I’ve been hooked on tales about things that go bump in the night since I was in third grade. I cut my teeth on Alvin Schwartz and Stephen Gammel’s Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. I was shepherded across the untidy years of puberty by Stephen King’s Loser’s Club and Anne Rice’s pansexual vampires, and I spent many a happy summer vacation working my way through Blockbuster Video’s horror section. It should come as no surprise, then, that I eventually decided to write a scary story of my own.
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That story, A Cosmology of Monsters, seemed like a simple enough proposition at the outset: a multi-generational saga about a Texas family running a haunted house and struggling with monsters both literal and symbolic. But as I began to write the novel and became acquainted with my characters, I realized that my story was in deep conversation with the tropes and history of horror. Since I’d always been more of a dilettante than die-hard horror geek, I knew needed to research my subject further. All this homework gave me (and by extension, my characters) a strong awareness of the horror tradition, and made Cosmology into a book that knowingly subverts and celebrates its antecedents.
During my research, I kept my eye out for new horror fiction at the libraries and bookstores I frequented, but I rarely saw much I hadn’t already heard of. There were the big names, like Lauren Beukes and Joe Hill, and a couple of anthologies in the sci-fi section, but I wanted more. Lord knew there were no shortages of mystery and sci-fi/fantasy paperbacks, so where was all the horror? Was it gone?
In late 2016, I stumbled across a list of the 2016 Bram Stoker Awards winners, the annual awards given out by the Horror Writers’ Association. I started looking up the titles and authors listed, and discovered, to my delight, that the horror world was alive and well, but coming mostly from smaller independent presses. It had left the chain bookstores and moved underground. I bought some books from the list, and, to my delight, found exactly what I had been missing in my reading diet.
Since we’re nearing Halloween, I thought it would be fun to share some of my favorite horror releases of the last several years. These books run the gamut from relatively well-known to downright obscure; their contents similarly range from heartwarming to moody to terrifying. No matter where your tastes fall, I hope there’s something here for you to read while you enjoy that pumpkin spice latte or bag of candy corn.
This short horror novel tells the story of the ghost of a failed writer trying to solve her own murder in grunge-era Seattle. I defy anyone not to fall in love with Greta, a narrator who is bracingly honest, wryly funny, and deeply sad.
Like Miskowski’s book, The Fisherman is also short, and helped along by an engaging narrator—an elderly widower on a fishing trip who is granted an unsettling peek behind the veil of our everyday existence. To say more would ruin the fun. This novel won the 2016 Bram Stoker prize for best novel, and it’s easy to see why.
Some cosmic horror writers set up camp in H.P. Lovecraft’s sandbox and play there for the rest of their careers. Laird Barron went a step further and created a cosmos of his own, hardboiled, mean-spirited, and deeply disturbing. All his books are worth reading, but this first collection of short stories is an excellent place to start your acquaintance.
If Marisha Pessl’s Night Film was your kind of book, you’ll love this found footage tale about a down-on-her-luck documentarian investigating the unsolved disappearance of Canada’s first female filmmaker. It combines great character work with an unsettling central mystery to create a compelling read.
This is more of a horror-adjacent coming-of-age story about a group of believers and skeptics who spend the summer of 1980 investigating their town’s local ghost stories and urban legends. For those who like their horror gentler (although still present) and with a lot of heart.
If you’ve heard of any title on this list, it’s probably this National Book Award-nominated (and Shirley Jackson Award winning!) short story collection, but I don’t think it’s possible to over-praise (or signal boost) this book. The opening story, “The Husband Stitch,” is a brilliant feminist take on a classic spooky folktale, and “The Resident,” is as good a modern example of the modern weird tale as I have ever read. If you haven’t read this book, read it. If you have read it, read it again. Also preorder the author’s forthcoming memoir, In the Dream House.
Ellen Datlow is the hardest-working person in the horror genre. She seems to edit multiple anthologies a year, and, in her lengthy introduction to each annual Best Horror volume, she also reviews every horror novel, collection, anthology, film, magazine, tv show, and work of visual art released that calendar year. In other words, she knows horror like nobody else, and always selects a terrific bevy of tales for her Best Of books. This year’s volume provides a great sampling of voices working in the genre right now.
I have a confession to make: I never listened to Tegan and Sara. This is strange because in the late ‘90s/early 2000s, when they first rose to queer icon fame, I was—from the top of my frosted tips to the soles of my Doc Marten boots—their exact target demographic. While every other queer teen was encountering the Quin sisters’ indie pop ballads on mix CDs from their crushes, I was still listening to Pearl Jam. Instead, I first heard of Tegan and Sara thanks to a stranger who thinks all queer women look alike.
I was at a thrift store—Beacon’s Closet in Williamsburg, Brooklyn—sometime around 2008, waiting to try on some clothes when another girl in line approached me and said, “You know who you look like?”
I had a few guesses. If my head was shaved I’d often get Dolores O’Riordan from the Cranberries. If I was wearing leather pants, it would be Joan Jett. If I’d let my hair grow in and was sporting a blazer I’d magically become the spitting image of Ellen DeGeneres. So I suppose it was only a matter of time before someone somewhere told me I looked like Sara Quin.
“Who?”
“From Tegan and Sara. The band.”
Every time I was told I resembled some gay celebrity I had the same reaction—an angry, painful, almost sickening visceral reaction.
When I got home I looked up a photo and rolled my eyes. Twin lesbian sisters playing guitars? Which one of them was even Sara? It didn’t matter because I looked nothing like either of them! Every time I was told I resembled some gay celebrity I had the same reaction—an angry, painful, almost sickening visceral reaction. This was somewhat hypocritical considering how gay I did in fact look, and in no way by accident. (How else was I supposed to get laid?) But I had been raised to believe lesbians were ugly. Ugly to look at, ugly to think about, ugly to be—even as I was clearly growing into one. That sickening feeling, that knee-jerk reaction of, “I look nothing like [your lesbian of choice here!],” came from a complicated self-hate that didn’t go away, no matter how alternative I got with my appearance choices.
So I didn’t start listening to Tegan and Sara’s music right then. I didn’t even give it a try.
Fifteen years later, this past May, I still hadn’t listened to their music. My friend and fellow book-person Megan was in town for an annual book industry expo. Megan asked if I was going to the event at Housing Works Bookstore Café & Bar celebrating Tegan and Sara’s forthcoming memoir High School. I may not have been a Tegan and Sara fan, but I had fifteen years of queer community and pride parades and ex-girlfriends under my belt, so I knew enough of their legacy to know that getting my hands on a book they’d written months before it reached the general public would be a coup. Yes, I wanted to go! But no, I had not been invited.
“Come anyway,” Megan said. “At the door just say you’re the third twin.” Thankfully it did not come to that. One polite email and a gracious reply later, I was on the list.
The event began with both sisters on stage, seated side by side. Each of them would read a section of the book, followed by a Q&A. In the years since that Beacon’s Closet incident I, too, have been on a few stages with a microphone in my face and a book in my hand. In fact, I’ve been on that exact same stage at Housing Works. When I achieved my life goal of becoming a published novelist I’d overlooked the amount of public speaking involved. My introvert’s approach to such extroversion has been to go into a fugue state while on stage and remember nothing afterward, so I’m never sure how I’ve performed or what I even look like up there under the lights. Now I realized: I probably looked like Sara Quin.
From my front-row seat in the audience at Housing Works, I could finally see the resemblance. We’re about the same size; we’re about the same age. Yes, she’s obviously way cooler than me but in our offstage lives we could, at least in theory, share T-shirts. As a five-foot-three, masculine-of-center female I can’t share T-shirts with many people who aren’t pre-pubescent boys—so I don’t take that lightly.
The experience of reading High School was just as surprising and comforting in its familiarity. Like the Quin sisters, I also cut my teeth on Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins. I even used to play guitar, back when I still had long hair. More significantly though, no other book I’ve ever read so perfectly captured what it felt like—what it really felt like—to come of age as queer in the late ‘90s, years before positive representations of nonconventional sexualities and genders could be found in mainstream newspapers or on broadcast television.
No other book so perfectly captured what it really felt like to come of age as queer in the late ‘90s.
The scenes in the book of Tegan and Sara fighting tooth and nail over their single landline telephone brought a knowing smile to my face, but also a lump to my throat. Tell a young queer person today, “We didn’t have cell phones,” or “This was pre-internet,” and you may as well be saying, “This was before we had electricity.” And it should strike them that way, because we were all in the frigging dark, straining to see who we were and who we wanted to be with so few visible models, while those that were visible were hassled, harassed, and made fun of.
High School’s cover is reflective like a hazy locker mirror, apt given how much reading it felt to me like catching sight of my past self. I was surprised at the pleasure it gave me to recognize my own experience in theirs, as I’ve only recently had any interest in seeing my past self. I was not an uncomplicatedly happy or proud teenager or traveler through my early twenties. I was anxious and depressed, and while I had a lot of fun and a lot of queer sex and many loving queer friends, I was still the product of my childhood home and ‘80s America. So I didn’t like myself very much. I definitely didn’t love or accept myself. I think people assumed, or maybe I just assumed, that if I knew I was gay and looked gay, I must also like being gay—or at least not hate myself. This wasn’t how it went for me. I didn’t want to relate to Sara Quin in my younger days, whether we looked alike, dressed alike, or were alike or not. Potential for connection doesn’t always create the desire to connect, nor does it necessarily lead to acceptance of oneself or the other.
What I understand now, but didn’t that day when I was thrift-store-shopping, is that you can build self-acceptance from recognition and identification. You can stare at an aspect of yourself that you are ashamed of in the mirror and seek out that component of yourself in others. The exposure can help ease your discomfort, amend your sense of commonality, and you can reconceive your identity through all that bouncing light.
You can stare at an aspect of yourself that you are ashamed of in the mirror and seek out that component of yourself in others.
Presently, Tegan and Sara and I are, all three, aging into elder-status lesbians who suffered through the ‘90s, drank through the early aughts, and today get to sit on stage at Housing Works and tell people in their twenties what it used to be like to be gay. This feels like something of a miracle. And it’s been a surprising joy to not just see myself in their present, but to see my past self in their past selves as well. “Recognition” means the act of knowing and remembering upon seeing, but it also means an acceptance that something is true or important—that it exists.
They have a new album coming out. It’s called Hey, I’m Just Like You. Ha, I thought. Funny. You are just like me, aren’t you? Or, I am just like you. I’ve already pre-ordered it, and before it arrives, I’ve been listening to some of their older stuff too, to get caught up on all those years of music I missed—and to remember with new affection things about myself I used to want to forget.
One last thing: After that Housing Works event in May I posted a photo to social media of Tegan and Sara on stage and half my relatives commented with Congratulations! and Good job! Did they think I was Sara and Tegan was the moderator? I have no clue. I simply said thank you.
“…With a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen.”
—Persi Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller, “Methods for Studying Coincidences”
Earth is so heavy with people, my love,
We’ve doubled our numbers since my arrival.
You can still fit twenty humans into a Volkswagen Beetle,
but I worry, will there be enough seatbelts
for our four children? What if civilization
bottoms out backing down our driveway?
Or you can populate two New York Cities
with people that share your birthday.
Isn’t that, and that, and that a coincidence?
A miracle might strike at any moment.
Everything rare is well done. Everyone compares
their lottery winnings. So long, religion.
down the road, rabbit’s foot. But even
in a world of colossal, humongous, truly superb,
blimp-sized numbers, my love, we’re
exactly two people. And when we sleep,
despite what my snoring might suggest,
I am only one man. And of that night
I proposed with Chablis and pawn shop diamond
beneath the walnut tree, and you said yes,
I’ll say this: quantity only betters the structure
of affection, the architecture of surprise.
As when you step from the shower
and search for your towel even though
I’ve hidden it for the millionth time
so that I might behold you searching
for your towel until you finally ask, “Hey, have you
seen my towel?” At which point
I jump to the rescue with dry, fluffy,
wondrous towels worthy of Nefertiti,
and the whole morning smells like sweet pea
and violet body wash, lavender and citrus
anti-frizz conditioner, and this is only
the first hour of the day. I’m one
timeline away from figuring out
when the odds kicked in, how I found you.
It’s so crowded, my love, and we’ve all
been mistaken for someone else
with the same first name and a one-digit difference
in our social security numbers. If only
we could hold a truly large mirror
up to Earth, we could at least gain the illusion
of spaciousness. This would also solve
the problem of surveillance. Everybody
making love outside, looking up
at themselves making love in the sky.
Hey Dwayne
--Reunion, Class of ’85
Didn’t you shoot the water tower with a dart gun?
Didn’t you join the Masons? Didn’t we walk down
the swamp road and spew pot smoke into each other’s faces
concurrent with hyper-ventilation? Didn’t I fall down
for a minute, then wake in awe of Def Leppard,
loblolly pines like compass needles fucked with
by the wind-magnet? Didn’t we go to three funerals
that Saturday? Didn’t we sit in the abandoned
tractor trailer shifting the dead gears? Didn’t they
sound like a hailstorm of horse teeth? Didn’t the well water
taste like matchheads? Wasn’t our team sponsored
by the sawed-off light of the turpentine factory?
Didn’t our coach point to the example with a busted
car antennae? Didn’t we ride your Kawasaki in the rain
all the way to Turkey Fork in December? Didn’t the gray sky
leave a skid mark on the ridgeline? Wasn’t there
supposed to be a bonfire at the bridge, but the boat-
ramp gate was welded shut, and the weedy beach
was empty, but for an x of smoldering driftwood?
I still remember the feeling I had the first time I finished one of Edwidge Danticat’s stories. I’d been assigned to read her short story collection Krik? Krak!, published in 1996,in one of my undergraduate classes at Barnard College (where Edwidge was an alumna) and I had approached the book the way I often did with assigned readings—a mindset of, Okay, I just have to get through this. But by the first page, I was immersed. “Children of the Sea,” the first story in the book, riveted me with its lush language and epistolary form; it was also the first story I had ever read about Haiti, a place whose violent history I’d known very little about. By the end, I was breathless, moved, and never more aware of the power of a well-written story.
I’m not the only person in the world to notice Danticat’s talent, of course (despite what my colleagues in my MFA program might have thought)—Danticat’s stories and books have garnered her many awards and nominations, including the American Book Award for her novel The Farming of Bones (one of my favorites), National Book Award nominations for Krik? Krak! and her nonfiction book Brother, I’m Dying, and a National Book Critics Circle Award for Brother, I’m Dying. Danticat herself received a coveted MacArthur “Genius” Grant. Even without all of this institutional recognition, I know from speaking to friends that she is beloved among writers and readers, particularly among women of color.
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Her new book, Everything Inside, is Danticat’s first collection of short stories to be published since Krik? Krak! over twenty years ago. The stories, which center on people of the Haitian diaspora and the various traumas they seek to make sense of, feel particularly timely at this moment as America debates over the value of and moral responsibility we have towards immigrants and their children. The stories are elegant and empathetic, still bearing the hallmark tension between beauty and violence that marked her first collection. And yet they’re less sentimental, more mature, quiet, and steady—the work of someone who has lived through more and has evolved in what she has wanted to say.
I was privileged enough to speak to Edwidge Danticat over the phone, where we discussed the evolution of her short fiction, the relationships between the characters of Everything Inside and the characters in Krik? Krak! and the difficult and differing ways in which immigrants and their children deal with lingering generational effects of painful pasts and the burden of representation.
Karissa Chen: I think this is your first collection of short stories since Krik? Krak!, which you published over two decades ago. I know in between you’ve written a lot of other things—novels, novels-in-stories, a lot of nonfiction. You’ve even written a bunch of children’s books and YA books. I’m curious how it’s changed for you to go back to this form after these years. I mean, I’m sure for some of these stories you’ve probably been working on them for a while behind the scenes. But I’m wondering why you decided to return to this form and if you approach writing short stories in a different way now than you did back then.
Edwidge Danticat: I love short stories. I love to read them and I love to write them. I like the bursts of narrative. I like the economy. When I was writing the stories in Krik? Krak! I was still in college and later working a full time job. I wrote those stories during stolen moments, often before exams, and after hours in the office where I worked. There was an urgency for me about getting those stories down because I was new at writing stories and each story felt like a stroke of lighting, something that might never happen again. I was always afraid that if I didn’t stop whatever I was doing and write those stories down, I would lose them forever. I think that sense of urgency shows in the stories in Krik? Krak! They’re very direct, declarative even, like the kind of stories they’re modeled after, the oral stories that are part of the call and response of Haitian storytelling, which we introduce by saying Krik? (or asking the audience if they’re ready to listen) and having them answer Krak! (or replying yes, they’re ready to listen.)
The stories in Everything Inside, though, are stories that I have been writing for over thirteen years. I have written and rewritten them many times, even after they were published in journals or magazines. These stories have benefited from the patience I now have with both myself and with narrative, the trust I have that some resolution to the problems in the story might lie somewhere ahead, in the future. I am now more willing to wait for my stories to resolve themselves. So it was great to re-enter stories with that kind of patience, to let the stories pause and breathe, and allow the characters to keep revealing themselves to me over the years. I enjoyed going back to the form and writing stories in this unhurried way. The stories in Everything Inside are not just longer but more nuanced because of this, and you feel, I think, that you are also reading about people with a lot more time on their hands, a situation which parallels the case of some first-generation Americans who have a lot more time and leisure to linger on some things and address certain issues than their parents did.
KC: You said some of these pieces you’ve been working on for a long time. What’s the one that you’ve been working on the longest and how long did that take you?
ED: The first story in the book, “Dosas,” is the one I’ve been working on the longest. I added the most recent elements to it last year. It’s based on something that actually happened to a few people I know, where someone they loved and trusted pretended to be kidnapped to get money from them.
I also wanted to write about Certified Nurses Assistants in Miami and later added an element of something my mother said to me while she was in the hospital with terminal cancer. Everyone who was taking care of her was Haitian and she found a lot of comfort in this. So one day she said to me, It’s wonderful that so many of us are here to take care of each other. Behind these words, I was hearing her say, Who would take care of us, if we didn’t have each other? So the combination of these two things—people we love betraying us and potential strangers taking care of us—came together in the many layers of this story.
Different elements kept popping up with this story over the span of thirteen years. A possible new romance for Elsie, the Certified Nurses’ Assistant. Her thoughts on marriage. Then I saw a sign in my gentrifying neighborhood in Miami’s Little Haiti that said “Nothing Inside Is Worth Dying for” and I put that on Elsie’s door and switched it to “Everything Inside Is Worth Dying For”, which gave us the title of the book.
KC: In both your collections, all the stories seem to be in conversation with the others in the book. Krik? Krak! was very much focused on a historical Haiti, with almost a sort of magical realism and focused on the violent past of the island. Whereas I think this collection felt a lot quieter, but still very much focused on the Haitian diaspora in our current times and how they wrestle with their different traumas. There’s echoes between the stories, even though all their situations are different.
I’m wondering—and I hate to do this, because I know it’s probably very annoying for you to have the two collections compared to each other—but because so much time has gone by, do you think that your own interests as a writer have shifted since these two collections?. I’m wondering where you are as a writer now that led you to write these particular stories.
ED: I don’t mind the two books being compared because the characters in Everything Inside could be the children or the grandchildren of the ones in Krik? Krak!. Krik? Krak! is about several generations of one family. The characters in Everything Inside are not related to each other or to them, and they are certainly of another generation, but they feel connected in my mind.
If we want to be really meta, we might say that some of the characters in Everything Inside may have read Krik? Krak! and said “This reminds me of my mother or grandmother.” I meet a lot of young Haitian-Americans who say that to me about Krik? Krak!, by the way. So there’s definitely a strong connection between the two books, the most important being the ancestral town in Haiti from which both groups originate: Ville Rose.
This is what’s wonderful about having a collection. When you’re writing individual stories, they feel singular. When you put them together, a thread emerges not only between the stories, but also between your past and possibly future work. But, as I mentioned earlier, I don’t think I would have been able to write the stories in Everything Inside twenty-five years ago. Watching the shift in focus and perspective between the different generations of my family has helped a lot in shaping these stories. Watching my parents die and the next generation grow up and become adults—American adults—has really guided these stories.
KC: I think that’s really apparent in the way you frame a lot of these stories. “Sunrise, Sunset” literally had that shift in perspective going back and forth between the two generations, showing the contrast in how they’ve had to deal with motherhood. But so many of the stories are recursive—where something happens and the characters go back to see how they got to this point in time. They’re revisiting their own histories, but vis-a-vis their family, etc.
ED: “Sunrise, Sunset” is a good example of that gap between generations where there’s this missing link of knowledge on both sides. The mother believes that her daughter should be grateful for all the sacrifices that have been made so that the daughter can have the life she now has, and the daughter thinks the mother is unable to understand all that she’s going through because her mother’s experiences are from a time and place that is unfamiliar to the daughter. If only they could talk, they would realize just how similar their experiences are. Yet, there’s something heavy about trauma-related migration that makes silence comforting for both of them until the silence becomes so stifling it’s dangerous. The friction comes to a boiling point when a new generation comes into the picture, the grandson. The story fills in that gap and you realize that if one could hear what the other was thinking, things would be a lot better.
KC: One of the other things I noticed about the stories in this collection is that the “big thing” that happens almost always happens off stage. So, in “In the Old Days,” the father has already died, in “Seven Stories,” Callie’s father has already been killed, and the earthquake happened off stage in “The Gift,” even though we get to see it a little bit. Even in “Without Inspection,” although we are in the moment of his death, like with the other stories, it feels like the traumatic thing isn’t the point of drama. Maybe this is because it’s something that’s out of the characters’ control. So instead, what you end up focusing on is how they make sense of this thing that has happened and their personal histories and the memories that lead up to it and what happens beyond that moment. It’s interesting because I feel like this is not how people often think about writing. People think, Oh, we got to lead up to the point of drama. So I’m curious what it is about this aftermath that interests you, because I think there actually is a lot of tension in the aftermath.
I was always afraid that if I didn’t stop whatever I was doing and write those stories down, I would lose them forever.
ED: For the stories in Everything Inside, the aftermath feels much bigger than any singular event because the “big thing” is one in a series of events—historical, cultural, familial, personal—that are affecting these characters. What concerned me most was not just one triggering event but how the characters were trying to regroup after a series of events, some of which go back several generations. If you were to meet any of the characters in this book on the street and you said, tell me something about yourself, this is what these particular people would say. That’s how I see the contents of the stories. Plus there’s always in immigration and migration this feeling where obviously you’ve come to a new place to have a different future, but you have no choice but to keep looking back because you’ve left everything you’ve ever known behind. So you’re moving forward, but always looking back at the same time.
KC: That’s something that personally interests me as well—when you are someone who is a migrant, someone who is either refugee or an immigrant, and the different ways of dealing with things. Some people just forge forward and they’re like, This is all I can do is, all I can do is move forward. And some people are like, I have to keep making sense of what has happened to me. Obviously many people do both. I think that tension is something that is really palpable through these pieces even with the children. In “Hot Air Balloons,” Lucy has this roommate who goes to Haiti and does all this relief work, and Lucy is like, I can’t, that’s not a thing that I’m trying to, and she’s sort of inherited this conflict.
ED: Whenever I asked my parents about their lives in Haiti during the Duvalier dictatorship and what it was like to live in Haiti in the ‘50s and ‘60s, for example, all they would say is some version of “We’re here now.” This was meant to explain everything. Like if things weren’t difficult then we wouldn’t be here now, so let’s move on. I think having to leave was painful for them in a way that they never wanted to detail or even describe. They had also grown up being discreet. Living under a dictatorship you couldn’t say too much because you didn’t know what people were going to do with that information, how it might be used against you. You didn’t know who to trust. So my parents were very tight-lipped about what their lives had been like. They’d moved on in some ways but were still tied to the past, as are some of the characters in the book.
Many younger people, like Lucy in “Hot Air Balloons,” are very protective of the image of Haiti, even if they’ve never been there. So many awful things have been said about Haiti that we want to highlight its beauty. So Lucy wants to go to Haiti but not with a relief or aid group. She wants to go on vacation there. She also wants to protect this image that her parents have created for her of the beautiful beaches and cool mountains which paradoxically co-exists with her parents’ conflicting desire for her not to go there so she doesn’t come face to face with some of the things that drove them away.
KC: I think when you’re the descendent of immigrants in America, there’s that burden, right? You feel that burden to be like, I want to be able to personally acknowledge the failings of wherever my parents came from; obviously they came here for a reason. But I also want everyone here who doesn’t understand that place that I’m from to not have a negative image of it. I want them to think this place I’m from is a great place.
The more stories we have, the more storytellers we highlight, the more nuance and complex our views of a place and its people can be.
ED: Exactly. I think fiction can get at some of that nuance. There has to be some balance. It’s not all terrible and it’s not all pretty either. There’s no place or person like that. We deserve to have our full humanity and the complexity of our lives fully explored. This is why it’s important to have more Haitian novels translated and have more Haitian diaspora voices out there. The more stories we have, the more storytellers we highlight, the more nuance and complex our views of a place and its people can be.
KC: It actually makes me wonder about another one of your stories, “Seven Stories,” because that one is about an unnamed island. It’s interesting because you write from the point of view of this woman, Kim, who’s Haitian, but she is an outsider to this island and she first hears about this island through her friend Callie. And what she knows is how Callie’s father was killed, but at the same time, Callie is telling her, My island is great in all these ways. Then Kim gets there and it has turmoil, it has its own xenophobia, but it’s also beautiful and has a very well maintained facade. It actually feels very familiar despite being an unnamed island. Why did you set this story in this unnamed place and then have this woman who’s on the outside be the one to take us into it and into Callie’s story?
ED: That story was originally a novella, which would mimic one of those narratives where people go to a place for a few days and feel they understand it and write a long expert type article about it, something which happens a lot with Haiti. I decided to make the person who does this kind of writing Haitian-American because I could easily be asked to write a story like that about another Caribbean island and find myself facing the same issues Kim Boyer does. Writing as an insider/outsider feels very familiar to me as someone who writes about Haiti while living outside of Haiti so I wanted to complicate that whole thing in some way. I also had this experience when I was in my teens of having some famous Haitian exiles move across the hall from me in Brooklyn in the 1980s and later seeing them in Haiti after they’d become politicians. It just so happens though that on this particular island in “Seven Stories” they don’t like Haitians at all, but would make an exception for Kim because she’s Haitian-American. Among many other things, Kim realizes, while trying to write about the complexity of the place, that she travels differently through the world and gets a very different reaction than other Haitians who are coming to that very same place for a better life.
KC: I’m going to ask you one more question. Is there a story in this collection that either was the most difficult or one that you’re proudest of? And would you be willing to share which one that is and why?
We deserve to have our full humanity and the complexity of our lives fully explored.
ED The story I’m proudest of is “Without Inspection.” It’s the most recent of the stories and it’s a story that I’ve been trying to write for a really long time. When I first moved from New York to Miami about seventeen years ago a lot of people were coming to Miami by boat from Haiti, the Bahamas, and Cuba. I wanted to write about someone who’d made this journey but ended up falling in a construction accident, something which was also sadly happening a lot a that time. And still happens now and then these days. Last year I went to an immigration forum and I learned the term “Entry Without Inspection”, which means entering this country without seeing an immigration official, which means, on paper, you’re not technically here at all. I wanted to integrate all of those elements into one story and it took a while to figure out how to do it. I wanted to incorporate a historical and mythological element about flight as well. I also wanted to include something of the quick moment after a person dies where some loved ones who are nowhere near them experience this feeling that you can’t quite explain, whether it’s a flash of something, a shiver, a flutter, or something else. Balancing all of that with the reality of Arnold, the main character’s fall, meant a lot of research, down to how many seconds it would take to fall from a certain height. So I’m really proud of how that came out, and that’s probably why I close the book with that story.
The hardest story to write though was “Seven Stories.” I was really enjoying the company of these characters and I didn’t want the story to end. Cutting it down to a third of its original length was hard for me. I killed a lot of my darlings, but I really wanted to keep that sense of the beauty, as well as the complexity of the place.
KC: Yeah. It’s really beautiful. The island feels really real—it was so real that I actually thought, Did I miss the name? I actually flipped back several pages to double check. It seemed so real I was sure you’d been there before.
ED: I borrowed different aspects of many islands, including Haiti, to make up that place. One thing I’ve found just in talking to people about the book is that if you want to be asked about something a lot, just don’t give it a name. [laughs] People really want to know if the place is real or not. All I can say is that it’s very real to me.
KC: And I liked the song that Arnold mentions, [“Latibonit O”]! I appreciated that in the final note, you give the whole translation. Because you have it without the translation in the story and the reader still gets the effect. And then, when the reader moves to the end note and reads the lyrics, it adds something extra.
ED: You should go and listen to it online. A wonderful singer and family friend named Leyla McCalla sings a very beautiful version of it. This book ended up having a lot of singing. That’s one of the things I realized after the stories came together. It had a lot of music, from Nina Simone’s rendition of “Take Me to The Water’, to Charles Mingus’ “Haitian Fight Song” to “Latibonit O” then the hymn “Shall We Gather at the River?”
So you got your early bird tickets for Electric Lit’s Masquerade of the Red Death ($35 until October 1, going up to $50 thereafter, act now!), and now you’re stuck on what to wear. Anything red, black, or red and black will do, but you obviously want to bring your A game. Well, look no further: we’ve compiled some classic, eye-catching looks from film and TV for sartorial inspiration.
Buttercup and Westley’s Fire Swamp outfits, The Princess Bride
Sure, they look sulky here, but in a minute they’ll be declaring undying love and lightfooting it around flame spurts, which sounds like a party to us. If you’re bringing a date to the Masquerade, having one of you in full red and the other in stark black is a great idea.
Dana’s “Gatekeeper” getup, Ghostbusters
Honestly, this might be orange, but we think it’s red with gold threads and anyway we want you to bring this entire energy to the party—the hair, the coquettish bared shoulder, the channeling old gods, the sleeping four feet above your covers, etc.
Mrs. White’s party dress, Clue
The simple black sheath dress and pearls combo taken to the next level. Accessorize with flames on the sides of your face.
Blade’s whole thing, Blade
A black leather duster and weird little shades truly elevate any party outfit, even a bulletproof vest. Before there was Neo, Blade did it first and best.
Lydia Deetz’s wedding dress, Beetlejuice
The wedding had some problems (groom a malign ghost, bride there against her will) but that frothy red confection of a dress and veil, plus Siouxsie hair? Perfection. If anyone shows up in a mouldering burgundy tuxedo we will also be into that.
Babs’s execution outfit, Pink Flamingos
She may be the filthiest person alive, but Divine looks like a million bucks in this truly iconic mermaid gown.
Dora Milaje uniforms, Black Panther
Outside Wakanda, most military getups don’t have the requisite pizzazz for a party, and Okoye does change into an also incredible red outfit in order to blend in at a casino. But the standard-issue Dora Milaje uniforms, with their leather and metallic accents, are plenty fancy for us.
Willow’s vampire alter ego, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Before she went evil IRL, Buffy’s geeky friend had an alternate-universe vampire version whose RenFaire-meets-dominatrix outfit sent every 1990s baby goth into orbit.
Maleficent’s horn and cloak situation, Maleficent
Listen, it’s been a hard year. You deserve to go to a party, but maybe you don’t want to change your clothes or do your hair. We have the perfect solution.
Practically anything from the Hunger Games movies
From the black-and-red training sweats to the “girl on fire” gown, from the black leather armor on the Mockingjay Part 1 poster to the… identical red leather armor on the Mockingjay Part 2 poster, the Hunger Games movies are full of fashion ideas.
The Little Man from Another Place’s suit, Twin Peaks
Cooper’s dream trip into the Black Lodge is an iconic moment in the show (consider the fact that it was parodied in both The Simpsons and a Harlem Shake video). But the dancing, backward-talking Little Man from Another Place is also important for a different reason: he’s a testament to the power of a custom-fit red-on-red suit.
Despite the sweltering heat beating down on New York City, this week officially marks the start of fall! The leaves are turning citrus-shaded hues, Halloween merchandise is taking over the aisles of every big box store, and overly-eager city dwellers are decked out in their cashmere sweaters and knit scarves. To celebrate this cozy season, we’re challenging you to put your autumn wardrobes to work. Dress up to match the cover of a book, and you could win a Writing Well Is The Best Revenge tote bag!
To enter, post a photo of you dressed to match a book cover on Instagram, and use #DressLikeABook. Remember to follow Electric Literature and tag us. The best photos will be featured in a post on the site. For some inspiration, here is the EL team channeling our inner fashionistas.
Associate Editor of Recommended Reading Erin Bartnett is a tinfoil butterfly at heart.
Former intern Ruth Minah Buchwald moonlights as a P.I. investigating literary scams.
Editor-in-Chief Jess Zimmerman is a literary gatekeeper, hence the dress with the keys.
Editor-at-Large Michael J. Seidlinger thinking about what’s he going to eat for lunch. \m/ \m/ \m/ \m/
Dog-in-Resident Billy and his personal assistant are so ready for their tropical vacation. Why be an office dog when you can be a beach dog?
Contributing editor Jennifer Baker dazzles as the 2019 PW Star Watch Superstar! #ShineBrightLikeADiamond
Jess’s sister Sam coincidentally happened to text her this picture while we were writing this. Everyone should always color-coordinate their outfit to match the book they’re carrying!
When you meet Archie Bongiovanni, you may feel as though you already know them. The jorts, the stick-n-poke tattoos, the larger-than-the-room laugh that means you always know where they’re standing. That’s because Bongiovanni’s incredibly endearing energy winds up all over the page in Grease Bats, their new slice-of-life graphic novel released by Boom! Studios. Bongiovanni has been drawing the comic strip that became the book, which features a group of queer and trans friends friending around a fictional Minneapolis, for more than five years on Autostraddle. For three of those years, I was their editor, which means I had a lot of questions. I recently caught up with Bongiovanni to chat about the experience of capturing the beating heart of a community on the page. We talked about the magic of trans cartoonists drawing trans characters, the superpower of fiction in addressing problems within marginalized communities, and why so many queer people seem to be so into comics.
A.E. Osworth: Can you tell me how the idea or inclination for the comic strip that preceded the graphic novel Grease Bats came about?
Archie Bongiovanni: I wanted to draw a story that felt reflective of my life at the time. I first started drawing the story-in my twenties, often drunk, probably horny, making some awesome decisions and the occasional messy ones, showing up for your friends and allowing them to show up for you, here in Minneapolis. I basically conceived Andy and Scout the day after Autostraddle (and you) asked if I’d be interested in a monthly comic.
AEO: If that’s the case, what made you decide to tackle something fictional, rather than something autobiographical?
AB: I was working on a lot of personal zines at the time and wanted something fun and reflective of the community I was around. I wanted to play with the dichotomy of two very different characters who loved and adored each other, but ultimately have pretty different personalities.
AEO: And fiction allowed you to do that in a way memoir didn’t?
AB: Yes, it allowed me to use moments from my life, but I got to play these moments out in characters who’d sometimes react differently than I would have! I got to play with things that happened to my friends or the idea of something—like queer karaoke being canceled because queers were too broke to sustain it at the bar.
Grease Bats allows for nuance; the characters are meant to showcase our variations, not our monolithic identities.
AEO: Was there ever a time you used the power of fiction to address something in the queer community that would have, if you had addressed it in nonfiction, resulted in more resistance? I’m personally thinking about the extreme “cancel culture” that marginalized communities sometimes engage in when it comes to policing their own, but you can take this question in any direction.
AB: I like this comic, which is ultimately about empathy, because so many of my characters feel differently about different things, and it’s not always a clean wrap up but it does end in some understanding and patience for the other. Grease Bats allows for nuance; the characters are meant to showcase our variations, not our monolithic identities.
AEO: One of the superpowers that I see in your comics is that someone will do something kinda fucked up, and maybe even another character will yell at them for it, but I’ve actually never seen a reader say they hate a character for doing something imperfect. Has that been your experience?
AB: Yup! I think my characters are (at times) really frustrating and frustrate each other and that is the truest thing of life. My pals frustrate me at times, and I know I annoy them at times as well! I’ve done some real dumb shit and there’s a balance of calling someone out on acting carelessly while also allowing them the time and space to act better in the future. And apologizing! My characters apologize to each other all the time. And I think readers like that, knowing that we all biff it sometimes and allowing for the folks we care about to biff it too. We’re imperfect, but learning. My chosen family is family, meaning at times we have the power to really hurt the other’s feelings but we also have the power to push through it together!
AEO: I want to dive in on genderqueerness if that’s okay. Is that something you’re comfortable talking about?
AB: Yes please!
AEO: As a reader and as a person who edited you for many years, I feel this incredible power radiate from watching a genderqueer artist render a genderqueer body on the page. What does that experience feel like for you? Empowering, totally mundane? Do I have a Romantic-Capital-R notion of this that is entirely unfounded?
AB: Oh it is awesome. I love drawing Andy being over-emotional when being called “sir” at a restaurant then having a crisis because that still means they’re being misgendered. I loved drawing the chapter “A Case of the Floppies” where Scout tries to distract Andy from their dysphoria by playing skeeball. It lets me draw these experiences I have authentically and non-academically, with a good dose of humor.
AEO: What do you mean when you say non-academically?
AB: So much trans and genderqueer discussion is serious. I get to draw it in a way that’s yeah, serious, but also playful! I love being genderqueer, it really comes from a playful relaxed place for me now.
So much trans and genderqueer discussion is serious. I get to draw it in a way that’s also playful!
AEO: Was that the case for you when you started drawing Andy? Or was that something both you and Andy grew into together?
AB: Oh for sure, I was just starting to come out as genderqueer. When I first started this comic, I didn’t go by Archie. And it was definitely something that I got more and more confident in. And I love Andy’s sense of genderqueerness, their love of painting their nails and micro-jorts and crop tops and they really give themself the space to Be Themself. I like that about all the characters. They allow space for them to just be their authentic selves and encourage each other to do the same.
AEO: Is there anything difficult about drawing Andy? And does that come from their particular place in the gender galaxy or from somewhere else?
AB: Andy is honestly the easiest for me to draw because I think and feel so much like them.
AEO: Who’s the hardest?
AB: Gwen and Taylor! I think Taylor is hard because they are the newest character and I have to make sure I’m checking myself about drawing them as a whole character and not just a person in grad school. And Gwen is hard because she is often, by the fault of me and also almost all my other characters besides Ari, put in a caretaking role, which is very reflective of femme folks in queer circles and isn’t fair to them or to Gwen.
AEO: I’m trying to come up with the right question about Gwen, and her femme-ness being exploited as caretaking, and I’m having trouble phrasing it. I want to acknowledge that the struggle is because I’m not femme. Something about whether you feel the need to disrupt this huge flaw in the community, that we often treat femmes as caretakers, or if you want to hold the mirror up to it and represent it accurately?
AB: I think it’s that I feel the need to challenge it and I haven’t had the confidence to draw that comic yet. It’s a little bit because I’m not sure I’m the best one to do it. I try and draw a lot of comics where Gwen is JUST Gwen, but there are chapters like The Job Hunt where she leans into caretaking. She def pushes back though, as seen in Astrology Is Real And Meaningful.
AEO: Because it’s fiction, does that mean you can talk about stuff that isn’t necessarily your experience? Is that one of the superpowers of fiction? I always struggle to answer this question myself! I am always mad when a cis person writes a bad trans character. And I’m reading it and thinking, just let trans people tell their own stories! But then I am also mad when a cis author doesn’t even give it a go. This is a real, earnest, hard question to which I am not sure there is a correct answer
AB: I don’t know if there’s a “correct” answer either, but there’s a way I try to guide my work so it has the diverse cast that’s needed to tell queer slice-of-life stories. I cannot forget where I am coming from and how that limits my lived experience and the privileges that come from it. But also, empathy is critical here, empathy and listening. I listen and believe my friends of different lived experiences where their life has challenges and their identity results in assumptions that I wouldn’t face myself.
Also if someone has written a bad trans character I’m always like…do they have trans friends?
AEO: That answer is almost always no, but it’s not never yes.
So speaking of all these other characters that are a bit harder to access, you mentioned that when Autostraddle first asked you for a monthly comic, you scoped out Andy and Scout first. But in the intervening years and specifically in the graphic novel collected version, the cast got much, much bigger. Can you talk about why it started out with two and why it expanded?
AB: It started out as two because I didn’t trust myself to draw more than two characters and have an audience care about them, especially when the comics only appeared once a month. I was real nervous about new characters but I WANTED THEM so badly. But in my mind I was like “readers won’t care or they’ll forget the next time a comic comes out.” I was wrong on all accounts! I want to introduce more characters soon!
AEO: Do you feel comfortable giving us a teaser?
AB: I want to draw Scout’s new girlfriend and have her be a part of the comic!
AEO: Topic change! Perhaps it is because I came to comics as an adult, but it is my perception that queer people love comics or are more likely to love comics than any other subset of folks. Indulge me in my probably-inaccurate presumptions for a second, do you think that’s true? Is that your experience?
Queers love comics! A lot! I think because it’s an easy medium to see yourself reflected in.
AB: Yes! Queers love comics! A lot! I think because it’s an easy medium to see yourself reflected in, unlike television where there’s SO many people that are involved to dilute or change the story. Perspective comics are often just one person drawing in their studio. And it’s an affordable medium as well.
AEO: Is there anything else you want the folks at home to know?
AB: That Minneapolis fucking rocks! Or at least the queer community here does!
AEO: Oh my goodness, yes, we didn’t talk about the role Minneapolis plays in the graphic novel! I think it’s often overlooked, but this is an explicitly midwestern queer story. Can you expound upon that a little?
AB: Minneapolis is so active and so busy and there’s so, so many cool people here doing the raddest stuff. There’s the most talented artists and activists that I am privileged to be among! All of the events that happen in the story are based on Minneapolis events (except the ’90’s lesbian floral witch party, that was D.C.).
AEO: That was a real party? Who threw that party? Do we know them?
AB: I was in Brooklyn at a queer event and someone was talking shit about Brooklyn and how the queers there suck compared to Manhattan and they were like “know what I mean?” And I was like not at all, I’m from Minneapolis, and she was like “oh no then you have NO idea about queers then, NONE.” It’s so dismissive and does such a disservice to all the queers working real hard in mid-sized cities or rural areas or basically anywhere that isn’t a gay hub. A lot of praise gets given to queer cities like San Francisco and Portland and the like, and that’s rad, but queer history and community is everywhere and it’s just as vibrant and vital (and sexual and fun!) as anywhere.
Also I do not know who threw that party. But I did get a giant hickey at that party.
In our monthly series Can Writing Be Taught? we partner with Catapult to ask their course instructors all our burning questions about the process of teaching writing. This time, we’re talking to Dawnie Walton, who’s teaching an eight-week fiction workshop at Catapult’s New York HQ. From rigorous, collaborative group feedback to readings by writers who have mastered the trickiest elements of fiction, this course will inspire you and renew your commitment to your work.
What’s the best thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?
My favorite workshops have all had one thing in common, and in some ways it puts me in mind of the “yes, and…” rule at the heart of improvisational comedy: Everyone in the circle embraces the core terms of your story—its style/genre, for instance, or the makeup of its central characters—and from that standpoint they help you refine and build. Any critique, then, is a nudge toward clarity and the development of meaning, toward more ambition and audaciousness within the context you’ve provided. I’ve left a workshop like this feeling tingly with possibilities, and raring to get back to work.
What’s the worst thing you’ve ever gotten out of a writing class or workshop as a student?
I really resent when a workshop harps on relatively small, easily fixable problems (an obvious mistake in math, for example). Bringing such an error to the writer’s attention is helpful, of course, but piling on to the degree of mocking is petty. It’s also a failure of the instructor to keep the workshop on track.
What is the lesson or piece of writing advice you return to most as an instructor?
You don’t need to stick to a detailed map or even have a destination in mind before you sit down to start the damn story.
Here’s a goodie from my years yearning to write fiction but intimidated by the how of it: You don’t need to stick to a detailed map or even have a destination in mind before you sit down to start the damn story. It’s okay not to know what you’re driving toward—in fact, I’ve found the not-knowing can lead to more natural narrative movement and open the possibility of characters ending up in those “surprising, yet inevitable” places. (The twin lesson, of course, is that writing is re-writing—the first draft, though very educational for you, will probably be a glorious wreck.)
Does everyone “have a novel in them”?
No, and that’s fine! There are so many beautiful ways to write that story percolating inside you. Maybe you bear down on pieces of it in short fiction, or refract it through poetry, or directly address it via memoir… The point is, you can find the form that feels right for you.
Would you ever encourage a student to give up writing? Under what circumstances?
Give up writing, period? Never. But I might suggest taking a break from one challenging project in order to regain perspective and/or mental health. (Even then, I’d recommend the student write something else, something joyful and untied to expectations, to stay inspired and in practice.)
What’s more valuable in a workshop, praise or criticism?
It depends where the writer is in the process. Personally, I find praise to be most helpful during early drafting—as in “This knocks me out; give me more of that, please.” In later drafts, when a story has a more definite shape and direction, I’m most interested in criticism about what feels extraneous, what impedes propulsion, etc.
Should students write with publication in mind? Why or why not?
My advice would be to write thinking not of publication, per se, but of your intended reader.
No… but it’s complicated. Most writers (myself included) dream about our work finding a home beyond our own laptops, but I’m hesitant to say writers should be worrying about anything except developing their singular voices. So my advice would be to write thinking not of publication, per se, but of your intended reader—not whoever you imagine to be on the other side of Submittable, but the audience for/about whom you are writing. If you come out of that process with a piece you feel proud to claim, a piece that makes sense to your readers while also engaging their brains and their hearts, you’ve gotten as close to publication-ready as is in your control.
In one or two sentences, what’s your opinion of these writing maxims?
Kill your darlings: Yes, if they are gumming up the works (and c’mon—in the pit of your stomach, you know when they are!). But save those lil babies in a separate file; just because they don’t belong in a particular story doesn’t mean they’re not beautiful, and you never know how they might serve you later.
Show don’t tell: Both showing and telling are necessary. My general rule of thumb has been to show what I want the reader to remember, and to tell relevant supporting details.
Write what you know: …and then dig deeper.
Character is plot: I doubt it’s true for everyone, but for me, extrapolating on a character — what X type of person might do in Y situation — has always helped generate plot for me.
What’s the best hobby for writers?
I find the visual arts so inspiring, especially photography. When I’m at a gallery or museum studying a portrait, I’ll often hold off on reading the adjacent description—it’s fun making up the story behind the still.
But I also love watching TV, prestige to pure trash. It helps me process modern culture and politics, which are generally central to my work.
What’s the best workshop snack?
I know I’m supposed to prefer something that doesn’t make much noise or mess, but I would be a liar if I did not pledge my fealty to the kettle chip. (There’s an art to eating them discreetly, I swear.)
Like Maaza Mengiste’s well-received first novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, her latest opens in 1974 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. In The Shadow King, readers meet Hirut as she encounters a bundle of photographs that bring on memories of living, and fighting through, the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. From there Mengiste takes us back through the lives of not just the Ethiopian people, but a larger nation, from foreigners to documenters to those in self-imposed exile during wartime.
In 1935, Hirut is an orphan turned servant to Kidane and Aster; they took her in as a favor to her parents on their deathbed. Kidane is set to follow in the footsteps of his father and lead his community into another war to fight against the ferenji—Italian foreigners. His wife Aster suffers from the loss of their child and the deterioration of her marriage, part of which she blames on Hirut. What transpires in The Shadow King is wide-reaching, tracking the effects of invasion, the expectation of sacrifice, the ways in which those within and on the outskirts of war negotiate their morality and the larger morality of what it means to be “free” not only as a patriot, but as a person. Mengiste weaves a story that’s both captivating and heart-wrenching, invoking descriptive imagery, choral sections, and alternative viewpoints of those at the front lines as well as those fighting beside and behind them. War is not only a fight for land but a fight to solidify the distinctions of power: who has it, who doesn’t, and how it feels to take what you feel you deserve.
Mengiste and I spoke about the ideology of war novels, the experience of regular people (especially women) in wartime, and how she built tension and perspective in The Shadow King by writing from alternating viewpoints.
Jennifer Baker: The Shadow King issuch an intense and threaded story based around the Second Italo-Ethiopian War. Was this a book that was in the works for a while?
Maaza Mengiste: It was about nine years of research and writing. When I finally got to the draft that I thought might be the end, I couldn’t believe it.
There were moments writing the book when I was terrified that I would not finish. As much as I was determined to get to the end, there was always that nagging thought in the back of my head. What if I didn’t do it? So when I did finish it I was absolutely thrilled.
JB: It’s a pretty brutal story and I always want to ask authors how are they feeling during and after writing. The brutality can be felt pretty viscerally, not only for the reader but you’re living with the characters for nine years. How did you look after yourself during this process?
MM: That’s interesting to me. You’re not the only one who’s mentioned that the book is brutal. I didn’t feel that when I was writing it, partly because I learned from my first book that no matter how much I can imagine about brutality and inhumanity in revolution and war, things were always worse. So I knew that this was really just the tip of the iceberg. And I knew that the things that I had researched, the things that actually happened were far, far worse than anything I put in the book.
I knew that the things that I had researched, the things that actually happened were far, far worse than anything I put in the book.
Also, I want to frame this question of brutality in context with what we have seen in the U.S., with the way the U.S. treats some people. The history in this country, the police brutality against African Americans… I was writing the book during this ongoing period. I was writing it during the 2016 [U.S. presidential] election. That was brutal. And the things that are happening right now with children in cages is brutal. The mass murders are brutal. So I don’t think I’m depicting anything we haven’t seen. But I think that what you’re saying is important. For me as a novelist, it’s about asking how can we move into these spaces of violence and how can we render them in language that helps to convey the cruelty, but maybe also offers a way to complicate our notions of what different kinds of cruelty look like. Something that I was working towards is representing the many nuanced ways that encounters can be cruel, brutal, violent, yet not leave a mark. It’s not simply like a bludgeon hitting you over the head again and again. But maybe the reader’s sense of brutality comes from an understanding that these aren’t just characters, these characters represent real people and we’ve started to know them, and we suddenly see the depth of pain that’s inflicted when nations confront each other through individual bodies.
JB: And also the conflict within ourselves?
MM: Absolutely.
JB: If we look at the categorization of a “war novel” they’re not exactly self-contained. War is not finite. Shadow King obviously does not come at it this way, so how did you know when and where to end it?
MM: I think that one of the questions I had to ask myself as I was writing the book was: Whose story is this and why do they want to tell it? I had to figure out what the story was in essence. And then once I realized that my intent was not to go through the entire war, then I knew that the story would end when my characters came to some kind of a realization, regardless of what was happening in the war.
And so when certain battles, personal as well as political, ended for them, that’s when the book would end. I had reached a certain point and I said, “I don’t think I can go any further. Neither can they, frankly.” The last chapter is set in 1974, and that also felt like a more natural closing for the book because the real story did not end when the war ended.
JB: As I was preparing to talk to you words such as “sacrifice” and “power” came up for me. And that it aligns to the expectation of sacrifice, especially the women, and it’s not to say the men don’t sacrifice things as well. Yet these expectations of how you support others in time of war, this is what freedom for country is, this is what patriotism means. And it’s all encouraged by a need to sacrifice something for that. Do you think that’s true?
MM: I think that for the people living during that time there were expectations of obedience and sacrifice, you’re right. The country’s at war and this is just what you do. The idea of loyalty and obedience was deeply ingrained in people. When the emperor put out a mobilization call there was no question: every family sent their eldest to war, every able-bodied man picked up his gun and enlisted. Every woman prepared to follow the army to cook and take care of the wounded. Haile Selassie was a man supposedly ordained by God to be an emperor. He could trace his blood back to King Solomon in the Bible. So when he said “Pick up your weapons, we’re going to fight,” you fight. There was no question about that. And I think with Hirut, one of the things I had to consider was how could she still be so loyal to Aster and Kidane, and to this whole war enterprise, when she herself is under such duress and is being abused. How could she be so obedient when her own self was at stake?
The idea of sacrifice, the threat of death, is constantly there. That is war.
The one thing I had to think about was that I could not place my 21st-century ideals and thinking onto this young girl who has been taught her place in life for as long as she can remember. She was born poor, she was born a peasant, she’s a servant because that’s just the way things are. That’s the way things are meant to be. I can’t place my own thinking onto her. I had to work within her world and within her cultural framework. And women, you’re right, they were told you follow behind the men: you sing these songs if you think anyone is turning back. You encourage them. You shame the cowards. But what many of the women didn’t realize was that they’d be in the direct line of fire because they were not that far behind the men when they were picking up the wounded or picking up the men. It was not only the soldier who was being asked to risk his life. And when women stepped into the front lines as well, they were confirming what they already knew: The idea of sacrifice, the threat of death, is constantly there. That is war. Our bodies become commodities for these nations.
JB: So how did these elements along with following several characters come together to be less of a straightforward narrative?
MM: I started thinking about the books I love. The reading that has completely electrified me. And it’s interesting we’re speaking now just after Toni Morrison has passed away. I remember reading Song of Solomon and realizing that she did this thing with the prose where she layered the brutality in such as way that as I was reading, I was bending into the book. I held it up close to my face so I could re-read the sentences again as though I could peer through the page to figure out what actually happened. Because she had coded language, she had coded the violence into this language that made you stop, re-read, and quite literally decode the depth of cruelty. I was shaken after reading that book, and I wanted to work with that charge that I felt while reading her book as I was writing my own book.
I was inspired by books that broke form and broke structure in a way I found riveting and challenging and enthralling. One of my favorite texts is Homer’s The Iliad. I’ve always been intriguedby the way that the chorus will step into the narrative and tell another side of the story and the battle scenes in that book are some of the best I’ve ever read. I gravitate towards books in which narrative risks are taken, and I wanted to emulate in The Shadow King. My book follows, in some ways, the form of Greek tragedies that I’ve loved. And then I was also thinking about music and the way that music is so much a part of this war between Italy and Ethiopia. I was looking at Aida, the opera, and thinking about how an Ethiopian might think of that if they were watching it as Italy invaded the country. I mean, let’s put this story into an Ethiopian context: there’s this Ethiopian princess who becomes a slave and falls in love with the man who is killing her people. It’s so politically loaded.I wanted to challenge that and and work with a musical form and also pay homage to the women who were using song as a way to galvanize fighters. Pay tribute to the way that music throughout the war in Ethiopia was really part of battle. People would gather and sing war songs before they went off to fight. I had all these elements running through my head as I was thinking about the structure of the book.
JB: The photos are what really struck me the most. You have the photographer Foto there but actually getting these segments where we are getting the descriptions of the photos and then his being embroiled in one side of this war. As a reader these photo descriptions reminds me that I’m an observer. I don’t know if purposeful or even if you can speak to whether or not that was purposeful.
A minor character asks, towards the end of the book, what war ever really ends?
MM: Thank you for saying that. That was really my intent, to force a reckoning with what we see and what we think we know from what we see. Photographs have shaped, have deformed the way we consider Africans and people from the African diaspora, Black people. These photographs have informed how we think of the West. How we think of colonizers. How we think of white people but also how we think of people of color. I considered whether I wanted to include the actual photographs and I decided to do word images. This way, I could examine some essential questions about what’s seen, what’s witnessed and the differences between those two. I wanted to see if I could capture some of that in the description of the photograph. A physical photograph wouldn’t have allowed me to do that. And part of what I wanted to constantly force the reader to question is whether what they’re looking at is actually what they’re seeing. What’s there? What remains invisible? What do we actually see of those human beings who are photographed and show up in our newspapers and in our social media news? I am hoping to move this kind of close examination off the page, beyond the book so that the next time we look at a photograph, the next time we see something stark and disturbing, we can look at it and say “Is this really what it’s supposed to be? What’s been left out?”
JB: So when it comes to Hirut’s part of the story, was there a particular place you felt comfortable landing with her? Especially since it’s such an evolution for her, she goes through a lot. Everyone goes through a lot, but I feel like we’re rooted in what she goes through.
MM: Hirut’s war did not end when the Italians were ousted in 1941. I wanted to depict a female soldier who understood that while she had helped to maintain her country’s independence, there was another war in which her body was the terrain, the battlefield, and it would not end so neatly. I had to ask myself how she would define the parameters of her own freedom and independence. What did victory mean to her? I knew this would require staying at her character for years after the end of the Italo-Ethiopian war. I think by the time I could envision her in 1974, as an older woman watching other women marching with rifles in a a brewing revolution, I really had some grounding for her, even for her in 1935. I knew I could develop her from a young age, but I had to be able to see her and be comfortable with who she was 40 years after that. A minor character asks, towards the end of the book, what war ever really ends? And I wanted to find an answer through Hirut.
On the third floor of Hauteville House, a Georgian villa on the British Channel Island of Guernsey, a man’s head, carved from the faux ivory top of a walking stick, hovers ominously above an ornately carved bed. To the right of the bed is a red curtain, which conceals a secret hidden passage. A short flight of stairs behind the curtain leads to a “crystal palace,” a lookout toward the coast of France, with a four-sectioned glass roof. In the center of the room, a white marble statuette on a pedestal, recalling the Roman goddess Diana, is perched incongruously on a footed stove that is also painted white, the figure angelic and solitary against the blue sky visible through the panes. It is as if one is absorbed within the cloudscape, at eye level with celestial bodies. This top-floor enclave is where Victor Hugo slept during most of his period of exile on Guernsey, which lasted from 1856 to 1870; it is a modest alcove where, as on an old ship’s cabin, the furniture folds and disappears into the walls, and a spare twin bed is just enough for a writer absorbed in writing life, a writer thriving in exile.
In the “crystal palace,” standing before a small black table, Hugo wrote the novels L’Homme qui Rit (The Man Who Laughs), and Les Travailleurs de la Mer (Toilers of the Sea), and a multitude of poems. He also wrote the first part of a three-volume epic poem entitled La Légende des Siècles (The Legend of the Ages), which contains many clues to Hauteville House: a game of opposition and contrast, of shadow and light. “Hugo,” explains Hauteville curator and director Gérard Audinet, “arranged his house as a kind of autobiography, with many references to his personal life, his Parisian status before exile, and to his works.” The references are most evident in inscriptions in wood and stone, which appear in unexpected places high and low throughout. Hugo’s son Charles once referred to Hauteville House as an “autograph on three floors and a poem in several rooms.”
Secret passage and “crystal palace.” (Photo courtesy of Visit Guernsey)
Hugo fled France in 1851, his vocal opposition to the reign of Napoleon III having made him a target of the regime. Louis-Napoleon, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, had been elected legally, a seeming populist advocating for universal suffrage. However, once in office, he manipulated elections and stifled a free press, installing himself as the third Emperor of France via coup d’état. In 1852 Hugo arrived in Belgium, and then traveled to Jersey, the largest of the Channel Islands, before eventually settling on Guernsey in 1855, at age 49. From his upstairs loft as well as from his expansive garden, Hugo could see Castle Cornet, a 13th century fortress in St Peter Port’s southern harbor, as well as the surrounding Channel Islands, and beyond those, the coast of Normandy. Writing further clarified and strengthened his political ideals, such that when Hugo was granted amnesty to return to France in 1859, he refused, pronouncing, “I will return when freedom returns.” Hugo continued living in Hauteville House until France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, which resulted in the fall of the Second Empire.
Hugo’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren gifted the home to the City of Paris in 1927 and billionaire François Pinault, who has described Hugo as “a universal voice of conscience and an enemy of oppression in every form,” recently financed a major renovation, overseen by Paris Musées. Now, Hauteville House is an intact legacy of a complex and pluralistic worldview, a literary object that embodies and breaks down the fundamental psychic conflicts between man and himself, man and society, and man and nature that Hugo examined in the writing he completed on Guernsey. In addition to La Légende des Siècles, L’Homme qui Rit, andLes Travailleurs de la Mer, Hugo completed Les Misérables at Hauteville House in 1862, an examination of class, power, dehumanization, and the inalterable human capacity for goodness and redemption that he’d first began in 1845. His time in exile reveals, writes scholar Patricia A. Ward, “an interest in the collective movement of humanity,” and a belief in an apocalyptic, revolutionary future, in which the individual, ultimately, achieves integration in society.
Hugo purchased Hauteville House, the only home he ever owned, with the proceeds from a book of poems entitled Les Contemplations, a meditation compelled by the unexpected death of his daughter Léopoldine at age 19. Ultimately, Hugo recomposed every single facing, designing every room to be a different act, scene, or universe; the tension on the lower floors leaks out in carved apertures and glazed windows and unexpected gaps that permit light in ceilings and stairwells, ultimately giving way to the ethereal upper floor.
La Légende des Siècles, the poem that is also a kind of key to Hauteville House, moves from the Biblical era to a modern utopia; parallels between the epic and the house’s decor, says house administrator Odile Blanchette, symbolize “the omnipresence of the human figure, the biblical references, Manichaeism, references to Justice and Liberty, and poems dedicated to the punishment of those who abused their power against innocents, as Napoléon III.” The first series of La Légende, published in 1859, writes Ward, indicates “how completely the opposition between progress and political oppression dominates Hugo’s interpretation of the medieval period.”
The master bedroom on the second floor, which conceals the passage to Hugo’s real bedroom, is medieval, romantic, and dramatic. This room emerges from a similarly dark “gallery of oak,” the two adjacent chambers occupying the width of the second floor. Hugo’s garden, an homage to the garden of his childhood on Rue des Feuillantines in Paris, and a model for the garden on Rue Plumet in Les Misérables, is visible from the windows below. The room is ornate and enigmatic, decorated between 1857 and 1859 with inscribed pillars with thick, winding grapevines, twisted bedpost columns, leatherwork studded with nails, a depiction of the sacrifice of Isaac on the footboard, a depiction of Dionysius carved into the headboard. The macabre tiny carved head, which is mounted on a minuscule wooden pedestal atop an elaborately carved oak headboard, only appears to be the head of a bearded and vital man when viewed from the left; on the right, the head is carved to look like a skull, its eye socket vacant, its cheek a concave hollow. Hugo etched Nox Mors Lux on the at the top of the headboard, the Latin for Night Death Light—he writes in Les Misérables, “Is there not in every human soul; was there not in the particular soul of Jean Valjean, a primitive spark, a divine element, incorruptible in this world, immortal in the next, which can be developed by good, kindled, lit up, and made resplendently radiant in which evil can never entirely extinguish?”
The master bedroom. (Photo courtesy of Visit Guernsey)
The dark palette of the bedroom and oak gallery complements a red drawing room on the first floor, bedecked in crimson damask, where wooden figures holding high torchères are posed on theatrical wooden pedestals. These spaces reveal, in some measure, Victor Hugo’s examination of the obstacles toward human progress, which might, as he describes in Les Misérables, “keep a poor man forever between a lack and an excess, a lack of work, and an excess of punishment.” In his vitriolic 1853 book of poems, odes, anthems, and songs rebuking the Second Empire, Les Châtiments (The Punishments), Hugo writes, “The heaviest burden is to exist without living.” In Hauteville House, Hugo created symbolic visual forms that contrast day and night, light and shadow, good and evil, beauty and darkness, work and dream, life and death, using dismantled and reassembled old chests, recombined Gothic elements, Flemish tapestries and Turkish rugs, mirrors, lacquer panels, Delftware, mahogany furniture, and decorative Japanese and Chinese porcelain. Artisans, carvers, and draftsmen created large-scale woodwork based on Hugo’s drawings and imagination. He built fireplaces to resemble cathedrals. He built a room made entirely of tapestries, the heavy textiles serving as walls and banquettes, one draping the ceiling, and one placed in front of a glazed window so that, like the beggar’s coat in Les Contemplations, light could pass through the seams and holes in the fabric.
These rooms all, ultimately, do eventually give way to light—in the blue room, adjacent to the red room, light strikes a mother of pearl table and two gloriously bright porthole mirrors with gilded frames, and luminous, shimmering tapestries embroidered with silver and gold jet beads. The counterbalance to darkness, for Hugo, was an unyielding belief in the limitless goodness and immutable potential within the human spirit. Early on in Les Misérables, Jean Valjean gazes at the bishop who has offered him shelter as he sleeps, before absconding with his silver, “The souls of the upright in sleep have a vision of a mysterious heaven, a reflection from this having shown up on the bishop. But it was also a luminous transparency, for this heaven was within him; this heaven was his conscience.” Later, he writes, “…cities produce ferocious men, because they produce corrupt men; the mountains, the forest, and the sea render man savage; they develop the fears, but yet, do not destroy the human.”
The red room. (Photo courtesy of Visit Guernsey)
In conceiving the fate of Jean Valjean, sentenced to five years of prison for filching a loaf of freshly baked bread, and ultimately to nineteen years for repeated attempts at escape, Hugo questioned, “What becomes of the handful of leaves of the young tree when it is sawn at the trunk?” In July 14, 1870, Hugo planted an oak in the long middle passage of the back garden at Hauteville House. He installed a pond, the “Fontaine aux serpents,” that came from the Place Royale, and a bench built so he could look to the coast of France.
On August 5th, 1870, Hugo left Guernsey and waited in Brussels with his mistress, Juliette Drouet, for the declaration of the French republic. Hugo would come back to Guernsey three times after that, the longest visit between 1872 and 1873, to finish his last revolutionary novel, Ninety-Three, published in 1874. His final visit would last from July 5th to November 9th, 1878. The decoration of Hauteville House, particularly the large carved oak pieces and painted panels, was finished after 1864, explains Audinet. In later years, repairs and improvements, for the rugs in particular, were necessary due to deterioration. The Paris Musées completed a comprehensive renovation, which exactingly preserves Hugo’s decor, in April of 2019.
Inscription reading “La fin du seigneur” (“the end of the priest”). (Photo courtesy of Amy Beth Wright)
For a writer, perhaps the most haunting and moving relics in the house are Hugo’s inscriptions, scraped and poked into wood and concrete: the names of the great writers who stirred him and of mythological and Biblical figures that shaped the cycles of imagery in his texts, and passionate declarations of his most fundamental beliefs. Above the dining room entry, he inscribed, “Life Is An Exile, Exile Is Life.” On the dining room chairs, “Hope is my strength.” On a wall bench he etched, “The End of the Soldier,” “The End of the Priest,” “The End of the Lord”—symbols of the demise of the “ancient regime,” or monarchy, explains Audinet. A great inscription over the fireplace speaks of the Virgin and Christ as a wish for the advent of the Republic, reading in part, “The people are small in your sacred arms, o liberty.” On the underside and interior of benches and recovered pews, there are names: Luther, Christ, Moise, Job, Isaie, Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, Moliere. And, in the garden, on a rear stone wall, is the phrase “Immensité dit l’être, éternité dit l’âme.” This is from a poem in Les Contemplations entitled “Magnitudo Parvi,” which can be translated to mean, “the magnitude of small things.” Addressing Léopoldine, Hugo meditates on eternity, and the cosmos. Translations differ slightly, but perhaps the most apt is, The soul claims eternity, the being claims immensity.
It is through these inscriptions, and in conceiving of Hauteville House as a total work of art, that Hugo claimed for himself a notion he penned in Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), “architecture is thought written in stone.” In his fifteen-year exile, Hugo exercised the kind of limitless freedom of individuality and creativity that he believed possible for humanity at large. What is left behind at Hauteville House is not just a complex and symbolic décor, or abundant evidence of Hugo’s modernity, but also a fearless and avant garde kind of self-expression. Hugo gave his inner life an external structure, a kind of sculptural identity, which is now the legacy of a fiercely original humanitarian and artist.
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