Welcome to this Track of Words guest post, where today I’m joined by the fantastic author David Towsey who’s going to talk about three films by a single director that had an impact on his brilliant novel Equinox. Published by Head of Zeus, Equinox first came out in May 2022, and the paperback edition is due in February 2023 so it feels like a good moment to look back at this fantastic fantasy novel! I haven’t read anything quite like it, with its fascinating central concept of day and night siblings – each body inhabited by two distinct personalities, one present during the day and the other at night – and I loved its blend of fantasy and horror, and the attention to detail in its setting. It’s always interesting to get an author’s thoughts on some of the inspirations behind their work, and in this post David takes an unusual but really cool approach to talking about what inspired his novel.
If you haven’t yet read Equinox, you can get a sense of what to expect from my spoiler-free review and from an interview I did with David prior to its release. I really can’t recommend Equinox enough, so I hope you’ll enjoy this guest post and then – if you haven’t already – get yourself a copy! Without further ado though, over to David.
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David Towsey: When talking previously about influences on my latest novel, Equinox, I’ve typically started with literary texts. It seems right to do so – there are lots of amazing books that shaped the way I wrote this particular story, world, and characters. Some are obvious, like Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Others have had a subtler impact, but still played a part in my thinking, such as Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend or Paula Brackston’s Winter Witch.
But having written a good number of blog posts, and taken part in a fair number of interviews (right here on Track of Words, for example), I have found myself reaching more and more for cinematic influences when talking about Equinox. Hardly a surprise, I suppose, given how ubiquitous film and TV are in my life. But what has been surprising to me is the prevalence of one particular director’s work when I reach for those influential films. That we share a first name is, I imagine, about the only thing we share; I’m honestly not one of those people who delves deep into the personalities and personal lives behind the credits. I don’t think I’ve ever watched a DVD extra… If people still do that.
That David Fincher directed three films that had an enormous impact on the writing of Equinox seems – to me at least – like a strange coincidence more than me being a massive Fincher fan. If asked on any given day, I’m not sure who I’d name as my favourite film director, or if I could even name a top three. I guess what I’m trying to say is, in thinking about this post I realised a bunch of new things about my own novel. I think seeing your own work afresh, given the opportunity to reflect on it, is one of the best aspects of writing a post like this. So, if you’ll indulge me… come with me now on a whistle-stop tour of three Fincher films, and how I’ve come to realise they influenced the topsy-turvy, witch-infused world of Equinox.
Gone Girl
Bet you didn’t see this one coming, huh? In fairness, when writing this I had to double check that the adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl was actually directed by Fincher. “Never saw it coming” pretty much sums up this film’s influence on Equinox. In the cinema, the big plot twist in the middle of this story hit me like a truck (I’ll do my best to avoid specific spoilers, but even knowing there’s a twist is a kind of spoiler… so, sorry about that). The twist hit so hard, in fact, that I went right out and picked up a copy of Gillian Flynn’s novel, of which the film is a fairly close adaptation. I wanted to know how Flynn managed such a twist on the page. The novel didn’t disappoint. I don’t read much in the crime thriller genre – mostly I’m trying and failing to keep up with SFF – which may partly explain why this example was such a revelation to me.
Years later, when planning Equinox, I quickly decided on a significant shift in point of view. It made sense with the big world idea – two personalities inhabiting the same body, one during the day, one at night. In thinking about how to handle this, Gone Girl was my touchstone. The shift in Equinox is not nearly so seismic, so destabilising, so unexpected, but I hope it has some of these elements. But regardless, I know I couldn’t have written that part of the novel without something like Gone Girl helping me conceptualise what could be achieved by such bold creative choices.
Fight Club
Continuing the theme of films that inspired me to go and read the source novel, it feels impossible to talk about Fincher films without including Fight Club. It’s the film I first think of when his name is mentioned, and I imagine it’s the same for many people.
Those familiar with both Equinox and the film will likely spot a similarity – the complex relationship between our narrator (Ed Norton) and Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) is not a million miles from that of my protagonists Christophor and Alexsander. Both relationships involve one party being rather repressed and stuck in their ways, while the other tries to help free them… with serious consequences.
But that wasn’t Fight Club’s biggest influence on my novel. Instead, I have to ask your forgiveness and indulgence, reader, because really it was Chuck Palahniuk’s afterword in my edition of Fight Club that had the most significant impact on me. There, Palahniuk expresses his surprise at the story’s reception – and, in fairness, he acknowledges it is largely the reception of Fincher’s adaptation – as a treatise on masculinity. He says, in a way that has stayed with me as an emblem of authorial innocence (perhaps even naivety), that he wrote Fight Club as a romance between the narrator and the character Marla Singer.
That just floored me.
It’s a story so far from what I imagined a typical romance to be, but the more I thought about both Palahniuk’s novel and Fincher’s film, the more it started to make sense. Equinox isn’t categorised anywhere as a romance either, but it’s definitely how I see the story: it has a romance at its heart. One that is so integral to how I shaped the other elements, such as the world building and the supernatural aspects, that I can see how a writer might describe their own novel that way, despite all the other forces competing for our attention.
Se7en
Boy was it hard not putting a box in Equinox… what a great ending to Fincher’s 1995 film, what a great device. But that would have been one influence too far. As it is, I do worry just how direct an impact Se7en (the only original screenplay of the three Fincher films discussed here) had on me and my novel. Se7en’s Detective Somerset (Morgan Freeman) is world-weary, one case from retirement, and initially refuses his call-to-adventure; in this he has a lot in common with Special Inspector Christophor Morden in my novel. And what a last case Somerset’s turns out to be.
Seven deadly sins that inspire really gruesome situations, which stretch an audience’s credulity in terms of their cruelty and cold-blooded calculation. In other hands than Fincher’s, the desiccated man on the bed for “sloth” or the force-fed man for “gluttony” could lose the audience. But the word-view of this film is so bleak, so brutal, that such scenes feel only too natural – something which is, in of itself, quite an uncomfortable realisation. The witch in Equinox is attempting to enact a ritual that requires some similarly detailed, esoteric, and grim conditions. In both my novel and Se7en, the protagonists’ quest is to stop the killings before the perpetrator is able to finish what they started. And like Detective Somerset, Christophor eventually realises he is a key part of the ritual he is trying to stop.
A list of gruesome killings, a hunt for the killer, and a cop near retirement: these are all well and good as similarities, but I think the influence runs deeper than that. For me, it’s Fincher’s framing of this rainy, bleak urban landscape – the feel of the place – that I tried so hard to replicate in my own writing. Because without that backdrop, the “foreground” of the killings just doesn’t land in the same way. Perhaps the best way I can express this is: the scene in Se7en that knocks the wind out of me every time is when Morgan Freeman looks at Gwyneth Paltrow over a dingy diner table and tells her why he couldn’t bring a child into this city, this world. There’s just so much pathos in this conversation. It doesn’t need the histrionics or the complexity of the ritualistic killings, it just gets you right in the feels.
I hope there are one or two conversations or moments in Equinox that come close to something similar. And if there is, maybe I have David Fincher to thank in one way or another. One day I might send him a token of my appreciation, some flowers perhaps. Just not in a box.
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David Towsey is a graduate of the Creative Writing programmes at Bath Spa University and Aberystwyth University. Born in Dorset, he now lives in Cardiff with his girlfriend and their growing board game collection. Together, they write under the pseudonym of DK Fields.
His first novel, Your Brother’s Blood, was published in September 2013 UK (December 2015 US) by Quercus’ imprint Jo Fletcher Books. The rest of the Walkin’ Trilogy followed in 2014 and 2015. His short fiction has appeared in numerous markets, links to some of which are available on this site. He has reviewed for critical journals, including New Welsh Review and the BSFA’s Vector.
He is also one half of the indie games company, Pill Bug Interactive, who have released two titles across PC and Nintendo Switch™.
To find out more, follow David on Twitter and check out his website.
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Thanks so much to David for writing this excellent guest post, and for agreeing to be part of the 2022 Track of Words Advent Calendar! If you haven’t already, I’d strongly recommend checking out Equinox, and the upcoming paperback release is an ideal opportunity to do just that! Hopefully you’ve got a sense from reading this post of what to expect from Equinox, and I can confirm that it’s very, very good.
Check out my review of Equinox
Check out my interview with David discussing Equinox
Equinox is out now in hardback, ebook and audiobook formats, with the paperback due out in February 2023 – check out the links below to order your copy:
*If you buy anything using any of these links, I will receive a small affiliate commission – see here for more details.
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