In Conversation: Anya Ow & Caitlin Starling

As part of the launch for Neon Hemlock’s 2020 fall novella titles, Stone and Steel and Yellow Jessamine, we are delighted to share two paired conversations between those authors and the authors of our spring novella titles.  Below, a conversation between Anya Ow and Caitlin Starling.

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Anya:  What started your love for writing dark/horror/gothic fiction?

Caitlin:  A combination of loving the aesthetic (for the gothic in particular: decayed grandeur, black lace, poisonous plants, the isolated manor house on the hill…) and a rampant anxiety disorder. I’m pretty familiar with feeling dread and terror, so it was only natural that my characters feel shades of the same. When you first envisioned Cradle and Grave, what came first, character or setting?

I knew I wanted to write a post-apocalyptic, Fallout-styled story. Similar to your love of the gothic aesthetic, I enjoy media (particularly games!) in that particular sort of wasteland wanderer, drastically changed, bleak type of world. However, I don’t plan either characters or settings in detail while I write. As an organic writer/pantser, my worldbuilding and characters are created while I’m setting words down to a page. Speaking of characters and settings, how has your work in narrative design affected your writing?

It’s made me more aware of the experiential side of reading—not just plot and character, but how atmosphere impacts how people read and enjoy (or don’t) a book. I know how to provoke feelings of dread now, and how to make books that share a lot of thematic similarities (The Luminous Dead also deals with co-dependent relationships, paranoia, grief, claustrophobia) feel very different. Your settings are incredibly atmospheric and layered. When you were developing the Scablands and the City, was there anything of particular importance to you, some detail you wanted to build everything else around? 

Conservation, climate change, and humanity’s impact on the environment have been key themes that influence or drive my work, and Cradle and Grave is very much the same. The Rinse and the world’s warping effects on its denizens and their lives were a central part of the story, a reflection of how we ourselves cannot hope to stay unchanged by what we’re doing to our world. Yellow Jessamine is also very much about warped change, both through an unknown otherworldly horror and through poison. Poisons and herbs are a key part of Evelyn’s arsenal, and it was a pleasure to see how confident she was in their use. What made you choose to write a poisoner, and do you have a favourite poison/herb/plant?

I created Evelyn as a very dramatic and angsty teenager. I wanted to make a villainess, a misanthropic woman living on a hill and hating everybody around her. Poison just seemed to fit, and then the more I learned about the plants Evelyn uses, the more I really dug in and enjoyed the research. Personally, I really love hellebore—it’s just so pretty! Foxglove is a close second. But in terms of loving (“loving”?) the poison itself, I’m very fond of gelsemium, just because it’s been associated with Evelyn since the very beginning. It’s actually included in my back tattoo. And what about your protagonist? Other authors maybe would have used as their POV somebody from the Citadel who is learning about the Scab along with the reader. Why did you choose to have Lien know so much already? 

I wanted to have a highly competent main character, connected to the challenging world she lives in on a fundamental level. That meant having to have a character who already lived and breathed the world, rather than someone who would’ve been more like a tourist. To Lien, the dangerous work she does and the world she lives in is part of her usual life, and I hope that in turn, readers sharing her point of view will find the setting more visceral. For Evelyn—also a very competent, self-aware character—power appears to be a cage that she must constantly keep building around her as a shield. I was surprised by some of the ruthless acts that came so naturally to her in the story, and loved how everything she had done built towards the dramatic denouement. 

What was the most difficult scene for you to write in Yellow Jessamine?

I tend to mirror the emotions of my characters while I’m writing. So I’d say the most difficult scene was one later in the book, where all Evelyn’s skills seem to be for naught, and she overshoots the mark—for those who have read it, this is the scene with Iris. Writing Evelyn not only terrified but actively failing was like being in a nightmare.

Tell me more about the Psychons! You allude to them having a fairly developed society (reminded me of a mix of Borderlands and Mad Max). Are there any details you left out? 

They are very much inspired by games like Borderlands–speaking of which, the Borderlands game set in Space Australia is amazing, would recommend. I don’t tend to pre-build details compared to building as I write, though, so what you’d see on a page for me is what you get. They are a reaver/bandit-based society focused on jury-rigging devices that limit or stop the Change, and much like these kinds of groups in Borderlands and Fallout, are parasitic. However, as the story shows, even their jury-rigged solutions are starting to fail, making them more desperate. 

What inspired you to write Yellow Jessamine, and what are you working on next?

I’d been looking for a story for Evelyn for almost fifteen years, and nothing I’d come up with had worked. They were all too adventure-y, or they tried to twist Evelyn into a positive figure, instead of a dangerous, tragic one. After The Luminous Dead, I decided to try my hand specifically at a novella, and actually planned it out almost mechanically— needed x amount of words, my scenes were y words long on average, so I had z number of scenes. I started just filling things in, bits of backstory I knew I’d want to hit, and then tried to think of what monster would be the absolute worst for Evelyn to go up against. And suddenly I had a whole novella!

Next up is The Death of Jane Lawrence, another stab at gothic horror- this one a little more traditional. Our protagonist is forced by circumstance to take a husband, marries a man she barely knows, ends up at his crumbling ancestral home… and then things take some very weird turns, involving Victorian surgical practices, calculus, esoteric magic, and probably too much cocaine. It’ll be out next fall!

What about you? What’s next, and will it be another apocalyptic tale or something else?

Victorian surgical practices and esoteric magic? I’ll have to check that out! 

I’m currently trying my hand at writing a graphic novel script for a project tentatively called The Noodle King, a cyberpunk world but set in Southeast Asia about the murders of street stall hawkers. I love the cyberpunk genre, but a lot of modern cyberpunk does look like “Asian aesthetics, but no/few Asians”, or very much more like a hyper-modern version of Tokyo or Shanghai. It is, in a way, an apocalyptic tale, since it takes into account how we might be trying to survive a 2+ºC increase in global temperatures. Especially over the equator where I was born, where high temperatures combined with high humidity would mean death to any human. It’s still unfinished, and as a pantser, I don’t know how it’ll finish, so I’m not sure if that project will go anywhere, but I hope it will. 

Looking forward to reading more from you. Thanks for doing this.

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Yellow Jessamine by Caitlin Starling is out September 5th.  Cradle and Grave by Anya Ow is available now.