Isabel Waidner is the author of Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, Sterling Karat Gold, We Are Made of Diamond Stuff and Gaudy Bauble. They are also an academic in the School of English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London.
Helen Macdonald is a writer, naturalist, a former historian of science and the author of H is for Hawk, an account of training a goshawk following their father’s death. Vesper Flights, a collection of essays about our relationship to the natural world, was published in 2020, and 2023 saw the publication of Prophet, their sci-fi thriller co-written over lockdown in a collaboration with Sin Blaché.
Sin Blaché is an author and musician. They have been writing horror and sci-fi stories all their life. Prophet is their first novel. Born in California, they live in the Northwest of Ireland and can be found obsessing over obscure folk instruments and playing too many video games.
This winter, they spoke to one another about horror, collaboration and the co-option of nostalgia.
Isabel Waidner:
How does a writer transform a familiar object or character into an instrument of horror? I’m thinking of Kermit the Frog as he appears in your new novel, Prophet.
Helen Macdonald:
The Kermit! Of all the horrors in Prophet, this is the only one based on a real childhood toy (mine). It scared me even then, with its stick-like, velcro-tipped fingers, the unmoving rictus of its open-mouthed face, those two hard plastic eyes. A neighbour’s kid once swung it by its legs and hit me in the face and the eyes hurt. But the Kermit on television unnerved me, too, with all his relentless reasonableness and optimism.
In our novel, Kermit is an object generated by a spooky multidimensional substance called Prophet, which our heroes investigate. Prophet forces people to remember beloved objects from their past, nostalgic things that represent safety and comfort. It then manifests these memories as actual, physical objects. We call these ‘Eos Prophet Generated Objects’ in the book, or EPGOs. Should a human touch the EPGO generated from their memory, they fall into a trance state, and if the object is removed from them by force, they die. The EPGOs become stranger and more menacing as the book goes on, and I gave our Kermit a suspicion of more legs than he ought to possess; there’s something spider-like about him.
One of the sources for Kermit and the other toy EPGOs in the book comes from a Second World War anecdote I read once, about soldiers trapped on the front in deep forest through a long autumn and winter. One of them was a talented amateur artist, and to start with he did a roaring trade drawing porn for his comrades. As conditions worsened and they began to starve, soldiers stopped asking for smut and started asking him to draw other things. Demons, witches, dwarves, folk horrors. Reading this story, I wondered; if starving soldiers were stationed in a winter forest now, what would they want our artist to draw once they stopped wanting porn? What creatures have been handed to us by the twentieth century that darkly inhabit our subconscious? Kermit, Furby, Bambi, Chuck E. Cheese, Pac-Man ghosts? Maybe.
Sin Blaché:
Horror in Prophet is about twisting the familiar. How normal, everyday things, like videotapes or places like convenience stores, are twisted into the horrific. I adore it. That kind of horror evokes emptiness and uncertainty, dread in a way that feels old and childish all at once. Horror tropes and trends always reflect the beating heart of society like black mirrors, and in Prophet we wanted people to think about the objects around them. What brought them feelings of safety and nostalgia, and what it would be like if those objects turned on them? It was great to explore those questions.
Macdonald:
Both Prophet and Corey Fah Does Social Mobility take conceptual ideas like social inequality and the co-option of nostalgia and examine how they might manifest in the physical world, with wormholes, EPGOs, and other creatures. It was fun to write the EPGO objects as horror, and even more so to write them as critiques of late-capitalist consumerist nostalgia – in the end, whether the generated object is a Pac-Man arcade cabinet or a full-sized Pan Am 747, it is a trap, deadly for both individual and community. But in a wider sense, the whole of Prophet is built from analogous elements: scenes and tropes from genre pieces. Snowy chalets from Bond movies; evil scientists in top-secret medical facilities; the stark light of the American nuclear desert. Prophet makes the reader complicit in their relationship to these tropes, and we hope that experiencing their familiarity and safety might provoke reflection on their ubiquity and their social uses. How do you see readers of Corey Fah Does Social Mobility in terms of their relation to its narrative?
Waidner:
Wormholes wreak havoc in Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, similar to the EPGOs in Prophet. At the centre of the conceptual framework of the novel, they are time- and space-defying passageways which open when a substantial amount of cultural capital is being moved to a place where it’s never been before: for example, the opening chapter is about Corey Fah, a queer working-class novelist, winning a literary prize. Parachuted into contexts of privilege and opportunity as a result of their win, Fah has to contend with their difference at every step of the way. The novel suggests that social mobility (which, in fiction and liberal political discourse tends to be connected to simplistic triumph-over-tragedy narratives or mythologies around merit) might not be quite as straightforward as it’s made out to be.
In narrative terms, wormholes in Corey Fah Does Social Mobility function as portals through which the past enters into the present, and vice versa. For starters, Fah’s previously disavowed childhood appears in the form of a cute but freaky deer/spider hybrid, Bambi Pavok, who keeps getting in the way of Fah’s ambitions to capitalise on their win. Then, a character inspired by the playwright Joe Orton travels from the 1960s into the recent present and reinvents himself as a gameshow host on television. The latter allowed me to connect my fictional take on social mobility, not just to my own experience and imaginings, but to a longer history of non-traditional writers surpassing expectations initially but failing to sustain their success: Orton of course was a gay working-class writer achieving recognition shortly before being murdered by his long-term partner Kenneth Halliwell in 1967.
As well as a dimension-altering agent of chaos, Corey Fah’s prize is a catalyst for adventure, life, kinship and even transformation – if you forgive the novel’s happy ending and underhand pay-off. Like your take on nostalgia in Prophet, my treatment of social capital in Corey Fah Does Social Mobility is highly ambiguous and conflicted – and I hope my readers take that away from it.
How did the relationship at the centre of Prophet evolve in the writing process? The slow burn between Sunil Rao, a former MI6 agent with an ability to detect lying, and Adam Rubenstein, a US special forces soldier, feels like a classic odd-couple situation, while also reading like a fan fiction of an original that doesn’t exist. Have you seen Natasha Lyonne in Poker Face, by the way, which also plays on the lie-detector trope?
Blaché:
Poker Face is amazing. Actually, it was interesting when it was announced. We were in the middle of writing Prophet, and Barbie had been announced recently too, and we were feeling very proud of ourselves for tapping into the cultural urge towards nostalgia and, most importantly, the monetisation of nostalgia. It really felt like we were onto something. Then, when Rian Johnson announced Poker Face, we thought ‘Oh no, maybe someone got there before us?’ but it turned out that Johnson took an entirely different route from our Rao, who has a similar ability to Natasha Lyonne’s character Charlie Cale.
In Prophet, nostalgia is at the forefront of the plot as an almost-constant threat to the characters. Poker Face still deals in nostalgia, but in a way that is much more in the background, more threadlike. The show feels like a series of Columbo reruns. Lyonne’s Charlie dresses anachronistically and everyone speaks like the heroes and villians from daytime television in the seventies and eighties, which helps the viewer accept many of the otherwise unacceptable rules of that world. It feels safe. It feels familiar. This is what we’re warning people about in Prophet: the urge to accept anything as long as it is wrapped up in a safe and familiar package. We just went in a different direction to Rian Johnson.
As for the lie-detector trope, I had no idea! We were writing Prophet between 2020 and 2021. Everyone was talking about who was telling the truth, who could discern the truth, and every conversation seemed to turn into an argument about what was true. We talked a lot at the time about how useful an ability like Rao’s would be in this environment. Very quickly, we started to wonder what that would do to a person living in a world of not just the huge lies told by politicians, but the smaller lies told by everyone around you. We talked about how it would shape a person, and what kind of coping mechanisms they would employ to survive. One thing that dulls the world are opiates, so it stood to reason that Rao would be an addict. Another thing that simplifies the world down to a dot is pain. So we reasoned that Rao would get into a lot of fights. We found out later, while researching nostalgia, that when it was still classed as a psychological disorder the medical treatment for it was, coincidentally, pain and opiates.
Another thing we talked at length about is a trope deployed across nearly all media: the odd couple. It was important to us to have that in Prophet precisely because we intended to create something that felt familiar straight away – like fan fiction of something that doesn’t exist. We joke now about how we see Adam and Rao in nearly every on-screen pairing lately. The Chaos and The Order. They’re everywhere.
Macdonald:
I adore Poker Face and its gender-swapped supernatural Columbo. Like Johnson, we made our truth-teller a creature of chaos, but Rao isn’t a human polygraph. He doesn’t read people, he reads the world. He instantly knows the truth or falsity of any propositional statement, so his ability is founded on the nature of truth, rather than human intention. His powers are therefore limited by ambiguity and vagueness, and – like Johnson must have done with Poker Face – we had a lot of fun using these abilities to undercut the usual tropes and narrative models of procedural mystery.
As for the odd-couple trope, how could we not? It’s everywhere, that yin-yang pairing – old as rocks. Their relationship very much evolved over the course of writing, though it was always intended to be a slow-burn romance. Initially I found writing Adam hard. He was baffling to me; I couldn’t get purchase on him – which, not entirely ironically, is Rao’s issue with him too. Facts about Adam are impossible for Rao to read, both a little nod to the daftness of Twilight (in which Edward the vampire cannot read Bella’s mind) but also because not knowing forces one to learn to trust, and trust is a condition for love. Rao had no need for trust before meeting Adam.
Enormous trust was also required to write Prophet at all. Trust in each other’s writing abilities, for one thing. But also Sin and I needed to learn to trust each other’s slightly different visions for these characters, and what supervened on this was a delightful surprise. My Rao and Adam aren’t quite Sin’s Rao and Adam, which makes the characters on the page more complex and contradictory than I think either of us would have written them working alone. It made them feel deeply human. We built them from old, familiar models but it required the interaction of more than one mind to make them move and feel real. Something of a parallel with EPGOs in the book, perhaps.
And here’s a question: I’ve never written a novel before and found the process of inhabiting different characters quite extraordinary. Some were based on aspects of real people (like the demeanour of our billionaire villain de Witte came from watching YouTube videos of a tech CEO giving corporate speeches from his barn). Rao, however. Rao isn’t me. But as a chaotic, non-binary ADHDer with an Oxbridge education, a student past involving more substance use than was wise for me, and a tendency to feel sorry for myself, I certainly wrote parts of myself into him. I’m not a psychopath, but it was so much fun to put myself in the very frightening mind of our evil research scientist Veronica, and write as one.
I’d love to know more about your relationship to Orton in Corey Fah. And perhaps also Bambi Pavok. How these characters reflect or amplify aspects of yourself, as well as how they serve the story.
Waidner:
My previous book Sterling Karat Gold gets at ideas around the exposure of lies, or better, the feeling of existing in a never-ending and constantly shifting network of lies: big lies, political lies. I don’t locate the ability to detect truth in a person like Sunil Rao in the novel, but rather I develop the concept of ‘spaceships’ – moments in which a hidden reality becomes apparent, briefly, before vanishing again.
Final word on Natasha Lyonne who emerges as a common denominator in our work apparently: no spoilers, but at the end of Corey Fah Does Social Mobility so much cultural capital has been transported to so many unusual places that the entire wormhole labyrinth falls in on itself. It collapses, to the effect that Fah and their partner, Drew Szumski, get caught up in a time loop – not unlike Lyonne’s Nadia does in Russian Doll, who, if you remember, relives her thirty-sixth birthday over and over until she works out what happened to land her in the loop in the first place! Similarly, yet not, Fah relives various one-hour periods of their forgotten past and catches glimpses of alternative lives during their time loop experience. This leads to some sort of reckoning, an insight into a previously unacknowledged ‘truth’, which eventually frees them – but only from the time loop situation, not generally, I’m not that optimistic.
In terms of your question: like yours, my characters tend to be heightened versions of myself, or versions of people I know, at least to begin with. But then I use distancing strategies to introduce personality traits and back stories outside of my experience, and those allow me to be shocked and surprised by my own characters. I want characters to have the capacity to move into narrative territory that I’m unfamiliar with, or that I might be uncomfortable with, otherwise what is the point. Using Bambi, the Disney film, to write the backstory of Fah is one such distancing technique: I draw on my personal experience of migration, queerness and living as a working-class novelist to inspire Fah, but I inflect that reality through a twisted version of Bambi, ending up with a character other than myself, who behaves unpredictably in situations the narrative presents to them. Or I use the autobiography of Joe Orton to create a character who channels my experience of winning a literary prize as a non-traditional novelist.
Photograph of Helen Macdonald © Tom Lucas
