Happy Halloween, and welcome to this Track of Words guest post where I’m joined by horror author Nick Cutter, whose new novel The Queen is out today from Arcadia. Described as “a heart-pounding novel about a young woman searching for her missing friend and uncovering a shock truth”, The Queen sounds like an intriguing read – perfect for the Halloween season! I’m delighted to be able to host this fascinating article from Nick, in which he delves into some of the challenges he faced with this book, of writing about teenage characters as a 40-something author.
First though, here’s the book’s synopsis:
On a sunny morning in June, Margaret Carpenter wakes up to find a new iPhone on her doorstep. She switches it on to find a text from her best friend, Charity Atwater. The problem is, Charity’s been missing for over a month. Most people in town – even the police – think she’s dead.
Margaret and Charity have been lifelong friends. They share everything, know the most intimate details about one another…except for the destructive secret hidden from them both. A secret that will trigger a chain of events ending in tragedy, bloodshed, and death. And now Charity wants Margaret to know her story – the real story. In a narrative that takes place over one feverish day, Margaret follows a series of increasingly disquieting breadcrumbs as she forges deeper into the mystery of her best friend – a person she never truly knew at all…
And with that done, over to Nick…
Nick Cutter: One fact seems certain: a person’s past becomes more indistinct the further they track away from it.
If you’ve reached a certain age, surely you acknowledge this yourself. Past the age of, say, thirty-five, I suspect most of us have a hard time recalling an entire day from our youth. We may remember the main adventure of that day – the zoo, the beach, a trip to our mother’s office – but as to the exact run of those hours, the sequence of unfolding events, at best we are likely to recall moments or sensations: a span of seconds or a pointillistic detail that lingers. These instances are akin to the baubles on a charm bracelet, and between lay those blanks of our memories.
That’s normal. As powerful as our brains are, our memory is limited: we simply can’t remember everything, and the mechanism whereby memories are shunted from short-term to long-term (and the retrieval methods our minds employ to retrieve those memories) are not fully understood by science. There’s also the misunderstanding – shared by many – that our memories are unchanging. That is why when we speak of memory, we use notions like photographic snapshots stored in the photo albums of our brains.
But our memories are always changing, for reasons as individual to each of us as our own fingerprints. Mostly (and this is just my opinion, though there is some research to back it up) our memories change as we change. As the biologist Gerald Edelman wrote: memory is more like the melting and refreezing of a glacier than it is like an inscription on a rock. Perhaps we wish to situate ourselves in our own pasts in a manner that helps us live with our personal histories. Our memories mutate to save us from those aspects of our past natures we’d rather not grapple with.
I had firsthand experience with this years ago, when I wrote an article based on an event that occurred when I was a teenager. There were two other people involved, and when I tracked those people down – some two decades after I’d last talked to them – both of their accounts of that incident deviated in significant ways from each others’, and from my own.
The incident, of course, was unchanging. Whatever happened all those years ago was inflexible, locked in the unalterable past. But our outlook on it all those years later deviated based (I think) on who we were at that time – older men, husbands, fathers – and our reckoning with that event as it related to the people we wished to see ourselves as.
So when it came time to write The Queen, a novel where I made the bold and perhaps foolhardy choice to write from the perspective of a teenager (a young woman, no less), I knew the hole I’d dug for myself. Not only was I writing out of my gender, but also out of my own timeline: the novel is set in 2018, narrated by an eighteen-year-old, and my eighteenth year elapsed in the Pleistocene days of 1994, a full three decades ago. How could I possibly put to page a faithful, or at least honest, attempt to write from a perspective so out of place with my own?
It’s not as if it hasn’t been done. Plenty of writers indulge in such a task. But a lot of them are either teenagers themselves (Bret Easton Ellis in Less than Zero; S.E. Hinton in The Outsiders) or still reasonably close to that age (any early twentysomething wunderkind with a book contract and a teenage protagonist). Others such as Ray Bradbury and Stephen King seem to possess photographic memories, able to pluck the most obscure yet tangible details from the rummage chests of their brains to add that oh so valuable verisimilitude to their works – and they, as well as some notable others, also seem to have never quite left behind their teenage selves the way many of us do; they are still able to access that mindset, channel it, and write convincingly from it.
For me, I don’t have such ready access to my past. Same as most of us, I’ve forfeited much of my younger self on that slog towards adulthood. But more and more as I get older, I want to go back to those days. There’s a safety there. Dare I say, an innocence. I don’t suppose this is a rarity with aging. It’s not that I feel those days were better per se, or that the world’s going to hell in a handbasket now (certainly not any faster than it’s always been), but it’s more simply that the outlook was less clouded by the, I guess, dullness of the adult world.
So, I did my best to trace back into my past. Setting the novel in my hometown where I lived during those years was one tactic. If I could see those streets – more as they existed in the 90s than now – my old high school (since closed), and surroundings, perhaps that would help expand the bounds of my memory and usher me into that teenage mindset. Beyond that, I dragged out my mothballed yearbooks, the inside flaps festooned with signatures and well-wishes (or crude innuendoes) from people whose faces had smudged away in my memory…leafing through them was bracing. Memories flooded back. My school also has a Facebook page and while I’m not on social media I was able to access it…there were hours of video posted, grainy 90s footage from the Television Arts class. Kids horsing around in the hallways, in the cafeteria, the gym, out in the quad, the smokehole – again, the memories and maybe more important the vibe (as the kids say) came back to me. This all helped anchor me more solidly in that time period and gave me some confidence I could write from that place.
But the glaring issue was, and is: I’m an old, as the kids also say (though they may not say it anymore; culture as far as word usage changes at a blinding pace). No matter how much I situate myself in the past, it’s my past – the past of a man approaching fifty, whose high school days are long in the rearview. How could I have even the slightest assurance that kids hadn’t changed so radically in the ensuing years that my first-person narration wouldn’t be hopelessly out of touch?
Well, that’s the thing about writing a novel. It’s a leap of faith at the best of times.
One thing that I tried to do was ping on the emotions or scenarios that felt universal and unanchored to any specific timeframe. The idea of two friends drifting apart at the end of high school – which was a situation I found myself in, and one I suspect happened decades before me and is still going on today. One friend goes away to school, the other stays home. Those two have been fast friends since childhood. It’s unthinkable to either of them that they might ever not be in one another’s lives. They tell themselves that just because one is moving away, they will be as close as ever. Calls every day, trips home every weekend. It’ll be the same as always. But then all sorts of things rush in to fill that distance. New challenges, new friends, each of them finding themselves in different ways and altering their views…the daily calls become weekly, then monthly, then stop altogether. The trips home dry up. One day the two of them bump into one another on the street and there’s this terrible gulf between them – not based on any real animosity, in fact there may even be great love still, but just this feeling of impossibility that they’d ever be so far removed from each other’s lives.
These two friends who used to sleep in the same bed, bike the same streets, fight the same battles, hang tight against misfortune, who could convince themselves they dreamed the same dreams.
Now that’s gone. And it’s painful as hell, but it’s life. And (I think and hope) a universal for people going through that time in their lives, divorced of generation.
So. I guess we’ll see. It’s a coin flip. But if you’re not challenging yourself in your work, I mean, what’s to keep entropy at bay?
***
Photo credit: Kevin Kelly
Nick Cutter is the author of the critically acclaimed bestseller The Troop which is currently being developed for film with producer James Wan (The Conjuring, Saw and Insidious), as well as The Deep, Little Heaven, and The Handyman Method, the last of which was co-written with Andrew F. Sullivan. Nick Cutter is the pseudonym for Craig Davidson, whose much-lauded literary fiction includes Rust and Bone (Norton), The Saturday Night Ghost Club (Penguin), and, most recently, the short story collection Cascade (Norton). His story “Medium Tough” was selected by author Jennifer Egan for The Best American Short Stories 2014. He lives in Toronto, Canada.
Find out more on Nick’s website.
***
Huge thanks to Nick for contributing this fantastic article – I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I did! I really connected with a lot of what Nick discussed, specifically around not having ready access to my past, so this has given me a lot to think about.
If, like me, you’re keen to read The Queen, you can check out the link below to order* your copy:
If you enjoyed this article and would like to support Track of Words, you can leave me a tip on my Ko-Fi page.
*If you buy anything using one of these links, I will receive a small affiliate commission – see here for more details.