangerous and tempting. Who wouldn’t want to look forever young (and perhaps just a little bit whiter)? What wouldn’t one give?
Like Awad’s previous works Bunny, All’s Well, and 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl, this latest novelis interested in the calamities and ecstasies we reap when we pursue our desires with desperation. Amidst its fairytale horrors, though (and believe me, Awad pulls no punches in the high Gothic intensity of the cabal’s beauty rituals), Rouge also tenderly explores grief, the psychic damage wrought by Eurocentric beauty standards, and the fierce, fraught love between mothers and daughters.
Chelsea Davis: Rouge is not just a story about the beauty industry writ large; it’s about skincare in particular. What drew you to writing about skin instead of hair or lips or body image more broadly?
Mona Awad: There’s just something so insidious about skin, and so intimate, and so horror. It’s this very, very, delicate protective covering of all this stuff on the inside. What does our obsession with the exterior, the surface, suggest about that interior? When you’re fixating so much on the surface of something seemingly so superficial as skincare, what are you avoiding?
I think a lot of what’s lurking behind skincare is anxiety about death. I started watching the videos and I was like, “Death is the thing we’re not talking about. We’re all on the edge of the abyss, putting our creams on.”
CD: There’s this beautifully jarring pair of sentences early in the novel that gets at exactly that—the way we run away from our own mortality towards an obsession with appearance. Belle is at the reception for her mother’s funeral, and says, “After the funeral. I’m hiding in Mother’s bathroom watching a skincare video about necks.” She’s in mourning, a state of extreme distress where she could be leaning on the people immediately around her for support. But she’s instead drawn like a moth to a flame to this skincare influencer she’s never met, on a screen.
MA: The fact that we are becoming more and more isolated makes us more vulnerable to whatever visual messaging we’re engaging with online or on our screens. That emphasis on the self will have consequences for our ability to connect with each other and see past ourselves. In Belle’s case, her loneliness makes her a target, the perfect candidate for La Maison de Méduse.
CD: Rouge is both a kind of fairytale in its own right and a meta-commentary on the genre. You also wrote a dissertation on fairytales, and your novel Bunny had elements of them. What about fairytales has such an abiding appeal for you?
The fact that we are becoming more and more isolated makes us more vulnerable to whatever visual messaging we’re engaging with on our screens.
MA: They are transformation stories at their core. They present the possibility of change, often to people who are powerless and wouldn’t have the means to change otherwise. And maybe the fairy tale indulges that longing for change—and then shows the shadow side, too. The fairy tales that are the most exciting to me will often present the wonder of transformation, but also the horror of it, the consequences.
The other aspect of fairytales that I love is that they present situations to us that I think are emotionally and psychologically resonant to a modern reader in a very real way—parent-child conflicts, issues with siblings, anxiety around sex and partnership, life changes—but they use a magical language of symbols to explore it. And I think part of why fairytales remain among the stories we keep coming back to across the centuries is because those motifs are so mysterious at their core. They’re elastic enough that you could cast them in a really sinister light, or you could cast them in a wondrous light. They will always ultimately elude being completely contained by any one meaning. And that is incredibly exciting as a writer. For instance, the mirror is highly mysterious in “Snow White,” and I was drawn to exploring its potential meaning in a story.
CD: It seems like another element of “Snow White” that your novel pulls in heavily is color. Both the original Grimm’s story and the Disney cartoon adaptation are characterized by a very strong palette of primary colors—red, yellow, blue, white, black. Red is flagged in your novel’s title, of course, and black and red are ubiquitous in the Maison de Méduse. Why was it important to you to inject this particular story with such a strong sense of color?
MA: Red, black, and white are the colors of folklore. And so emphasizing that color palette felt important to signal to the reader that we’re entering that kind of world. Also, in fairytales, red has a couple of different meanings, but certainly one of them is danger. So it’s a bit of a warning—but it’s also a lure, because it’s visually so attractive and it’s what’s right beneath the surface. The book might, at first glance, be interested in skin, but ultimately it’s interested in something deeper and more vital.
CD: What about that third color you mentioned as being crucial to Rouge:white? When people join the Maison de Méduse cult, they gain skin that is not just smooth and youthful, but specifically white.
MA: Snow White has such an interesting history in that sense. There are variants from all over the world. And in the Grimm version, Snow White’s whiteness is really more metaphorical; they never explicitly say that she is white-skinned. It’s the Disney version that gives us “skin as white as snow.” That was really interesting to me, that history of how Snow White becomes unequivocally, unambiguously white. And of course the object of such envy.
So Rouge became a story also about how beauty and whiteness are tied together in a very problematic way. That connection exists in the real-world beauty industry, too. As somebody who is of mixed ethnicity, an ethnicity that I share with Belle, I’ve always been really sensitive to that subtext—the idea of “brightening,” which is just a breath away from “lightening.” So race was definitely an aspect of beauty culture and the beauty industry that I wanted to have inform Belle’s own insecurity about her face and her skin.
CD: In pursuing whiteness and eternal youth through the cult, Belle ends up getting a lot more than she bargained for. That monkey’s paw plot structure is a common one across your novels: your protagonist gains something they want desperately, but at devastating cost. That “something”is a thin body, in 13 Ways of Looking at a Fat Girl; in Bunny,it’s creative success. What do you find exciting about the Faustian bargain as a narrative setup?
MA: It’s my favorite dilemma because it’s at the heart of all fairytales. There’s a desire; there is a longing. Usually the person who has the longing is an underdog of some kind, and is not able to acquire the thing that they want. The Little Mermaidis a great example.
Fairytales are transformation stories at their core. They present the possibility of change, often to people who are powerless.
That careful-what-you-wish-for story connects us all because we all long for something that we think would make everything better. And I’m so interested in exploring that longing and of what it feels like to attain it—the wonder of attaining it, but also the really deep dread that might arise when it is not all that we hoped for. Because the longing is always a disguise for some other longing. Belle might long for great skin—but what does she really want? Connection with her mother; feeling accepted in the world that she finds herself in.
CD: Yes, that mother-daughter dyad is really at the dead center of Rouge. I was wondering whether the process of writing this novel clarified or complexified your understanding of your relationship with your own mother.
MA: In some ways it did. I was really interested in the dynamic in which a mother knows she is going down a destructive path, but can’t keep herself from doing so. And her daughter is watching her go down this path, and wants to follow. The mother doesn’t want her daughter to experience the damage that she’s already experienced herself. But it’s already too late.
And the mother’s navigation of that in Rouge, the ways that she tries and fails to protect her daughter from the irreversible damage she herself has undergone—for me, just thinking about my own mother, and thinking about my mother’s relationship to her mother, that was really meaningful to explore that in the story. It helped me understand just how difficult that might be. You don’t want to harm someone by doing harm to yourself, but you still might, against all your good intentions. That’s just the nature of parent-child relationships.
CD: A young daughter is like a mirror, in that sense. She’s taking in everything you do.
MA: Yes, that’s right. Including the beautiful things, too. I really wanted to do justice to each of these two characters, the mother and the daughter. To present the truth of both experiences, even as we’re looking at the world of the story through the daughter’s eyes.
CD: Both the mother and daughter eventually succumb to the same shady skincare cabal, and both experience, as a result of those spa treatments, gradual memory loss. A significant stretch of the novel is narrated by Belle as she’s experiencing this and other forms of cognitive impairment. What it was like to write a story through the perspective of someone whose memory is deteriorating?
MA: I’m fascinated by altered states of consciousness. I love reading stories where the character’s mind is altered in a way that’s reflected in how they’re telling us the story, because we can see things that they can’t. That’s a great pleasure for the reader, to know things that the main character does not.
It was both fun and scary to write Belle in such a state. I teach a class on horror, and of course, there are many possession stories in that genre. So the idea that what’s on the outside might be seeping inside and changing Belle, altering her consciousness, is a nightmare. And the worst part of the nightmare is that she’s not fully aware that it’s happening to her. That’s the most terrifying part of possession: if you’re truly possessed, you don’t know it. I wanted to explore what that might feel like.
But beyond the supernatural element at play, Belle’s changing mind was also a way of exploring a real-life fear that I have. Memory loss is something that could happen to any of us any time; you could somehow lose your grip on your understanding of who you are.
CD: It sounds like you often write directly into your fears.
MA: Yeah, I do. That’s where the heat is. For me, it’s the engine of creativity—fear and longing, together. I love asking the question, “what if?” I can make my own horror novel just sitting in the dark by myself. I’ll really scare myself in the process, but I’ll probably have fun, too.
CD: On the flip side, since you’re often writing about your own anxieties, do you find that there’s any personal catharsis at the end of the process of writing a novel like this? For example, are you in a different place with regard to skincare and beauty after writing Rouge than you were beforehand?
MA: Ultimately, there is catharsis whenever I feel like I’ve written a scene that is really meant to be in the story. But then there is a feeling of great loss when it’s all over because I’ve lived inside of this world for two or three years. I’ve completely inhabited it. It’s been the place that I go in my mind. And when it’s finished, there’s no place to go. And so I have to go through a real period of grieving, actually, when it’s over.
Rouge was particularly hard to let go of, in terms of how it changed my view of skincare. I mean, when I first finished the book, I had no desire to watch skincare videos ever again. [Laughs.] And then I wrote a piece about my skincare addiction for a Canadian magazine called The Walrus, and so I had to revisit some of those videos. And when I started watching again, I got hooked again. I bought all these products that I can’t afford, that I won’t use, that I definitely don’t need. So it truly was an addiction. I thought I was going to be so above it. But I’m not above anything.
CD: I mean, you’re not alone. In the age of Instagram, and casual filler, and twenty-year-olds getting into Retinol, it’s easy to feel like our culture’s obsession with appearance is only getting more inescapable. Do you, or Rouge, hold out any kind of hope for ways out of the trap?
MA: Without giving too much away, I think that the novel does offer ways to find connection in isolation, either through mutual trauma or sharing trauma, which is something that I think can be very meaningful. And in fact, social media might be a way to do that—already is, for many people. But that connection can also happen through art, through sharing stories. Being both the reader and the audience, both the teller of the story and the listener. I think that is the way forward. Or at least that’s my hope.
Murder has long been a man’s game in literature. Patrick Batemen, Joe Goldberg and Tom Ripley are just a few of the complicated killers who have appeared in novels (and later on screens). Readers take a front row seat to their sadistic minds and delight in their depravity as they kill with few consequences. Similarly, horror films, murder thrillers and shows like SVU abound, in which male killers stalk women who often function as disposable prey.
It’s a refreshing change when an author can turn the tables on this narrative. My debut novel Kill for Love “neatly flips the formula of the male serial killer on its bashed-in head” (Kirkus Reviews). The novel follows Tiffany, an L.A. sorority girl who seemingly has it all—but wants more. A frat party hookup gone wrong unleashes within her a lethal urge: the insatiable desire to kill attractive, young men.
The books on this list also feature women who kill, some for revenge and many just for the hell of it. From a professor to a fashion editor, the female serial killers in these books are both cruel and captivating. These women are dark, demented and don’t mind being labeled as “unlikeable.” The novels listed below are stand-alone works of fiction. Included with each title are film and TV recommendations, all featuring women creators at the helm.
This gastronomic, gut-busting novel can be devoured in a couple sittings or savored like a fine Chianti. The narrator, Dorothy Daniels, is a food critic with a sophisticated palate that extends beyond acceptable norms when she develops a literal taste for men. Dorothy regales readers with her history of killing and consuming her male suitors. She challenges you to throw away any gendered expectations on just how bad she can be: “You who call women the fairer sex, you may repress and deny all you want, but some of us were born with a howling void where our souls should sway.” The prose sings, and the mayhem is delicious.
Movie pairing: Julia Ducournau’s cannibal film Raw.
In this fast-paced dark comedy, the story revolves around kind-hearted and responsible narrator Korede, who lives in Lagos and has found a perfect potential boyfriend in Tade, one of the doctors at the hospital where she works. There’s just one little problem: her beautiful and spoiled sister Ayoola has caught his eye too – and she has a habit of murdering her boyfriends. The story moves quickly and builds tension from page one when our narrator states, “Ayoola summons me with these words – Korede, I killed him.” Braithwaite uses the character of Korede as the level-headed foil to her brash, killer sister in order to explore the bonds of sisterhood, the weight of the patriarchy, and the emotional burden of carrying family secrets.
Movie pairing: For another wicked tale about a woman reckoning with her murderous companion, check out Jennifer’s Body, directed by Karyn Kusama and written by Diablo Cody.
Looking for a serial killer story with strong horror vibes that can pair perfectly with Halloween season? This novel follows Maeve, who is a sweet-looking Disney princess by day, sadistic Sunset Strip serial killer by night. Leede infuses gothic horror into the narrative with a storyline involving Maeve’s once-starlet grandmother Talullah that has shades of old Hollywood films like Sunset Boulevard and Psycho. Maeve is all her own though, and she rightfully rails against the double standards often placed on misanthropic female characters in literature. “Men have always been permitted in fiction and in life to simply be what they are, no matter how dark or terrifying that might be. But with a woman, we expect an answer, a reason.” There is in fact a method to Maeve’s madness, and the story builds to a horrifically satisfying conclusion.
Movie pairing: Mary Harron’s cult classic film adaptation of American Psycho.
If you’re looking for a story of revenge and feminist rage, this is your book. Dr. Scarlett Clark is an English professor at an East Coast university, and her extracurricular activities include uncovering men’s wrongs and making them pay. A female Dexter with a similarly strict code to her murders, her career and freedom are jeopardized when a colleague begins investigating the suspicious deaths that have plagued the college town since she took up tenure. The novel also features a second narrator, Carly, a new student who is learning to develop her own agency after leaving her abusive household behind. The story has plenty of twists and turns that will keep you guessing until the suspense-filled close.
Movie pairing: For more violent justice, make it a double feature with Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman and Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.
A fiendish blend of The Devil Wears Prada, Heathers and Scream Queens, Akhtar’s novel revels in satirizing the fashion industry and its impossible, Westernized beauty standards. The plot delivers pulpy, gory camp as narrator and fashion editor Anya St. Clair stops at nothing to rise amid the fashion ranks at the fictional New York magazine La Vie. She quickly sets her sights on her colleague Sarah, and Anya’s increasingly unhinged obsession with befriending her work rival sets in motion a succession of elaborately staged and hilarious murders that involve everything from spiked heels to poisoned tampons.
TV pairing: For another tale of feminine obsession and serial murder, buzz over to the series Swarm, co-created by Janine Nabers.
My Men by Victoria Kielland, translated by Damion Searls
This recently published Norwegian novel provides a fictionalized account of one of America’s most prolific serial killers, Belle Gunness. A Norwegian transplant who murdered her lovers, she found many of her victims through personal ads. The prose is meditative, poetic and almost hallucinatory as Belle reinvents herself with each passing decade and begins to lose her grip on reality. The narrative is framed by revealing newspaper ads and chapter titles that read like aphorisms. Belle’s surprising longing and romanticism (“Love was the only thing that could save her”) provides a fascinating contrast to the increasingly brutal dispassion of her murders.
Movie pairing: For another look at the humanity behind a real-life murderer, watch Patty Jenkins’ Monster.
Before Amy Dunne burned into our brains in Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn’s razor-sharp debut introduced readers to Camille Preaker, a reporter sent to unearth the dark crimes occurring in her hometown of Wind Gap. There is a serial killer afoot who is targeting and torturing little girls. Everyone in the town assumes the murderer is a man, but Camille senses the predator’s identity might not be so straightforward. While on the case, she is forced to stay with her previously estranged family and quickly settles into toxic old habits. Saying anything more might give away the book’s many shocks. Immersive and unsettling, you’ll feel Camille’s unease and the palpable danger lurking in the decaying town.
Movie pairing: For a similarly uneasy horror tale about the family ties that bind, watch Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook.
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