The Big Idea: Lauren Beukes
Posted on June 4, 2013 Posted by John Scalzi 22 Comments
Lauren Beukes’ latest novel, The Shining Girls, is hot. How hot? So hot that even before US publication, it was snapped up by Leo DiCaprio’s production company to be made into a television series. Why is it so hot? Because Beukes is one of the best writers of speculative fiction working today, and The Shining Girls a fine example of just how good she is. And to what does she credit for the genesis of this latest book? Why, the Internet, of course!
LAUREN BEUKES:
Writers write – that’s the most important thing, getting those pesky words onto the page. But writers also mess around a lot on the Internet. And sometimes, just sometimes, that can pay off.
Take me, for example. I threw out the idea that I should write about a time-travelling serial killer during a bit of silly Twitter banter. And then quickly deleted the tweet because I realized I had to write that, right now, before someone else thought of it.
I had the image of a limping man giving a little girl an impossible toy that hadn’t been invented yet and a promise that he would be back to get it when she was grown up. I knew he had a house that opens onto other times that allows him to stalk young women through the decades. And I knew that when he did come back to find her to fulfill his promise, that she would survive and turn the hunt around.
It’s nice to have a strong premise to start with, but “serial killers” and “time travel” are two genres with a strong tradition, from Silence of The Lambs to Twelve Monkeys. I’m a big fan of the remix and the best mash-ups riff off the best things about the original and subvert them in a way that hopefully says something new or interesting.
Which meant, alas, I couldn’t write Bill & Ted’s Excellent Killing Spree from the dinosaurs to the Dark Ages with a stop-off in World War Two to kill Hitler. Although that would probably have been a lot of fun.
And in fact there would be no killing Hitler. Not in my universe.
Between grandfather paradoxes, multiverse theory and the natural inclinations of subatomic mesons, I opted for classic Greek tragedy-style fatalism. By trying to resist your fate, you put into action all the events that will ensure that it comes about. Throw in some loops and snarls and paradoxes, and hey, voila!
You know what else has loops and snarls and ugly echoes that come up again and again? History. Especially recent history.
Which is why I decided to contain the time travel over 60 years, from 1931 to 1993 (thereby specifically avoiding cell phones, the Internet, CCTV, Google Streetview and Reddit jumping on board to solve the mystery in two days flat)
There are obvious parallels in the book; the Great Depression of the 30s and our current recession, surveillance society and erosion of privacy in the name of the War on Terror, mirroring the tactics of McCarthyism and the Red Scare, the fact that women’s right to control their own bodies is apparently still somehow up for question according to politicians. But I was also interested in how cities have reshaped around highways, how the world has changed and how we’ve adapted, how all of that explains who we are right now. I could do that through the eyes of my serial killer, Harper Curtis, who is too cynical to see anything but ruin and rot, but we can pull focus to see the bigger picture.
I read a lot, watched documentaries and YouTube videos, listened to oral histories, re-visited Chicago, where the novel is set, to location scout and interview insightful people from Chicago architects to criminal defense laywers, cops, historians, sports reporters and music journalists.
On the other side of this remix, I had to contend with the stereotype of the serial killer.
I tracked the killings very carefully across the timelines with a murder wall above my desk full of notecards and red string and evocative photographs of the eras; Harper’s killing timeline, which gets uglier and more elaborate as he goes on, jumping all over the place so his MO is impossible to track, the actual historical timeline, the totem objects he leaves behind on the bodies and the novel’s timeline, playing out between his story, Kirby, the survivor’s, and the young women of the title.
I also did a lot of research. It was a sad horror reading up on true crime cases. The banal reality is that serial killers are generally not the Chianti-sipping diabolically sophisticated Hannibal Lecter predators of our popular imagination. Most of them are vile and violent losers with impotence issues and very little insight into why they do what they do.
But despite the lack of inner life, in the news and in fiction, serial killers usually get more attention than their victims. There are so many dead girls. Dead girls every day. At worst, the young women are a bit of violent titillation, the gorgeous tragic blonde with glazed blue eyes and her dress rucked up to expose her stockings, lying with limbs akimbo in a spreading pool of blood, or chained up naked in a basement having her eyeball gouged out.
At best, they’re just one more piece in the bloody puzzle the detective has to solve. A tragic loss, especially one so young and beautiful, but we usually don’t get to know a whole lot about who she was before she was a corpse.
All of which meant I was much more interested in “the shining girls” Harper goes after than writing about him.
Killers often have a general type – which could be vulnerable people at risk, like sex workers or runaway kids, or much more specific, like Ted Bundy’s predilection for co-eds with brown hair and a middle parting.
But what if it wasn’t a physical type?
What if my killer was attracted to young women with a spark, who stood out in their time, who weren’t afraid to fight convention, or were still afraid, but pushed through anyway, who had fire in their guts and a burning curiosity and the desire to set the world alight. That would drive my killer insane. He would have to cut it out of them.
Trigger warning. There is cutting. The violence in the book is terse, but it is shocking. It’s supposed to be. Because real violence is shocking. And we shouldn’t forget that, what violence is, what it does to us, personally, and the ripples it sends out through society.
There’s a moment in the book where Kirby says, “How am I supposed to let this shit go?” pulling down the scarf she uses to hide the scar across her throat. And she’s right. How can we?
I dealt with it by narrating the attacks not from the killer’s perspective, riding on his shoulder, complicit, getting off on it, but from the victims’, the horror hung on a few terrible details right at the end of a chapter that has been all about their lives. We’re with them at the end, in the shock and pain and fear and outrage.
I tried to make it about the emotional impact. To make it real. I worked to make the women breathe on the page, so you would feel the loss of them. Not just as mothers, sisters, daughters, friends, but as people in their own right, from a young activist to a bohemian architect accused of being a dirty Red, an African American Rosie the Riveter war widow or a burlesque dancer who literally glows because she dances in radium paint and Kirby, the one who got away, but who has allowed her life to become derailed by the attack.
Ultimately it’s a story about obsession, free will and determinism; Harper’s compulsion to kill and Kirby’s obsession with finding him, being trapped by fate or kicking back against it.
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The Shining Girls: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s
Read an excerpt. See the trailer (US|UK). Visit her blog. Follow her on Twitter.
I love your ideas but present tense novels make me grit my teeth! Have you ever written a book in past tense?
I actually liked it in present tense. Instead of seeming like a gimmick, I felt it gave the book immediacy, and mixed with the jumping timeline added a dreamlike quality. It’s a fantastic read!
I have not read this yet. I certainly am going to change that fact. Sounds interesting, and sounds important. It will be interesting to see if the series occurs and if they do a good job (sorry, Hollywood rarely does a good job).
Oh man. This simultaneously sounds amazing and like something I really don’t want to read, because if it were bad it would be awful… but if it were good, it would be agonizing. I’m not certain I need to court nightmares when they show up so easily on their own.
But I probably will.
I read The Shining Girls in one go last weekend, and it was great. Gritty, gruesome in places, but also wonderfully riveting. I highly recommend it. If you’re not too prone to nightmares :-)
What’s the betting that a TV series would totally miss the whole thing about being from the victims’ perspective and not being voyeuristic about their deaths?
Online order placed before I even finished reading this entry…LOL
Wow, this one sounds amazing. Definitely going on my reading list. It’s been out for a month and I hadn’t heard of it. THIS is why I read The Big Idea. :)
Got this in the mail a week ago, and will be reviewing it in the coming week alongside Neil’s new one. Very much looking forward to it.
Added to reading list – been a big fan from the Humble Bundle inclusion, I think – Zoo City was a really good read, very off the beaten track though a little rough around the edges. Moxyland I was a bit more ambivalent about, although it has a death in it that really jolted me.
Lauren Beukes is in my Top 2 authors, out of respect for Mr. Scalzi I will not be more specific on rank. Her books are order sight and synopsis unseen. I’m excited for another one!
I just went out and bought this pretty much on the strength of Lauren’s writing in Zoo City, which I thought was completely awesome. Also the premise sounded so good and since she’s one of- okay, the ONLY- author whose present tense narrative didn’t make me feel like I was reading the equivalent of nails on a chalkboard, I really wanted this one. So far (on page 34) it hasn’t disappointed.
I’m seeing her in Scottsdale, Arizona at the Poisoned Pen on Wednesday night…
Great Idea. Question: let’s say I decided last week I wanted to write a book about time travel and wanted to check to see if any of my ideas had already been done, like say the precise method of time travel — how does one go about researching that adequately? Is it acceptable to use the same “house that opens onto other times” angle or would I have to come up with a new idea?
Let me know quickly as my DeLorean is double parked
I saw a story about the film rights being bought and either misread the description of the concept or the reporter stated it incorrectly. It sounded like the killer is the hero of the story, and I thought, no way am I reading that. Now reading this description, I can’t WAIT to read it!
This sounds like a really good novel. I’m kinda too chicken to read horror though, it does nasty things to my mood and my mind.
I also read it in one sitting on my last day of annual leave. Riveting, unputdownable, all those words and non-words. Sure, it’s been torn apart in post-reviews, but I don’t care. It was a gripping read and I’m pretty hard to please. Thank you Lauren Beukes!
I liked Moxyland and absolutely loved Zoo City. My copy of this came in the mail yesterday and I started it last night. Didn’t matter I was in the middle of another book. I won’t wait to read Lauren Beukes.
god damn i gotta read this.
f’ing loved Zoo City.
I think it’s some sort of rule that one just CANNOT kill Hitler. –However, you CAN save Churchill’s life, over and over.
Came up w/that idea after reading his biography. Luckiest guy evahhhhhhh. Repeatedly cheated death.
Can’t wait to start reading this. I went to a signing/reading last night and was really impressed with the author. She seemed very intelligent and down to earth. I am going to go back and catch up on her other novels and pick up her run in the Fables universe coming out soon.
Found out about The Shining Girls here, finally got my hands on it and finished it this evening. Incredible writing. Wonderful.
Also:
The Shining Girls was, for me as a Chicagoan, what Ready Player One was for me as a geeky kid growing up in the ’80s.
Thanks for opening my eyes to this book on Whatever. I’m going to pick up everything I can by Lauren Beukes.