librarypunk - 151 - David Demchuk Returns

Episode Date: June 19, 2025

We have David Demchuk on to talk about his new book The Butcher's Daughter. We also talk about more Canada updates, including how the backlash against queer and Black literature is evolving in the Canadian landscape with US backing.  Media mentioned https://www.techdirt.com/2025/03/19/youtube-apparently-unsure-if-shakespeare-is-in-the-public-domain/ Get the book here: https://sohopress.com/books/the-butchers-daughter-the-hitherto-untold-story-of-mrs-lovett/  Transcript: https://pastecode.io/s/ik2fbytc Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/zzEpV9QEAG

I'm Justin. I forgot my new job title and my pronouns are he and they. I'm Sadie. I work IT at a public library. I have COVID right now. And my pronouns are they them. I'm Jay. I'm a cataloging librarian and my pronouns are he, him. And we have a guest. Would you like to introduce yourself? Sure. My name is David Demchuk. I am a Canadian writer of dark fiction and my pronouns are he and him. Crowd goes wild. Welcome back. Well, I'm happy to be back. Yeah. I know we've been talking about having you back ever since you announced this book, really.

Well, that's very nice to hear. So we've been, I've been waiting for it to come out, and I'm really, I'm not the Sweeney Todd head in my relationship. That goes to the Jay. Hi. But I have watched, I have watched a lot of Sweeney Todd with him. Yeah, we did a Sweeney Todd episode on a Tender subject, and it was really fun. Oh, cool. Yeah.

I'll have to go hunting for it. Yes, and we'll need to have you on for this book, obviously. Yeah, I know Jay's been too busy to read it, but I have gotten through it and finished it. And, well, just so everyone knows what we're talking about, although the links in the description to buy the book, it's The Butcher's Daughter's Daughter, The Hitherto Untold Story of Mrs. Lovett, a novel. This is true. And it's co-written by me and a debut author named Kareenly Clark, both Canadians. Originally, when we started the project, we were both in Ontario.

Corrine remains there. I have since moved to St. John's Newfoundland. So a good chunk of the book, and certainly the whole editing process had to happen while we were provinces apart, thousands and thousands of kilometers apart. Yeah, you're really out there on the edge. Yes, it is the absolute edge of the continent. Like, you know, I look out my kitchen window and I can look into the harbor, into the narrows, and out, into the open ocean. So, yes. Yeah. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's,

exactly, it's going over in the UK, for us. Exactly. No, you got it. It's exactly what I was going for. Perfect. Um, so there's a interesting development. So, I'm going to do a quick segment. which is Canada news I can't just still for rip are you back I can't believe you wanted to come back on I wanted to come back on for the music cues I have to tell you

So last time you were on We had found this guy who sent a Take Down Notice to Sadie's workplace saying that he owned Shakespeare's works and that the library was infringing on his copyright. Apparently, he keeps doing this and finally did it to someone who had some legal power

to do anything about it. So the guy's name is Julian Coalier, and they covered this on tech dirt about three months ago now, and he had been sending out his takedowns, and eventually came up against public citizen, which is the ones who finally started going into the copyright office. They found the same thing that I did, which is the translations of Shakespeare's plays that were not translations

and had been granted a copyright by the copyright office, which was very strange. So anyway, he's still. up to it. I really want to know what happens with some of the other stuff. I don't think that the copyright office has done anything. But finally, you know, because I sent an email to the copyright office after we got this to say like, hey, what's going on? Why is this guy have a copyrighted of Shakespeare's works? And hopefully something is going to happen. But I remember when we were looking into him, he had something like 40,000 registered works in goodreads. So whatever con this

is running, I really, really want to know how far it goes when someone finally unravels it. So any internet sleuths who want to help out, go read that tech threat story and go, you know, reach out to the guy who wrote it. Because I really just have my own curiosity about what on earth he's doing with all those copyrights and all those claimed authorships and all the AI slop that he's inevitably generating. And of course, we found out he was a Canadian, which is why he comes up in our Canada segment. Yeah, Canadians, you know, you can't trust them. They're polite and all until, you know, until they snap. And who know, and I mean, and, you know, scammers can be found the world over and clearly, you know, he's well in his way. But what a bizarre story. It was bizarre

when it was when Sadie first raised it. And it's even more bizarre now that it just continues on and on. Yeah, I really can't believe that he hasn't just, like, shriveled up and died. It's so strange. It's so weird. That it took, like, threats of, like, a nonprofit for the copyright office to even, like, respond of, like, which I don't think they've taken away his copyright. I'm not sure. But YouTube, at least, finally started to respond because he was taking, he was submitting YouTube takedowns. And of course, with the DMCA, one of the major problems with it is whoever makes the claim gets the benefit of the doubt.

And they're supposed to be, you know, penalties for abusing the DMCA, but in reality, that never really happens. And they're not enough to dissuade people from just using it wantonly left and right. So it's one of those cases where you have to file a counter notice and then YouTube will maybe eventually go look into the thing that they took down. And, you know, this one's not really copyright's fault. It's kind of DMCA's fault. But it's just interesting the links that this guy goes to, spending all day sending takedown notices to libraries and YouTube channels about the fact that he owns a copyright on Shakespeare, which the Copyright Office did give him.

I mean, okay, I'm reading the one on Public Citizen, and he has a website going where he sells playwright licenses. So that's the scam. Yeah. Does he have a course? Does he have? That's like the grifter thing. You do a course.

I'm just thinking about like how many of these tiny organizations putting on Shakespeare's plays had probably like freaked out and fallen for this just because like they don't know any, like they don't know any better. Like the libraries that got this just straight up ignored it because we know enough about copyright to know that it's bullshit. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Usually. I mean, I'm sure some did a double take. But yeah. Take a copyright class in grad school.

Yeah, become a copyright guy. Oh, I found this really cute thing on Tumblr. I was going through old Tumblr posts, and I found that I had message Jay about seven years before we started dating when he said he was becoming a copyright guy. And I was like, and I said, yes, absolutely, you should do that. I sent him a little meme. So basically our relationship has been unchanged,

which is he says something about himself when I respond with a meme. Yeah, it was in 2016. Yeah, so very funny. Yeah, that's why I take my copyright class. Yeah, you should do that. Learn copyright. It's confusing and it's strange, and that's all the more reason you should learn a little bit about it.

But I also, since the last time we had you on, there have been, well, a lot of things have happened. I mean, we could list them. But one thing I particularly wanted to get your read on as an author and as a queer author, queer icon, if I may say. Well, keep talking. Ladery will get you everywhere. A lot of the sort of fervor for book bands, which I really thought were kind of going to be a flash in the pan of social media, this particular one that kind of stuff. a few years ago with the focus on queer and black authors.

And I thought, you know, it's going to leave the mainstream and it's going to keep going. And the churches are going to keep it going. And the Facebook people and stuff like that, they're going to keep doing this. But we've really seen this this continual effort to keep challenging books all across the country and in Canada. And it's this past year, I think, really started to gain a foothold, or at least as being reported on more of the foothold. that are being won in Canada towards something that I think most Canadians would consider an Americanism, which is the sort of puritanical approach to book banning. But I wanted to get your read on this. Sure. Well, certainly with libraries, a lot of the money that is behind these movements in the U.S.

is the same money in Canada. It's American money that is coming up here and that is fueling these efforts. and which is not to say that there aren't Canadians who, you know, would happily ban books and who would happily challenge them in libraries and in schools, but there's not the same kind of, as far as I can tell, the same kind of big money charge that there is from movements in the U.S. And so that's a factor. The other thing is you don't see it a lot in the biggest city libraries. A lot of big cities like Vancouver or Montreal or, or. Toronto, have either advisory committees or groups within the library system or they have them within

the city system and they avail themselves to the various departments that the city manages. So in that case, if you have a 2S-LGBQ plus group, they may not work for or with the library specifically, but they will provide information and support to the city, and the city in turn will pass it on to whatever departments. Often these groups have city counselors on them. Often these groups have representatives from within the queer community, queer and trans communities, within various parts of these communities. And that helps sort of legitimize the positions that these advisory groups take. I don't know if it's very similar in larger states or in states with larger cities or if it's very different, but that's one of the things that helps

mitigate it in Canada. If you're in a smaller city or a small town, it's an entirely different story. And that's where there's a lot of vulnerability. And one of the other things that is a continuing problem, and I think this is true in the U.S. as well, is just that libraries in general are having funding cut, branches are closing, branches are consolidating, and all libraries are expected to do more, do more with less and do more for more people in ways that extend beyond just lending books, obviously. There was a period where we saw a real desire to broaden library services so that they, you know, you had maker areas and you had like, you know, readings and book clubs and you had a variety of things going on that welcomed people in,

but in order to do that and have it be sustainable, you have to resource it. And that's where a lot of challenges have happened as well. So I think that libraries are struggling on a number of fronts and people who are, you know, more conservative and who are more right wing, see that there are vulnerabilities, that there are cracks, and then they just squeeze their way in. And then they wiggle, wiggle, wiggle until they can make a place for themselves and be heard and be taken seriously because, of course, you're supposed to listen to all sides and you're supposed to, you know, so that's, that has been a significant problem. It also has to be said, I started in the library system.

I was a page part time in a library. It was my very first job. I wasn't particularly good at it. I was a devoted reader, but I wasn't necessarily a devoted worker. But one of the things that I detected was there are some, you know, quite rightly, there are some librarians and some library workers who see themselves as freedom fighters. And then there are others who really are either subtly or blatantly interested in bringing their values into the library system, into the branch onto their shelves.

and there is a real tension there. There are some conservative librarians in Canada. There's no question. Even in the largest cities, there are some conservative librarians who want to see these changes, who want to see queer material being pulled off shelves, at the very least being pulled off of children and young adult shelves and being either put behind the counter or sequestered permanently into the adult section. So those kinds of things, you know, those people are just waiting.

for these movements to catch fire. And they'll be happy to act on that. And it's really depressing. And for the image that a lot of people have of Canada as being a bastion of progressivism, and there's a certain amount of that, absolutely. There are still a lot of very uptight people, a lot of people who are freaked out by queer people, freaked out by trans people, freaked out by people of color. And, you know, the most you can hope from them is passive aggression.

and which Canadians are quite good at. And so these things have been, you know, in the works for quite a while. And if there is a way for them to gain a significant perch here, they will. It's just, you know. And so as a result, it's up to authors and publishers and readers, obviously, and librarians and teachers to fight back. One of the organizations that I think is doing quite good work in this way is the Writers' Union of Canada, which is not really a union, but it is sort of an association for writers

that a guild, I would say. We have a writer's guild that's really a union and we have a writer's union that's really a guild. But the writer's union represents fiction and nonfiction writers. And I guess to a certain extent, writers working in sort of adjacent areas. And they have put forward a strong front when it comes to censorship, when it comes to book banning,

when it comes to actions against libraries. And so they, I think, are at the forefront for us. But a lot of it is left up to, you know, individual libraries, individual, you know, groups of readers and authors to fight back on their own. And it's tough. It's very tough. Yeah. I wonder if there's that structure you were talking about of advisory. I'm not familiar if there's something like that.

I mean, I guess Jay would be the one to know if there's any sort of similar. structure that he's aware of. But I think it's interesting when you said that there's, they're looking, they see the vulnerabilities in the systems and they're looking for cracks to wiggle in. I feel like a lot of it has been the amount of success they've had at schools because there's this compulsory thing. And of course, a lot of this momentum was gained in school libraries. We're much more eager to ban books very quickly because there's a compulsory element of public schooling. You know, you have to go. Whereas with, you know, with public library, you don't really have that argument. It's sort of like, well, if you don't like it, don't read it.

Like, no one's making you go to the library. And yeah. Now people are like, well, public libraries equals just for kids. And so that's why, yeah. I mean, I know the book is a little older now and outdated, but like Dr. Emily Knox's book on book challenges, like, so. So many of those happened in school libraries, and that's been happening for, like, decades. Like, but rarely was it bans? It was just a lot of challenges, right? So, like, this isn't necessarily a recent thing. It just hasn't necessarily, like, there's always, like, there's been banned books week for, like,

also years and years and years, right? And it's just usually focused on these, like, challenges to a lot of, like, teen and children's literature in the United States, at least. Never focusing on, like, the fact that, like, prison libraries, like, are heavily sensitive. like what prisoners are allowed to read, for example. But yeah, like in, I recently as had as being part of the collections department, had to be part of like an intellectual freedom training at my, at my, at my, at my workplace. And like, because I, where I live in work, like most of our, the very few challenges we get are,

they're all for conservative and right wing literature. So it's like not really a problem we have here. at the library, but like in libraries around us for sure. I mean, I think a larger threat is for, I mean, not a larger threat, but like what's also happening now is like the ebook packages that libraries subscribe to. Often you can't curate them, especially things like hoopla. And like the difference between challenging stuff that's in hoopla because it's like awful and like people still have the right to read whatever they want has been really.

tricky and it's like, well, if we can't actually curate this collection, like, is it worth having? So we're seeing a lot of that of just like not being able to curate stuff as people move more and more to these like e-book packages and stuff. Yeah, it's just like a mess. Yeah. I just am amazed. I mean, Judy Blumes forever came out when I was a teenager. So I want you to throw your mind back decades. The fact that this book is continuing to, to be challenged, even now, is just beyond imagining to me. And, you know, like, it's like any number of these books are perennially, you know, and probably permanently under consideration for being banned in one part of, you know,

North America or another. And it's ridiculous. And, but they are looking for a fight they can win. And, and then what they will do if they win one fight is they will use it, they will climb up on its shoulders and they will fight for three more things. And if they win those, then they will climb up on top of those and just gradually make their way through. And it's, it's dispiriting, but up until this point, they haven't had a lot of successes. And the best thing that people can be is prepared and ready to fight to deny them any other successes. because it's, you know, it's just a ridiculous way to try to shape the way kids think about the world. And adults, too, for that matter.

Yeah, like, I don't, I'm not necessarily with how collection development and, like, how this interacts with, like, because, like, so many collection development policies in the United States libraries are, like, based around, like, First Amendment rights and stuff, you know, like, we, you can read whatever you want, et cetera, et cetera. so I'm not sure how like collection development and ethics relates to more legal concepts and precedents in Canadian libraries. But like if you are a librarian in Canada, like look at your collection development policies and look explicitly at like because you you should have something in there for like if people want to challenge or suggest a removal or whatever, whatever, suggest that something be moved to a different section, like whatever. Sometimes there are legitimate cases where like a librarian didn't know what a book was. it in the kids section when maybe it shouldn't have been, right? Like, that happens sometimes.

But look at your policies, make sure that, like, you're thinking, like, think like you're a mom's for a liberty person. If you were going to try to get something banned, like, what would you try to do to every library in this country and then write your collection development policy to, like, protect against that? Yeah. I'm just going on little soapboxes today. We'll just take care.

I'm like, add another thing. Yeah, I mean, I'm interested, you know, since you are an author and actively writing and we'll get to the book, which is you've made very queer in a lot of ways. And I really enjoyed all the different ways that you've crafted the story. Does it, do you feel any pressure as someone who's publishing from this kind of, backlash movement in terms of, you know, is your publisher ever ringing their hands about something? Or do you see it in other authors maybe? Or just, you know, is this trickling into your world, your own personal world? I've been very lucky in that most of the people who I encounter and certainly all of my editors and all of my publishers have been attracted to my writing as

writing that comes from me. They are not looking for me to change and they are not looking for the content of my work to change. So they know what they're getting more or less when they decide to sign on with me at all. And so that's, first of all, very helpful. The second thing is that both, I mean, I'll say specifically about Red X and also about the butcher's daughter, both editors, both publishers, in fact, wanted me to go further, do more, write more, lean in. And I know how luxurious it is as a writer to be told that, you know, to have people say, you know, oh, you know, if you want to queer it up, you can make it as queer as you want. If you want, you know, we're going to market this as a horror book.

So lean in on the horror. Like things like that. There are absolutely people, peers of mind, people who are. working, you know, more actively in the Big Five, who get subtle or less subtle messages either from an editor or from an agent to make different adjustments. And some of that is about the market. In fact, you know, a lot of it is about the market. But some of it is also the fact that you are part of a larger publishing house and a larger publishing house has sort of many competing expectations within it. You know, it's, no one is going to say,

necessarily if you're if you're being published somewhere that you know publishes Dick Cheney and and George Bush and you know and and Jordan Peterson or whoever. Oh, you can't embarrass those people. But you are sort of aware of the fact that those people get published by the very same companies that that publish our books. It's good to have a balance. It is good to try to figure out how to balance off, you know, situations like that. But there is a desire for people, particularly people who pay you a fair amount of money,

to have something that is marketable and salable. I have, the only thing I can say that I've experienced is on certain online review sites, you get a sense that titles will be mobbed, at least briefly, by groups of more conservative people. And if they detect that a book is queer, I mean, I've certainly had friends suffer this far more than I ever have. I've seen what goes on. You know, they storm the site. They give everything, you know, they give it one star. So you have like a slew of like 40 people who are giving one stars. And it's, even if they don't say it, it's obvious. It's because of queer content. It's because of trans content. It's because of sexuality that they don't approve of. It's you get a lot of that. It's particularly hard on, I would say, non-horror genres. I think it's bad for fantasy. I think it's bad in science fiction.

I think it's bad in romance. You get a lot of that kind of pushback. And it can become really demoralizing because for a period of time, when your book is out, this is the only feedback you're getting is from these sites. It takes quite a while sometimes to get reviews in magazines and newspapers for those few that still do that. And so you end up in this sort of like weird distortion field where the only feedback you're getting is from people who are hating on your book because they don't like what it represents. So that's, I think, probably one of the tougher things to try to navigate. But personally, I mean, you know, the people who have published me, the people who support me, they they don't want me to alter my work to try to, I. dumb it down or to or to desexualize it or to make it less violent, you know, or less horrific.

They, they want it to be the work that it is. And, and when, and when editors and and copy editors apply themselves to it, it's, it's fully understanding the kind of work that is expected of me and, and that, that I want to explore. So that's, so I've been very lucky that way. But yes, for other writers, I know it has been really, really unpleasant. So I think we've bugged you with enough library questions that we have an excuse to just talk about the book now. Why don't you give people like, how do you describe the book when you, when someone's like, tell me about it? Like, where do you, what do you go with? Well, I generally say, well, first thing that I do is I establish whether or not somebody knows who Sweeney Tott even is.

Sweeney Todd is a well-known urban legend. It's originally a penny dreadful. It dates back, I think, to the late 1700s. But the Sweeney Todd, we know, sort of came into sort of popular fiction and popular culture in the 1800s and has been basically adapted, you know, numerous times in numerous ways from that point to today. People know it most, I would say, is the Stephen Sondheim musical. with the book by Hugh Wheeler, which was adapted from Christopher Hampton's play from the 19, I want to say the 1970s. That sounds right, yeah. Yeah, it sounds about right. And, but there are other movie versions. There are other television versions. There is a Canadian radio play version from the 40s that, that I listened to as part of the preparation for working on the book. The original Penny Dreadful is 800 pages long, and also a mess.

So when I proposed this and when Corrine agreed to join me on this, one of the things we did was we revisited the Penny Dreadful and had a little meeting where we basically said, well, it stinks. And what have we done? And so we knew that we couldn't replicate or duplicate the original story or what we perceived to be the original story, nor could we duplicate or replicate the Sondheim version because of copyright, among other things. So what we decided to do and what the book is, is an origin story. It is the origin story of Sweeney Todd's not too terribly well developed traditionally as a character,

helpmate named Mrs. Lovett. Mrs. Lovett is a fascinating and enjoyable comic character in the musical. She more or less is in most of the other versions. but you don't learn very much about her. You don't really learn the thing that we most wanted to know, which is what would drive a woman like her in the 19th century, if we were going to set it there, to assist someone like Sweeney Todd,

and to carve up people's bodies and bake them into pies. Even as a fanciful, sort of ghoulish conceit, it seemed like a lot. People were obviously really willing to accept it, because they really enjoy her as a character, but we wanted to know more, and we wanted to explore who she could have been in the years from her childhood

up until she became the so-called Mrs. Lovett to try to find out what was going on with her. And so that's basically what the book is about. We start, you know, as you can tell from the title, we start in a butcher shop where, you know, owned by her father and mother, and then through various circumstances, she ends up out of the butcher shop and working as a maid in a physician's house, and then later on as a ladies made in a mansion on Mayfair, in Mayfair, and then finally she ends up through various means with the pie shop on Fleet Street, where she becomes acquainted with Sweeney Todd.

And through these various stages, we see how she develops as a person and how she yearns for agency as a agency as a woman in a time where that is just not allowed and and how she kind of has to create a space for herself given the kind of person she is. Yeah. And of course, you left out the last sort of phase of her life where she ends up in a convent where she's writing a series of letters to an investigator. So this is an epistolary novel. It is. Hell yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting. It's a Episcularian novel. If you, if you like document thrillers, this is a document... Hell yeah, I do. Let's go.

Yeah, so how, so the framing device, I mean, first of all, there are three framing devices. There's like, there's all sorts of shit going on. But the basic framing device is that a, there is a young female journalist who has disappeared. And an investigator has found this dossier of documents in her apartments. And so we read them as if we were the female investigator who had gathered. And we basically go more or less chronologically through them. And what it is is largely a correspondence with this woman who is apparently confined in a priory. Her name is Margaret Evans. And the journalist has reason to believe. We never really know why, but The journalist has reason to believe that Margaret Evans is, in fact, the notorious Mrs.

Lovett of 50 years prior. And so at first, Margaret denies it, but Margaret insists that her own story is quite fascinating and proceeds to tell it. Meanwhile, the journalist writes to a number of other people to try to verify parts of Margaret's story, but also to try to find holes in Margaret's story that might prove in some way that Margaret is really Marjorie Lovett. And I mean, obviously, we would not have written the book, published the book, put the book in stores if it was going to turn out that she wasn't.

Like, you know, there is a- Not exactly a spoiler. Yeah, not exactly a spoiler. You know, exactly. There is, you know, some lingering doubt at the end, but by and large, we can assume that Margaret Evans is, in fact, Marjorie Lovett. she certainly tells a great Marjorie Lovett story. And the letters give us an unusual amount of access into her life experience,

her thought processes, and the conflicts that she has come up against, including with Sweeney Todd, as she has just tried to sort of live her own life and be her own woman. And, and yeah, it's a, the epistolary novel was very popular at the time, some of the best-known gothic genre novels in that period were epistolary, primarily Frankenstein and Dracula. And so it was a form that was familiar and had a documentary kind of feel. It's kind of the found footage, you know, horror of its period. And so we wanted to make use of that if we could, because one of the things that's always attracted me in writing any long fiction has been not just looking at a particular character, but also at a community around that character.

I like to have a multiplicity of voices, and I like to have some disparity around what the supposed facts are as perceived by those various characters. And I really love, you know, one character having one perspective and seeing one thing and then later on finding out that another character saw something entirely different or had more to add to the story that shed more light on it. That kind of thing always really intrigues me as a reader and even more so as a writer. Also, I have, it has to be said, a relatively short attention span.

And so I like a book that's made of little bits because I can write little bits. You know, it's like, oh, today I'm going to write a letter from so and so. And today, you know, tomorrow I'm going to write one from this person. And, oh, we really need, you know, a different kind of document here. We need a telegram here. We need, you know, a, a, you know, what other things do we have? A police report over here and newspaper obituary over here. And accruing those kinds of things and using that to build out a story, I personally find really enjoyable.

And it's always been a thing. Oh, and Justin's holding up examples from the pages. Yeah. And, and what was great was, I mean, Corrine and I, once we established that this was how we were going to write it, we did our best, as one can do in Microsoft Word, to simulate some of this stuff. And then we went to the publisher once the book was picked up and said, well, we were kind of hoping it could be done this way. And the editors sort of went away, had the discussions they needed to have, came back and said, all right, let's set out what things are supposed to

look like and what things are similar to each other and what things are different from each other. and let's make a plan about how we can design this book. And it was fantastic. They went away and came back with just, I think, a spectacular looking book that really represents a lot of the materials from that period in a way that I find quite immersive. And so, you know, that's a success for me. Yeah. When I was in college, I took a course on supernatural 19th century British prose and poetry

where we like read Dracula and everything. and it changed my fucking life. I love Dracula. And one of the things we talked about, like, around the epistolary nature of Dracula and, like, a lot of the early, like, gothic fiction in general was, like, the way that the time because of industrialization and the change of technology of how people mass communicate, that, like, a lot of the, especially in Dracula, like, the epistolary nature is also exploring, like what ways of sharing information or are more true? Like what is more reliable,

something that is handwritten or something that's mass printed in a newspaper, right? Like these are questions that Dracula is kind of grappling with because it's not just letters in Dracula, right? Like there's like transcripts of like phonograph records and like all sorts of like neat interesting things. And so like I think it's so cool when like if you're trying to explore a character that in all of these other versions,

we don't really get to know about. And you're using a method which is like inherently about questioning how information presents itself and how we react to it. I just, I just find that so cool. Well, in particular, there's like public information. As you say, like, you know, stuff that's in newspapers, stuff that's in police documents, things like that. And there's also the private aspect of handwritten letters that are coming to this journalist, the intimacy that's involved. And, I mean, one of course, naturally, when we started on the project, the first thing we had to realize was that Mrs. Levitt, Marjorie Levitt, as we know her, was from the east end of London. She would have been Cockney. She would probably have been barely literate. And so I thought, I mean, and Corrine too, it was like, what are we going to do?

who can't write a book from the point of view of somebody who can't actually write. Because it would just be brutal. Like, what are you supposed to do? So, the first thing we did was, you know, when we placed her in the convent towards the end of her life, you know, she's around, just little older than me, I suppose. She's close to 70 when she's in the convent. First thing we did was who gave her somebody who actually just transcribe what she said. So there's a sister named Sister Catherine who is sitting with her. she's on one hand kind of monitoring what it is that Margaret is saying to this journalist,

but on the other hand, she's facilitating. And so for the first two-thirds of the book, we have, you know, Margaret's writings beautifully written, very clear, very understandable, and then later on in the book there's a change where we get what I would describe as the true voice of Mrs. love it, and it's a very sharp change. And where it's even more beautifully realized is in the audiobook version from recorded books. They do a wonderful transition from one to the other. And so that, I think, took the whole story into another realm, because not only is there the question of, what do you trust in an intimate communication in a handwritten letter from somebody, but what do you trust if someone has been mediating that all along and somehow shaping it

in a way that may be different from what the original voice is? There are a lot of those kinds of layers all the way through the book, which I just found, if you're going to do this kind of sort of mystery thriller, I just found like just a lot of fun to play with. Yeah, I really, when you sent me some of the illustrations from the book, I had to go by it because I listened on audiobook, which was great, and you have different voice actors for the different parts. I was half expecting you to show up at the end to read your own... Your own section, because there are so many different voice actors. You can't do the gimmick twice.

Can you imagine? That would be so gay of you, though, like, honestly, just like every single audio book, you just have to cut and show up and be like, okay, now I'm ending this. I'll be like Alfred Hitchcock. One of the things that is really great as well is the book has recipes at the end. Hell yeah. Let's go. So for people who like, you know, that extra touch, we went all the way with that as well.

But yeah, I mean, the look and feel of the book, I think is really remarkable. Titan books in UK has done their own internal design and I've seen parts of it. and it's different again, but it's also really terrific. And of course, because of where they are, they have access to a lot of stuff, stuff that we never even saw. So the things that they have incorporated into the book have a really neat feeling of realism. Yeah, there's an example. That's the telegram, isn't it?

Yeah. Yeah, that's, I mean, the early part of the book is, well, I mean, really, most of the book, is taking place really before the invention of the typewriter. There are a very small number of typewriters in the UK at the time that, well, it's not really the UK in Britain, at the time that the story is being told. And so the vast majority of the stuff that you're reading in the book would have been handwritten at the time. And, I mean, we pushed the limit of believability,

I think about as far as we could go with some of that. But I think a reader is, you know, is game for that kind of stuff. But we did want to give in some of the elements that feeling of things being handwritten, that feeling of forms being sort of, you know, types, literally typeset, things like that that give that sort of antique feeling to the whole enterprise. Yeah. And when one thing I noticed when I picked up the the print book was because I was only about halfway through when I got it. I was halfway through the audiobook, and I notice about halfway through when the voice changes of Mrs. Lovett, the font changes. And so suddenly you have these big chunks that are all written in a different font and that they're bold, essentially, in a bold font. And so I go, oh, I can't read that because that's clearly something that I haven't heard about yet, because someone else must be writing who hasn't been writing so far.

So I didn't want to peek around But I really got this sort of as book art Because you know you've got you've got the cover of a book of the 1890s which I've read a million of I don't think the title was nearly long enough Usually those titles are about a paragraph long very true Some EM Forster like room with a view chapter titles bullshit like You know what I mean like Italians drive them and it's yeah Yeah I love that stuff

when you're writing with all of these different types of documents, was there anything, and also doing like the historical research, is a lot of like language that I thought was really interesting. Was there anything where you had to like stop and go, all right, we need to redo this or we're going down the wrong? Like once you'd already started writing and then something like didn't come together and you were like, oh, we've got to change how we're doing this. Well, yes, as a matter of fact. So, Kareen and I met through my agent, well, our mutual agent. We both had her as our agent. And the reason that I involved Kareen in the project was because she had lived in London. She had done tremendous amount of research in Gothic literature.

She knew the Victorian era tremendously well. She had a lot of research materials that we would be able to use. It really was her milieu. I knew if I wrote the... this myself, it would have taken eight years for me to write because I would have had to research everything from scratch. And what was great working with her was that she had just this tremendous body of knowledge right out of the gate. And there were a few things, you know, I said right close to the beginning. I said, what are some things that we could use in this book that we

never normally read in historical fiction like this? And she rhymed off almost immediately several things that we acted on right away. One was that there should be an anatomical venus. If we were going to have a physician's house, there should be an anatomical venus, which if you don't know, is sort of like a wax figure of a woman, usually nude, and you take part of it off so that you can see the inner workings of her human body. And some of them are partially animated through squeeze bulbs and fluid and things like this so that you can see how circulation works or how digestion works, things like that. So that was a thing that we incorporated. She was really interested in us coming up with a founding hospital, which is a kind of an orphanage,

where poor women would leave their children ideally to be adopted by wealthier families or to be raised at the orphanage. And they would leave an object with the child and keep a matching object, like for example, two earrings so that later on they could claim the child. Of course, there were very few times where that actually successfully occurred, but the founding hospital was really fascinating. And then I started asking about what different environments we could be in, and one of the environments that came up was the priory. And so we, particularly me, I took a lot of the priory work, you know, started writing away about the priory, started writing about the rituals the nuns went through, you know, over the

worst of the day, how they interacted with each other and stuff like that. We had the submission draft. We sent it in. It was accepted by both Soho and Titan. And then the British editor, Rufus, came back to us and said, so one of the things that is a problem is that your priory appears to be Catholic. And it wouldn't have been. It would have been, yes, it would have been Church of England. There were Catholic priories, but Catholics were treated as very. very differently during that period in England, and we would have had to address it somehow. Right. And so I, like, all of these things, and like a lot of that stuff was stuff that was researched, of course.

And so we had to dismantle all of that stuff. And then we had to, like, names of churches and locations of churches and names of people at the churches and who was visiting and who was like, all of that stuff had to change. And even to, I would say, like, the second last draft, I would say we were, like in the editing process, we were still finding things and having to change them. And it was just brutal. So that one was a particular test. And then, of course, and in its own way, it did rearrange elements of the narrative because some things that would have been possible under, and it's not like I know a lot about Catholicism either. I pick it all up from popular culture. But a lot of things that were routine or that were possible under Catholicism would not have been possible under Church of England.

So we had to make that adjustment as well. The other thing that was hilarious was Rufus was great. Rufus also came back and said, so the king before Victoria, you have given him three different names over the course of that book. Just showing how terrible we are at other kinds of history. So it was like, oh, God. So we, you know, had to, so that was a cue for us to go through and correct a bunch of those little things as well. Because you take for granted that you know, particularly as a Canadian, certain things about British history and British culture. And, you know, that's the wrong person.

That wasn't invented yet. That hadn't happened yet. That doesn't happen for another 10 years. Like, it's those kinds of things that you have to continually monitor when you're going through a book like this. the one thing that got through that I mean I and I think is you know, it's just a thing you live with. There is a reference.

The first part of the book is in the 1830s, 1837 or so. There is a reference to delivering to the woman of the house, the lady of the house, her toast and tea. Toast is not actually invented for another 20 years. Toast. And when it's invented, it's because they have invented the toasting fork. Because of course, there are no like stoves with griddles or things like that, you know, surfaces. It's a fire. And so what you did was you like speared the bread on the fork and you held it in the fire, which I mean, I can't see a very high success rate for toast in this situation. However, that's what there was. For there to be a toaster or even a different kind of toasting implement, you have to wait even more decades. And so, you know, so we have toast.

It's like, well, we have toast. So if anyone, you know, comes at us and says, you know, your book's not very accurate. We know they're talking about the toast. So, yeah. But we got, and also there was a point where we had a photograph on the wall of the bakery. And, of course, photographs hadn't been invented yet. So we had to pull a photograph off the wall of the bakery and swap it with, you know, a drawing or an engraving. And, you know, it's those, it's those kinds of things.

But it's a, it's a, when you're doing this kind of writing, you're doing your own fact-checking. No one else is doing that for you. People are checking your language. And we had a lot of lively discussion about language, particularly an American publisher, publishing a book that is entirely in British English. But no one is really paying, nor should they be paying close attention to what you are asserting as being factual. So we had to do a lot of sort of, you know, finding stuff out, even finding, you know, like particular idioms, particular phrases that you would think would have been right in that period. But in fact, we're not to like, you know, 1905 or something like that.

So it was a bit maddening that way. It is legitimate, legitimately kind of bonkers when you think about like how different the beginning of the Victorian era was to like the end of it. Like, we just think, oh, the Victorian era, that that's, like, one coherent thing, but it is really not. Yeah. No. Victoria lived forever. Didn't she? She was so fucking old, dude.

Well, and the other thing, too, is, like, the Industrial Revolution happened all around that period. Yes. There is massive technological change that occurs. And it's extraordinary to think about it in being in somebody's, you know, one lifetime, and particularly a monarchs. So that was a thing that was really important for us to capture as much as we could. And particularly to remind people that in the early part of the Victorian era, they had nothing. They had no sewers. They had no antiseptic.

They had doctors who like sawed your limbs off. They had, you know, no anesthetic, no nothing. They had, like, there was a lot of stuff that they just did not have. And so life was horrible and squalid. Even if you were relatively well off, you know, it literally stank. And a lot of what, you know, what we have received in the way of depictions of Victorian life are necessarily sanitized because to see what it really would have looked like would be disgusting. And you would be so distracted by that, you wouldn't be able to pay attention to anything else.

So, you know, so I mean, a lot of, a lot of my, you know, obviously I've read a great deal. But at the same time, a lot of the imagery that I have in my mind from Victorian life is like Hammer Horror movies. You know, it all looks like that. It doesn't look like what Victorian life really looked like. And so we had to play a bit of a delicate game with the reader as well because we needed to remind them, yeah, you know, it was terrible. But at the same time, we couldn't, you know, let them dwell on that or we would never get into the story. So, yeah, that was a big factor as well. Yeah, there was a, it was a, just something that I saw as like a pure historical anecdote,

which was when Mrs. Lovett is describing the difference in the fog from her childhood to when she was writing, saying like, the fog stung your eyes, and we would have to keep the fog out of the house, and we would pray all day that a wind would come and blow the other direction. Yeah, a lot of that was, Corrine. Corrine really brought those aspects of the story to life. We really wanted people to be fully aware of how much a character like Marjorie would want to escape those surroundings and what it would mean to be able to leave the core of the city and go via made and Highgate.

That was a tremendous move for her. And we tried to find a way to make that as realistic as possible, given the kind of book that it is, where, you know, we, we leaned in a lot on the penny dreadful aspect. So there are outrageous coincidences and, and, you know, incredible twists and turns and reveals and, you know, rugs being pulled out from under the reader. And just, you know, insofar as all of that stuff is fantastical, still grounding it in things that, that people could see and smell and feel and hear. That was, that was really critical to the success of the book. Something I don't want to forget to mention, thought of it twice now, and I was about to write it down.

Do you hope that future adaptations of Sweeney Todd are going to start to incorporate some of this backstory? Do you imagine it'll happen? I don't, I don't, I'm not really worried or intrigued by that specific thing, as much as I hope that it opens the doors to a lot of interpretation. because there are a lot of ways to take the story. There, for example, there is no reason for Mrs. Lovett to be a white woman. Like, you know, in the same way that there was no reason for her to be, you know, you know, fixedly heterosexual. There was, there's no reason for her to be a white woman. The Mrs. Lovits that we routinely see are women who are middle age or older.

We did one who is quite young. She's like, she's not even 20 when she, I think she's just 20, 20 or 21 when she arrives at the pie shop. And it creates an entirely different dynamic. There's no reason why people can go in a number of different directions as far as age, as gender, as far as sexuality, as far as, you know, racial background, racial history. London is a very complex and rich place at that time period. and it is very often flattened out in its depictions. You know, it's whitified for a white audience,

and of course it's straightified for a straight audience. So that's a thing that I think is well worth exploring. And I also hope that it inspires people to look at other stories from that period and shake them up as well. Because, you know, the material's in the public domain, and it's there for re-exploring, and it's there, you know, to be made relevant to today. And one of the things when Corrine and I were, you know, would be working, you know, individually and together on it, you know, mostly through Zoom calls. We've only been in the same room three times in this whole time.

The only, you know, like we continually reminded ourselves that while this was a period piece, it's a story about today. And why does this story matter today? Why does this character matter today? What is it about her that engages people today? If it's not that, then it's just like walking through a museum and it's not especially engaging. How could we make it engaging for people in the present? And that's, so that was, that was important to us as well. I have to ask, because when I was, I'm trying to find the exact portion because I was listening.

I was listening to the audio book, and I just thought, David, what have you done? The character of Fab. Oh, I love Fab. I love Fab. All babies don't live. I love Fab. Fab's garment was the most startling. Instead of the long white linen tunic one might expect, he instead had a gossamer loincloth wrapped about his hips, presenting his generously proportioned.

sex to anyone who glanced his way. I had never seen a man's most intimate parts. My mortification was so profound that I was speechless. I bet, honey. So Fab works in a art house. Yeah, in a horthouse. I guess we'll just say it.

Like a Molly house or? Well, he's, he is, yeah, he is the one Molly in the host. The other whores are all women, but he is the most popular, and he makes the most money for the house. And it said that if a man can't get the woman he wants, then he will happily take up with Fab. And there are mock weddings, and there are sort of these sort of like, and the tableau vivant and all sorts of stuff going on. It's not your normal whorehouse. It's not a normal house of any kind.

But Fab was a really, it was really great to be able to investigate Marjorie's attractions to women. And it was really great to be able to have a such a straightforward, outlandish queer character in Fab, who really just sort of like set the bar for what we could achieve, you know, in sort of, you know, raunchifying this story. Yeah. Yeah, he was just, he's just a delight. He's probably, I mean, he's certainly one of my three favorite characters in the whole book, and was just a treat to write. Yeah, you had to have the catty gay man with the beautiful hair. And it was really interesting talking about, like, how he would sort of get more feminine for some of the men who were uncomfortable with their attraction to him. And then of course, like, you know, the the brothel is like a mixture of like a liberal arts college and a brothel.

Because, you know, you kind of, when you introduce the characters, you kind of think they are artists. Yes, we're seeing them through Marjorie's eyes, and Marjorie does not recognize what's going on. She has been rescued off the street by one of these women who is really lovely to her. And Marjorie would never have, the only experience Marjorie has with whores is streetwalkers, basically. And so when she walks into this mansion in Mayfair, she doesn't really understand what it is she seeing. And the madam of the house, Madame Quince, is presenting it as a kind of finishing school for girls and partly as a way of avoiding detection, but also as a way, I'm sure she thinks in mind of genuinely improving these women, perhaps for the possibility that they will, you know, be able to be, you know, permanent mistresses to some of these men. And these men are themselves,

you know, intellectuals, educated, moneyed, obviously. And so they want, you know, a woman who, you know, or a man, who is more sophisticated and more knowledgeable and worldly. And so, so when when Marjorie walks into the situation, she does not understand what it is she seeing. And then, of course, finally, one of the young women turns and goes, Marjorie, we're horrid. And then everything changes because, of course, if you're a maid working in a brothel, you are not very different and treated by the rest of the world is not very different from the women who work there. So she has tainted herself by coming and allowing herself to be in this situation. And that creates a lot of tensions within her.

as well. But it's, I mean, it's the most beautiful place she's ever been in, and it's the most free place in its way that she's ever been in. But it too has its sinister side. Yeah. Although from all the places she lives, it really seems like one of the happier times of her life. Oh, yeah. I mean, and we, and that was deliberate. We had, you know, she, she went through a lot at the butcher shop, and she certainly goes through a lot, which we won't talk about, at the physician's house. When she gets out of the physician's house and finds herself in the mansion and Mayfair, both Corrine and I, when we were talking, I said, I want to give her a break. It is unfair to just keep putting her in these awful, awful, awful situations. I think

she needs a rest and to regroup. It doesn't mean that she's not still in peril. There are still, you know, men lurking around the outside. There are, you know, threatening messages that are being sent inside. There are, you know, there are things going on, but you don't think that she's going to be subjected to any kind of violence inside that house. And it's only when she leaves that house and she ends up, you know, in the pie shop that everything just sort of gathers back up again with even, you know, more steam and more momentum and more viscerality. That, you know, and it charges its way towards the end. So I think that worked out quite well. And this is just because I don't know that much about Swinidad adaptations, although I've seen a few

with Jay. The way, when he finally shows up, he's almost like a, I mean, he does come off as just a monster that everyone is kind of afraid of. He's a big group. Yes, he's a big. Yeah, very, because in my head, it's just the Johnny Debt movie playing whenever we're walking around. Because that's the one I've seen the most. This is the problem. It's not a problem. This is the challenge with characters who you know best from musicals. It is intrinsic to a musical, a good musical, anyway, and Stephen Sondheim musicals were good musicals. It is intrinsic to a good musical that characters are using tools of language that suggest that they are erudite, that they are educated, that they are sophisticated. There's internal rhyming. There's rhyming, first of all,

There's internal rhyming. There's clever use of particular words in order to achieve particular effects. And so, I mean, you can say, you can say that the characters in Sweeney Todd are foolish, but you can't say they're stupid because someone incredibly intelligent wrote them. And that comes through in a big way. In the original Penny Dreadful, yes, he's a thug and a brute and a monster. He is killing, he doesn't really kill women. He does still focus on men. He's primarily killing men who are itinerant and who won't be missed, and he is taking their jewels and their valuables. That is the main reason for him to do that. He is in a lot of ways, someone who is driven mad by London and driven mad by the Industrial Revolution, which is

emerging all around him. And he is sort of like, I don't know, I wouldn't go so far as to say he's an evil force, but he's an amoral force. And so when we wrote him, we knew we were going back to that. You know, I mean, Johnny Depp, you know, lots of things to say about him, but one of the things we can say is he's not very much bigger than me. And he's not going to overpower anybody. And so, so this is a man who if he got you in the barber chair, you were not getting out of that barbuchar alive. It was as simple as that. And the entire time, I mean, she handles it well, but the entire time that Mrs.

Lovett is in the pie shop, below the barbershop, she's fearing for her life. And she's trying very hard to make sure she's not next. And that was an important thing for us to move to the front of the story as well. Once we got there, he is very different from, really from any of the musical or theatrical depictions of recent times. Yeah, because I wasn't sure if, because there's basically no real relationship between them, and I know in the musical there is. Yeah, I never bought it, and I never bought it.

The whole time, it's like, why is this woman with this man? Why is this woman, like, and not just with him, but just like, you know, completely besoughten, you know, she is like, you know, and it's like, there's nothing to have a, crush on. And one of the arguments you can say about the musical is because the character is a little more sophisticated and a little more devilish. You can see someone falling for that. But she's made to be foolish for being an old woman who, an old widow who is infatuated with this younger, you know, younger, you know, he may be brutish and violent, but he's charismatic guy. And we were like, yeah, that's just no, we're not doing that.

We're not doing that at all. And so we didn't. Yeah, and I think it works really well, especially because you sort of wrote her as queer as well. The only relationship we see her in is with another woman who she convinces to come live with her as a boy, which I thought was a lot of fun you were having with gender there, her imagining, what do you like if you were a man who could live with me, huh? Honey. How would that work? I've also read Tipping the Velvet.

Yeah, absolutely, as did we. It's so good. And we, yeah, there's a lot of Sarah Waters that sort of threaded through all of this as well. And we also wanted to, I mean, for the people who only knew the story through the musical, we wanted to make sure there were some Easter eggs and some callbacks for them that didn't, like, you know, that didn't copy the musical, but that hinted at the fact. that, you know, the musical, like our story originated somewhere. And so when she gets, you know, her girlfriend to dress as a boy and she calls him Toby,

people will immediately go, oh, I know that name. Right, which is what I did. Yeah. I'm just, I am just your median voter when it comes to Sweeney Todd. I'm just like, oh, yeah. Yeah. From the screen that I look at all day. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, it was really fun. I wonder, you know, in the future, if I watch when you taught stuff, I'll go, well, of course she's doing that. I mean, that's because she wrote about this when she was in the prior. I'm just going to be doing that in my head because that's kind of what I, you know, it makes sense to do that. You've added to the character in my head, which is, yeah, I just think makes a book a lot of fun.

Good. The only thing I could hope for more out of an art book is, you know, when I have all my books packed up right now, but whenever you have a book where they have things that are folded into it. So you usually get like a very nice letter or something. But one of my favorite things I have is a replication of the morals of Jesus, which is the Jefferson Bible. Oh, yes. And when they replicated it, there's a little thing where he fixed an error. And it's a tiny little flap of paper that is sort of folded into the edge and they replicated it in the book. So you can see the little fold of paper where he would have fixed the error on the book.

I love stuff like that. Yeah. It's expensive. It is expensive, obviously. That you become aware of. And particularly now, special printer things are very expensive, more than they've ever been. And so it's a real commitment. You might get stuff like that now in like special editions and things rather than in a regular printing.

But it's, it is harder and harder to do some of that stuff unless you're going, you know, to a boutique sort of publisher who's only going to do sort of like a limited run of stuff. stuff. I have some, I guess they're called ergodic books. Yes, erotic literature is my favorite. Yes, exactly. And this is sort of adjacent to that. And, but I have some, you know, it's like, here's a box that has a bunch of, you know, sort of like zine-like, you know, documents in it. Or here's, you know, another thing that is, you know, filled with postcards. And here's another thing that is like, and so that stuff, I just, I love that stuff.

but it is now just like it is a true art project to make those things and it's really expensive to produce them. So, and I already, I mean, in Canada, in Canada, the butcher's daughter is like 3695 and it's like, holy shit. That is a whopping amount of money for a book. And the paperback will be out next year, which is great. But I love the fact that it's a hardcover. and I love the fact that it has this look and feel about it and this sort of weight and heft to it. It's, you know, and also like, you know, spot lacquer on the cover and things like that. It's really, it's lovely to have.

Like, I'm not a print purist, but I do love when a piece of media, like, engages, like, where the medium itself is, like, part of how you experience it. Like, House of Leaves is my favorite book, and I could not imagine House of Leaves in any other format than the way that it is printed, right? So I really like books that do incorporate the nature of being a book into how you experience it. It's just such a pleasant reading experience when that happens. Well, with each of the books that I've written, I have tried very hard to look at them as objects and to try to find ways to expand the conventional reading experience. I mean, with the Bone Mother, through the use of archival photographs with red X,

you know, it was, you know, there were a variety of things that were going on there. There were particular pages, things were happening to them. There were particular images, things like that. And with Strange Light, you know, printing with the French flaps and the untrimmed edges, it was that also gave a particular look and feel to the book that I really appreciated. And with this one again, it was just like, you know, how can, how can we make this reading experience unique and special because I think it's one of the things that a lot of readers crave, particularly horror readers, know that you're going to be getting, you know, variations on

stories, you know, very often that you already read before. And there's a comfort that you can get out of that. But what can you bring to the experience that's new or unusual or fresh and disarming in certain ways, you know, to give people a bit of a, you know, sometimes a little bit of a or to, you know, further immerse them into the reality of the book. Yeah. And that's why it asked. As Horror Vanguard is always saying, horror wants to do things to your body. And I think that includes, like, the physical experience of reading something.

Absolutely. And I think with, you know, a big fat, I mean, of course, this was the other thing that was a constant, you know, sort of concern of ours. The ideal historical book is probably about this size, a little over 400 pages, a little over 100,000 words. the ideal horror novel is closer to 75,000. And so, you know, the conventional horror reader, I mean, Gothic readers, you know, I think have a different sensibility,

and they're looking for a slightly different thing. But at the same time, you're trying to please all of these people without pissing anybody off. And if you're giving someone, I mean, I'm not Stephen King. I know what, you know, I know the story. So if I'm going to give somebody a book this big, and say, this is a horror novel, there had better be some horror in it, and it had better go at a particular pace. There better be, you know, there's a slow burn at the beginning, but once it gets going, it should really get going. And if there's any doubt that it's horror, you should

introduce elements into it that remind people, oh, yes, you know, here, you know, a kid's leg got sawed off. Here, there's, you know, a tumor the size of someone's head. Here, there's like, There's all of these things that just sort of, you know, just keep you reminded. Oh, yeah, horror novel. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, horror. Horror.

Horror. Like, it's there. So, you know, you come to realize that while no one is necessarily pushing you as far as the extremity of the content is concerned, there is an awareness that a reader has expectations. And insofar as you can fulfill them, even though. as you subvert them, so much the better, because then they can come away from it. They may come away from it annoyed with some of the choices you made, but they can't say that they didn't get an interesting experience out of it. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think more so than the

moments where you're being reminded it's a horror book. For me, it was the sort of tension that kept stringing through all the different scenes of, you know, you know, she at least makes it to to out alive, but like what is, what terrible thing is going to happen to her next, you know, especially once you get to Sweeney Todd, like, what is he going to do? He's unhinged, right? There's, she doesn't know what he's going to do. He doesn't seem to know what he's going to do. He seems kind of run by instinct. So that was, and of course, the doctor's house is like, probably the, for me, probably the most horrific part, viscerally. Yeah. Everything that goes on the doctor's houses is just horrendous. And, and, and at,

you know, at the same time, you know, I mean, there are certain modern concessions, but, but by and large, that stuff is not, you know, wildly different from what you would have found in, in penny dreadfuls or sensation novels of the period. We just compressed a lot of stuff into a very short period of time. But there, you know, there is, there is a lot of brutality. There is, like, I always, with Red X, we had quite a number of content warnings. With this book, I knew that the early readers were going to do my work for me, and they have. If you go on NetGalley or Goodreads or any number of the other places, there are people who very helpfully have gone like this with the list of things that go on in the book. And it's like, thank you, thank you.

Very grateful for that. At the same time, we also tried to be cognizant that, you know, people have limits to what they can endure in a book. we didn't want to push it wildly far. But yeah, it's not light. It's not cozy horror. If it is cozy horror for somebody, I'm not sure who that person is. You're not on my favorite review website,

which is Does the Dog Die? Oh, well, we should, although, I mean, one of the things we, I felt really bad about both Bone Brother and Red X. And so I tried really hard, even though obviously the first section, is in a butcher shop. I tried really hard not to kill off any animals this time. So the dog does not

die. There is a dog that goes missing, but it does not die. And in fact, as far as I can recall, while it's understood that animals die in a butcher shop, there is not a lot of gruesome animal death. In fact, I don't think there's really any. And however, the rest of the list is completely covered. Well, that's what I love about does the dog die, because that was how it started, but then, of course, the amount of triggers that they added are absolutely massive. So, like, I love the Does the Dog Die for, like, why am I conclave? It's like, does the main character die? Yes. The Pope. Is religion mentioned? You know, just like the kind of triggers that you don't really need. I mean, different people absolutely have, you know, different sensitivities. And

And in horror, it's really hard because a lot of the things that you have personal anxieties about, sometimes you want to stick your finger in the wound and sometimes you don't. I mean, the thing that I have, I have like a long list of fears. I write horror because I live horror. I have a long list of fears. But one thing that I find really, really incredibly intensely uncomfortable is home invasion. And so. So, like, I have never seen the strangers because I know, right? Yeah. I've seen clips. I've seen images. I know what it's going to be like, right? I watched funny games once, exactly once.

And that whole time, I was just writhing. I was just writhing through that whole thing. There are a number of those that I just find, I just find them really difficult. And so for someone else, it's going to be an entirely different thing. You know, there, I have, I have a friend who. she has a sort of a religious background and we can watch a lot of horror together, but horror that has to do with Satanism or with possession or anything like that is just, it's a hot button.

And it's like, okay, well, then no, we're just not going to do that. I may think it's silly, but that has nothing to do with me, you know? So these are the things that you kind of have to negotiate. Yeah, we covered a lot of ground in this book. And if somebody were to put it up on, you know, does the dog, die, there would be like 30, 40, 50 things. Red X is on there. Of course.

The only trigger is, does the dog die? And there's one, yes. The dog shirt is something. I'll give it that. Yeah, absolutely. And, and, you know, and there are lots of people, lots of people who can read anything in horror, they cannot read animals being injured or killed. and I, you know, I'm really, I'm basically three for three now.

So the next book, since I know this is going to be a question, the next book is a haunted house book, and I don't think there are going to be any animals involved. So at least that's the plan right now. So, yeah, so that's the next thing on the list. Yeah, I mean, is that, hmm? I was just going to say our mutual podcast friend, John Greenaway. of horror vanguard has done a lot of interesting writing around like the haunted house genre from like a Marxist lens and like looking at like the owning of property and land itself like within capitalism as like inherently like horrific and everything. So I'm like really excited to see how

you approach the haunted house story. And like obviously you two should should meet and talk. It would be really cool. It would be wonderful. There's also there's also a really interesting threat of conversation going on now around haunted houses and colonialism. And I think that's also a really fascinating... My haunted house. My haunted house is, well, first of all, in the world of the book,

is the first scientifically documented haunted house and is established scientifically as being haunted from like the early 1970s. So in the present day, this is just understood to be a factual phenomenon. There are, there have been studies about what the nature of the haunting is. It turns out it's biological, and I'm not going to go any further with that.

But I worked very hard to come up with a way of making a haunting work in as real a world as I could make it. And so it's basically about a woman in her late 50s, early 60s, who's recently lost her husband, and now her adopted gay son has run away, and she believes that he has run to this house, which is her ancestral summer house, which is an entity in popular culture, the way that the Amityville house is, except real. And so, and, and of course, it is a place where people have died and have become ghosts and are, on the property and on the premises, and some people have deliberately gone there to die in order to become ghosts in that space. And she fears that her son is aiming to do just that. And so she has to try to find him and stop him.

There is also, at the same time, a cult that has sequestered themselves nearby. They're the no-hopers, and they are a bunch of young people who have basically given up on the direction that the world is going in, and they are also devising a way in which they will be able to die and live on as ghosts on these properties. So there's a lot going. It's a sort of a combination of Hillhouse and annihilation. Interesting. Okay. I like both of those things. I'm not a horror person, but that's got me. I enjoyed both of those things. Yeah, so it's not at all, at least as I currently see it, it's not at all gory, but it is sort of psychologically unsettling. And I would say also perhaps scientifically unsettling.

And the idea behind at least a segment of the book is that we get to see examples of how this house and how her family were treated in pop culture. So, for example, we see early on in the book a review from, you know, TV guide of the TV movie that was made about the house and about, you know, and mentions the character who is played by, you know, that is meant to be her who was played by, you know, a young Jody Foster. And, and sort of those kinds of things. And then seeing pages from books and magazines, you know, talking about the nature of the house and, you know, lyrics from songs that were written about the house. and, you know, those kinds of things. And that kind of ephemera finds its way, you know, into the document that we're reading. Great. Yeah?

No, I'm excited. And obviously, I'm going to point people towards it once you have more information on when it will be out. Yeah, I mean, it's going to be a while. It takes me about four years to write anything. Oh, well, that's not fair. It takes about two years for me to write anything, and then it takes another two years for the book to come out. So it's about four years from now. we'll say. And it's called, currently it's called the Stone Garden. I'm sure somebody's going to talk

me out of that. But, but, but yeah, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a too is going to have sort of the element of being an artifact as well as being a narrative. So, so, I am, I am happy to go down this road. The other two things that are coming. up for me are I have a short story called The Start of Something that is going to be in the next issue of Weird Horror, which is published by undertow publications. That is going to be out, I think, later this summer. And then there is a book that is edited by Becky Spratford, librarian, called Why I Love Horror. I have an essay in that. In fact, I have the second last essay in that, which called of Men and Monsters. And that will be out, I think,

at the end of September. So, yeah, so it's nice to have those as well. Great. And I'm going to point people to all of that when they come out. And as, of course, now the link to the book will be in there. Do you want me to add maybe one or two of the images to tease people? Oh, sure. Because that's what made me go, okay, I have to have the physical book.

Yeah. Because you just got to see it. Great. Is there anything else you want the people to know about? I can obviously put any social media in the description. Yeah, I mean, that's most of it. As I say, the UK version is going to come out next week, in fact. I believe it's June 23rd or 24th. So that will be different again. Eventually, a paperback is going to come out sometime next year from Soho. I have heard a rumor that there may be a special edition of Red X for its fifth anniversary, but I can't swear to. to it. Redix is like literally one of my favorite

books, David. I love it so much. I will be the first person to buy that. Like, Red X is so good. It like changed my life. Yeah. Well, there, it will, if it turns out to be the way that I

would like it to be, then I think you will be a very happy person. Yes. Good. Oh, my cat's going to come say hi. Maybe I can get the camera on so we can see see. Oh, hello, Matt. Arthur? Yeah, here we go. Yes, hello Arthur. Yes. Lovely. Best boy. Yes. He is the best. He seems big, or is it just because he's close to the camera? You get to go through cat puberty because he was a street cat. So he's got those like big, like Tomcat cheeks and everything like before he got fixed.

Okay. So he's like 12 pounds. He's a big boy. Yeah. Aren't you bloody? Yeah. But a beautiful boy. He's so handsome. He's very aware of his size. He's very cautious. and just like feels his way around. He's like, oh, hang on. Unlike dogs that stay puppies forever, even if they're like 300 pounds. Arthur, stop eating cables. You have food. He's picked up some very interesting habits from his cat roommate.

Oh. Yeah. Oh. Like how to paw his food down and attack cables and poke Jay when he wants food. Oh, that's nice. I was like healing from no surgery, like actively just bleeding. And then Justin, like, got pictures of Arthur just like peeking up over me, like, about to tap me for food.

Exactly. I don't care if you're convalescing. I want food. I want to poke you. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Good night.