The Twenty-Seventh Dispatch
Hello from the final third of the last month of summer break
Fiction as Context
…and one thing I hope for These Familiar Walls
I was never very interested in modern history—as a girl I was obsessed with fantasy books and fairy tales, so the only historical subjects that I could find some interest in were from ages that felt even a little like the stories I loved the best, in my teens I wanted to watch documentaries about Vlad the Impaler or the witch trials, and when I was older I found the earliest history of humanity more interesting than almost all of that. In school I struggled the most with math and science classes, and I excelled the most in English courses, and history lessons landed somewhere vaguely in the middle. So when, in my first semester of college, I was assigned The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien, I had so little interest in it that I almost skipped the book and took a poor grade for the class.
In hindsight I’m really glad my teacher called me out and convinced me not to miss out on that book. It’s an incredible collection of stories set during the Vietnam War—and of course it’s about the war, and it’s about what it was like to experience the war, but it was also about telling people what that experience was like, it’s about making people feel the way the author felt during the war and about the war. (I’ve talked about it in a couple podcast interviews if you want to dig up more of my thoughts about this phenomenal book.)
And I think that’s a huge part of the point of fiction, not just to tell a pretend story but to convey a true feeling, to create a true experience out of something that’s entirely made up. It’s something I hope I can achieve with my own writing.
My next book, These Familiar Walls, is a dual-timeline haunted house story. It’s not a pandemic story, but half of it is set during 2020, and the shutdowns play a part in the isolation experienced by Amber as she finds herself trapped in a house with a menacing presence. I wrote the first draft of These Familiar Walls during 2020, I queried it in early 2021, and over and over I was told that nobody was ready for “pandemic stories.” It used to bother me, you know? Not that I’d dare to compare myself to Carpenter, but nobody calls The Thing an “Antarctic research story.” But eventually I’d heard that so often that I began to worry that this book would never see the light of day unless I edited it to change the year and remove any shutdown or pandemic references. I didn’t want to do that, though. I want my work to be among the voices offering one facet of our era’s context. When I found out that These Familiar Walls was going to be published and that I wouldn’t have to change the pandemic element of the book, I was thrilled.
I hope people who pick this book up when it comes out read that aspect of it and feel seen. I hope that someday when my kids read this book, my kids who were 5 and 1 during the lockdowns and can’t really understand how that year felt to the adults around them, it gives them an opportunity to really grasp what it was like to live through that strange moment in history. I hope that in its own way, These Familiar Walls can have that, if almost nothing else at all, in common with The Things They Carried and with every story ever told that made the reader—or the viewer, or the listener—really feel an experience that they didn’t have to (or in other cases, get to) live.
So in that way I guess the people who weren’t ready for it when I was querying in 2021 weren’t entirely wrong—it’s a ghost story and a family story and a coming-of-age story and it isn’t a pandemic story, but it’s not-not a pandemic story. And this morning I’m feeling proud of it. I can’t wait for you to read it.
Book Recommendations!
We’re doing TWO book recommendations this month, because the absolutely show-stoppingly gorgeous and visceral and frightening The Faceless Thing We Adore by Hester Steel came out earlier this month, and early next month we’re getting Rachel Harrison’s latest, the wildly fun and scary and propulsive Play Nice.
The Faceless Thing We Adore
In The Faceless Thing We Adore, unhappy and perpetually out-of-place Aoife leaves her unsatisfactory life and her Mr. Wrong boyfriend behind when she feels the call of a distant, sun-soaked island. But that call was a little more personal than good travel advertising, and what Aoife finds is more than a spontaneous trip to figure herself out—for the first time in her life, she finds a place where she feels like she belongs. It’s just too bad that the place is a cult’s commune on the island, and every secret Aoife uncovers leads to darker and more dangerous depths.
Hester’s book is haunting, and heartbreaking, and horrifying, and gorgeous. (There are no particularly fitting synonyms for “gorgeous” that begin with the letter H or I would have used that rather than spoil my alliteration here. Alas.) It’s one that you’ll find yourself thinking about for a long time after you read it. Hester Steel is a new horror voice you’re going to want to keep an eye out for.
Play Nice
In Play Nice, Clio’s deeply estranged mother has passed away, and she’s left Clio and her older sisters the house they lived in together before Clio’s dad got custody when they were kids. This isn’t just any unhappy home, though—Clio’s mother insisted that the house was demon-possessed, and even had a memoir published, all about the demonic haunting.
Rachel Harrison’s signature close examination of women’s relationships is in top form in this book, her character writing is deep and rich, and she continues to bring a deft touch of humor to this story amidst the grief and the trauma and the scares. In my opinion this is her best book yet, and I need everyone to read it like…immediately. (Well, after it comes out. But definitely preorder it immediately!)
The Writing
I’ve sent my agent my newest manuscript! The campground horror book I’ve been chipping away at for ages is, for now at least, out of my hands. Hooray!
Now I am still stuck in the absolutely torturous process of figuring out which of my ideas to write next. I’ve written out pitches for the two I’m the most drawn to in hopes that doing so would give me a strong inclination to start one over the other, but they both still sound so fun and I feel so ready for both of them. So I’m moving on to outlining each one, to see if once I’ve got the plots all planned out, maybe then one of them will stand out to me more strongly as the thing I want to be doing next. Failing that, I could always resort to a coin toss?
Either way, it's not like whichever story I don’t focus on next will disappear; I’ve got enough ideas lined up and waiting their turns to last me for years. And lately in moments when I’m engaged with any kind of simple task that keeps my hands busy and frees my mind up to wander, I’ve had another, newer idea starting to come into focus—that one, at least, is one I know I don’t feel ready to tackle yet, so it’s patiently waiting instead of trying to jostle to the front of my brain.
Sales and Giveaways and ARCs!
Right now through September first, Barnes and Noble is having a Book Haul sale—tons of hardcovers, both in store and online, are 50% off. Including The Cut! Get a hardcover of The Cut for $14.50 right now while the sale is running!
In the meantime, over on goodreads you can enter for a chance to win a free paperback advance reader copy of These Familiar Walls! Enter here, any time between right now and September 7th, for your chance to win!
And as of this month, eARCs of These Familiar Walls are also available to request on Netgalley!
That’s a Wrap
And that’s it for me for the month of August. Thanks for joining me! Next time you get a Dispatch in your inbox, my summer break will be over but autumn (and my birthday!) will be upon us, and I can hardly wait.
(Also, if you liked this newsletter and haven’t yet subscribed, you should do that!)