Hello and welcome to this Behind the Scene post here on Track of Words – I’m joined today by Jane Hennigan, with an excerpt from her new science fiction novel Toxxic (out now via Angry Robot) alongside an exclusive commentary on the subject of sequels and narrators. The follow-up to 2023’s Moths – “a thrilling dystopia, in turns heart-breaking and heart-pounding”, Toxxic “extends the world and the story of Moths, exploring the nature of gender roles and feminism through warm characters in difficult circumstances.” It sounds fantastic, and Jane’s commentary offers a fascinating insight into the thought that goes into a book long before an author actually starts writing – really interesting stuff whether you’re a reader, writer or both!
Spoiler warning: as Toxxic is a sequel, there are some spoilers here if you haven’t read Moths.
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Jane Hennigan: Writing a sequel is a little weird. No sooner have you emerged from your original writing cocoon blinking at the bright light and desperate for fried food (just me perhaps) the muse is whispering in your ear – Don’t get too comfortable, This world isn’t done with you yet. It’s not like that for everyone. A friend of mine has a five-book series mapped out in a teetering pile of notebooks. I can’t plan that far ahead. My writing is more of a case of instinctive exploration. However, as soon as the whispering starts, I am on the hunt for the most vital ingredient in any story, in my opinion – the narrator. This time, I pushed myself out of my comfort zone and chose not one but three.
People (friends, relatives, agents, publishers, wiser people than I on social media) tell you, as a newly published writer, NOT to look at reviews – I mean, I tried… but I am human. One of the things I discovered readers liked about Moths is that it is narrated by a 70-year-old woman. In an apocalyptic and dystopian setting, this is a twist on the usual fit, attractive heroes and heroines who fight their oppressors and/or survive marauding hordes of flesh-eating monsters. So, I should definitely make sure that the sequel is narrated by a seventy-year-old woman, right?
The problem was, Mary had played out her arc. She’d done all the learning she had to do in Moths; survived an apocalypse, fought injustice, atoned for past sins and sacrificed herself for the good of those in her protection. Despite the hit of dopamine I enjoyed when a reader congratulated me on my fresh take, creating an older protagonist, I couldn’t bring myself to rouse Mary for round two. She’d earned her rest.
So, in true sequel tradition, I looked around my original cast list in the original for another likely candidate. Tony took a tentative step forward. Poor innocent Tony has had the most misery poured upon him in his luckless life. Born into captivity, protected in a facility from a deadly outside environment, he spends his time in Moths reading and yearning to be free. Mourning his greatest love, Logan, who’d been infected in a facility riot, his life has been empty, pointless and grim. The only ray of hope is that Mary, before she left, promised that he would one day step outside the facility and experience the world, a world until now, he’d only read about in simplified, laminated, moth-proofed books.
Toxxic follows Tony’s journey to freedom. It also looks at how freedom forces him to make difficult choices, choices he was protected from, living in a sterile facility. Even outside, Tony discovers there are rules, schedules, and societal niceties to be observed, ones which differ greatly from those he’s used to. And he isn’t given much time to learn. Due to Mary’s bravery and sacrifice, he’s given a vaccine, an injection that will protect him from the tiny toxic threads that drift around in the atmosphere. But the world is not about to welcome him with open arms. Some older women still remember how dangerous men can be.
As a kind of mirror to Tony, I needed a person raised in the post-infestation society – a citizen of the outside world, one who thought nothing of living and working in a matriarchy, and with no experience of men. Evie is my ‘everyman’ although of course, not a man. It is an interesting thought experiment, trying to create a woman’s psyche who has never known patriarchy, although, arguably, as she was raised by a mother who was raised in a patriarchy, that is to say, before the infestation, some remnants of this hierarchy will remain. Language too, has its gendered baggage and so just because the men have gone, doesn’t mean the women are starting afresh. Added to this, the older women of the Union, those who hark back to the times before, are given a derogatory name – dollies. Women who can’t quite give up their connections to the past.
Finally, XX102 takes to the stage. I tried to create a complex antagonist, not necessarily likeable, but with sympathetic elements. One with a fully realised personality, with clear and understandable motives, one that I might put myself into her shoes and consider if perhaps she didn’t have half a point – if maybe I wouldn’t have done much better given the terrible circumstances. But, ultimately I wanted to show that misandry, or any ideology based upon the vilification of a person based on gender, is just as unjustifiable and toxic as misogyny. Villains must be heroes in their own story, and XX102’s story is by far the hardest I’ve ever had to write.
I find the narrative perspective of any novel fascinating – all narrators, even authors bring with them a certain amount of unreliability, a pernicious bias towards a flattering light and without the help of an omniscient eye, the reader becomes judge and jailor. I love writing fiction, especially speculative, because I get to thrust a group of ordinary characters into an extraordinary situation and watch how they cope. Some in Toxxic and its prequel, Moths, cope with more grace and humanity than others.
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Chapter 1
XX104
One day, a long time from now, people might ask why.
Why did we choose the method we chose – why did I do these terrible things? But those people, those women, will ask such questions from a place of safety. Those women will be in command of their lives, free to live and look as they wish. Those women will not have to check their bodies against a list of standards nor feel the grasping fingers of a man’s ego choke off their words. They will be central to their own lives.
The hard truth is that the men in the facilities are not men. Your generation doesn’t know what a man is. You may have learned about them at school, maybe even had a visitation with one, sipping cheap wine and giggling about the strangeness of it all. But those mild-mannered boys with soft hands and shaved heads are not the real thing. They’re a dormant version. When the moths came, they didn’t just infect the men, they revealed their true and complete nature. They worked together to hunt us during those first days of the outbreak. Something glossed over in schools is the sexual violence. The infected, the Manics as they’re known, violated women’s bodies before slaughtering them.
But men are not like that now! I hear the liberals call as they wring their hands and offer up their daughters as sacrificial lambs. We have a vaccine!
Yes – we have a vaccine. We may never see another Manic again – if it works.
But it’s not the Manics whom I fear. It’s the men, the uninfected men. How long before we’re back to where we were? Forcing ourselves and our daughters into grotesque shapes to please the greedy eyes of men, pretending that we have it all, when really we work twice as hard for half the reward. Oh, but you don’t know what I’m talking about. You have only known this world – a hard existence, but a safe one. A fair one.
Perhaps, if I explain, I’ll become a person to you, not the monster Union State radio would have you believe me to be. Or maybe you’ll diagnose me – the trauma of the infestation made her do it. Then you can label me damaged, condemn me gently whilst offering excuses. All so understandable… It would have made a good TV show – if such a thing still existed.
All this conveniently overlooks the fact that you live in the freedom I protected. One I fought for – literally fought. Despite how unfashionable it is to talk about the time before, my story deserves to be told. And I know things about men – things that you, who’ve grown up without them, couldn’t possibly know. I stand in the breach so you can live – because that and so much more is what this vaccination will take from you.
I’ve decided that, if I can make you understand what it was like before, and what happened that summer in London, at Waterloo, four decades ago, then you might not rush to condemn me. You may not agree, but at least you will understand why I have done the terrible things I have.
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Tony
Dear Mary.
They said you’re sick, so I thought I’d cheer you up with a letter. Sorry about the paper – this crackly stuff is all they’d give us, thread-proof they say. You remember it. My handwriting is getting better, at least.
So many things have happened around here, you wouldn’t believe it. Yesterday, Artemis – from E-block – said loudly and in front of everyone that one carer – Lillian – had been familiar with him, without his permission, and not on a visitation day. That was the word he used: familiar. Everyone was amazed. Lillian was furious. She replied that Artemis was mistaken and that she was just trying to be nice to him, and he was exaggerating. This argument happened over breakfast three days ago, and everyone is still talking about it. The thing is, Lillian has disappeared. She’s not on the rota, no one has seen her on the rounds – we think she left. Artemis is being tight-lipped over the whole thing. He blushed and shook his head when I tried to get him talking during a gardening session last week.
The other thing that everyone is talking about, of course, is these rumours of a vaccine. People have been saying – and by people, I mean the carer Isla – there’s a way men can actually go outside, out into the air and the sun, that the moth threads won’t affect us as long as we take some medicine every month. Isla says that it was you, Mary, that made sure we had a chance at the medicine. If that’s true, I’m so proud. The other carers and ward-sisters won’t say anything about the medicine and some of them get quite annoyed if I mention it, so I’ve let it go. But there’s an odd fidgetiness with all the women who look after us, lots of shared looks and awkward pauses. When you’re locked up your whole life, doing the same thing day in day out, you get a sense of when things are a bit off. Change has a vinegary smell.
Anyway, if it’s true, and one day I can go outside, the first thing I’ll do is come and see you. I’ve been practicing my guitar, and I think you’ll love one song I’ve made – it’s about Logan. Also, the drama club has been working on an adaptation of The Tempest – maybe when you’re better, you can come back and watch us? It’s a crazy idea, but what if we could perform it outside! They offered me Prospero or even Mirando, but I chose Caliban. I like his style: “When I waked, I cried to dream again!”
Get better soon.
Tony
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Evie
Mary hasn’t moved in two days. She used to wake up at about lunch time for a few sips of water, perhaps some soup – not anymore, it seems. I ought to get on with other stuff. I’ve three older women on my round, and one of them, Emma, likes to chat. She’s from before and she wants to tell me about what it was like: the aeroplanes, the cities, her favourite sweet-and-sour chicken. I smile and nod. The thing is, when you work in geriatrics, you get this a lot. It’s when they start talking about their sons and husbands that most of the girls here find it awkward, or they freak out completely. I was in the nurse’s office yesterday, and one of our new girls burst through the door and could barely get her words out. Emma had told the poor girl a story about the first infestation, about how her father had killed her mother in front of her by tying her up with a skipping rope on the kitchen floor, before pouring lighter fluid over her clothes and setting her on fire. These stories can catch you out. I’ve been doing this for a while now and I sometimes think the dollies sneak these stories in just to see how you react. Anyway, apparently, Emma had gone into the gory details about the smell. No wonder the poor girl freaked out!
The problem is, they don’t get taught about it at school these days. Twenty years ago, when I was at school, we learned all about the infestation, the reformation of the government, the fertility and contribution programmes. I remember one social history project, I was about fourteen, when we were taken to the records office in the nearest village, and each given the name of a victim or a family. We had to research them and find out what happened then present our findings to the class. I had the ‘Sullivans’ and their story was average. The mother survived the initial infestation but succumbed to suicide three years later. An Abidance Unit found her body in woodland on the South Downs way, wrists cut, a small, blood-soaked child’s sweater in her arms. That’s how they identified her. The sweater had Marcus Sullivan sewn into the label. The records officer explained to me that records in the first five years were sketchy. Mr Sullivan died overnight – a so-called ‘Blue.’ The son was seven years old, and he went manic. It’s not known what happened to him, but they suspect it was exposure. That’s what got most of the younger boys that didn’t get picked up and taken to a sanatorium in time.
There was a picture of them as a family. The original records officers must have taken it from the house shortly after the infestation. It was a big picture, about the size of a book, with a crease at the edge where the frame had bitten into the paper. Melanie Sullivan was wearing a cream shirt and had long, mousy brown hair, parted in the middle, a moony freckled face and plump painted lips. Mr Sullivan had a lean face, very blue eyes, and stubble. Pictures of men are weird. I stared at that photo for ages. It was probably only the second or third time I’d seen the picture of a man’s face and I marvelled at all that extra hair. I wanted to reach in and run my fingers over the dark shadow. Was it soft like the hair on my head or thicker like the hair on my legs?
The boy in the picture, Marcus, was a freckly faced kid. He was pretty, a bit babyish for seven years old, but not that different from the girls in the village. His chubby face was cute and moonish like his mother’s, and his eyes were the same bright blue as his father’s. He looked lost, like he wasn’t used to having his picture taken like this, in some kind of studio. Smiling shyly, he had a mark on his top lip, a smudge of what looked like milk. Why hadn’t the photographer got him to wipe his face?
I got permission from the office to take a copy of the picture – black and white, of course – so I could include it in my presentation. I snuck it home and stared and stared at Mr Sullivan’s face. I still have it hidden in my dresser, and now and then I slip it out and just look at the young boy’s cute half-smile and Mr Sullivan’s stubble.
Sean was his name… Sean Sullivan.
My friend Bankie got an interesting family, the Couzins. I’ll never forget the story. Mr Couzins went manic and tied up his wife and their sixteen year-old daughter. Then he drove them to a nearby cathedral. He made them climb all two hundred and fifty steps before pushing them off the top. An hour later, probably suffering from a moment of horrified lucidity, he jumped off himself. Bankie’s presentation was by far the most interesting, but she didn’t have any photos, so at least I won on that front. These are all horrible stories, of course, but that was so long ago. Even when I look at Sean’s picture, I don’t think it’s real. Just a cold detail of history. But there’s something that draws me back to the image hidden in my bottom drawer, some fascination with this strange old-fashioned family.
But since my school days, the syllabus has changed. I mean, it was always heavily skewed towards science, but now they study social engineering, civil logistics, agricultural and marine development, genetic research and so much more. There just isn’t the space in the timetable for history. Which is all very well – until a young nurse turns up in the staff room hyperventilating because a patient has told them a story about a woman being cooked alive on the kitchen floor.
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That was quite dark, wasn’t it? Really interesting though, especially in light of Jane’s discussion of the different narrators! This is exactly the sort of insight I was hoping for with the Behind the Scene posts, and I hope you’re enjoying it as much as I am. For more about Toxxic, here’s the publisher’s synopsis:
Forty years ago, the world changed. Men became crazed killers and threatened all humanity. Now the world might be about to change again, but will it be for the better?
Forty-four years ago, as any schoolgirl can tell you, the moth’s eggs hatched and an army of caterpillars spread their tiny toxic threads on every breath of wind. Since then, men have been cloistered, protected from birth against the deadly poison.
But now there’s a vaccine – a way that men can leave the facility without dying or suffering from psychosis. Emerging, into their new world, eyes wide with wonder at every new experience, the truth soon becomes clear.
This world was not made for men. And they are not safe.
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Jane Hennigan was born and raised in Aldershot in Hampshire. After a decade working in E-commerce, she gained a degree in English Literature and Philosophy from Royal Holloway, and an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Surrey. She spent seven years teaching English literature undergraduates, before moving to the seaside to concentrate on writing.
Find out more at Jane’s website, or follow her on Twitter.
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Huge thanks to Jane, and Caroline at Angry Robot, for this fascinating commentary and excerpt!
Toxxic is out now from Angry Robot – check out the links below to order* your copy:
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