The South African novelist Lauren Beukes has one twisted imagination. Best known in America for “The Shining Girls,” her 2013 novel about a time-traveling serial killer in Chicago, Beukes is now following it up with “Broken Monsters,” which begins with a Detroit detective examining a bizarre discovery: the upper body of a young boy that has somehow been grafted on the lower body of a deer.
As Detective Gabriella Versado, a freelance journalist named Jonno and a homeless man known as TK try to solve this frightful mystery and even more horrible discoveries to come, Beukes takes the reader on a remarkable tour of Motor City in all its devastated grandeur. Along the way, we glimpse the complexity, resilience and hope of its people, even in the midst of mounting dread inspired by events both natural and supernatural.
Printers Row Journal recently caught up with Beukes, 38 — whose “Shining Girls” is being developed as a television movie by Leonardo DiCaprio’s Appian Way Productions — for a Skype interview from her home in Cape Town. Here’s an edited transcript of our chat.
Q: After reading the first pages of “Broken Monsters,” my first thought was, “Man, this is messed up.” Those weren’t the exact words, but this is a family newspaper.
A: (Laughs.) Got it.
Q: Really, how do you come up with this stuff? You are a very strange woman, Lauren Beukes.
A: (Laughs.) The book started with that image, actually — a female detective finding this body, the boy and the deer. I remember wondering how this could have happened, and thinking, “What the hell have I got into?” It’s hard to talk about the book without major spoilers, but the answer has to do with dreams. Somebody actually tweeted at me the other day, “You’ve basically killed Mr. Tumnus from Narnia.” And I thought that was a very insightful reading.
Q: Mr. Tumnus, for those unfamiliar with C.S. Lewis’ “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” is a faun with the head and torso of a young man.
A: That’s right. He’s the first person the kids meet when they go through the wardrobe into Narnia, and of course that’s entering a door into a fantasyland. My story is something similar, except it goes horribly wrong.
Q: Of course there have been a number of films that take the idea of dreams manifesting in the real world: “A Nightmare on Elm Street” being the classic one, but more recently —
A: “Inception,” absolutely. And I was interested in exploring all aspects of that, every meaning of the word “dream” — the American Dream and “dream big” — as well as the subconscious. I was also thinking about how the Internet ties into the subconscious. There’s an idea out there that compares the Internet and dreaming, to the places where the subconscious can vent.
Q: It’s easy to be anonymous on the Internet. It’s often pointed out how nasty people can be online, but it’s also possible that that’s how we really are without the filters that civilization provides.
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A: Yes. When I was writing the book, I was collecting a lot of images on my Tumblr of obfuscated faces and people wearing masks, these very dreamy distortions of our appearance, and I started thinking about how we can become lost within ourselves and on the Internet. We can be playing a game on the Internet, pretending to be someone we’re not and using that anonymous shield, and be subsumed by desire or ambition. And so the book is to some extent about what that can do for us, and do to us.
Q: Your previous novel, “The Shining Girls,” was set in Chicago, and the new one is in Detroit. Why Detroit?
A: Because it’s the symbol of the birth and death of the American Dream. It’s kind of the go-to metaphor for the recession and industrial waste and the way our civilization is collapsing in on itself. A lot of people hold up Detroit as a symbol of everything that’s wrong with America. What all cities have in common is crime and corruption, but Detroit in particular was once the shining city, and now people see it as a terrible ruin. But it’s home for a lot of people. It’s where they live their lives and have their families and their jobs and their dreams and their hopes for the future. And so I wanted to get under the skin of the easy cliché, to explore what Detroit is really like beyond the hipster ruin-porn aesthetic and people who really just want to see it as a devastated city.
Q: Ruin porn?
A: Yes, a lot of what you see of Detroit on the Internet are beautiful pictures of abandoned homes, which are haunting and striking and evocative and devastating. But that’s not the whole story. Recently I met a very smart, liberal gallery curator from New York, and I was trying to tell him about Detroit, about how there’s an interesting artistic scene there, and it’s a really inspiring, interesting, complicated place. And he was like, “No. Detroit is ruined, it’s a mess, there’s no going back, everyone’s fleeing it, it’s just horrible.” And he didn’t want to hear otherwise. He only wanted to believe the easy clichés.
Q: One of the early scenes in the book shows a family being forced to abandon their home after a foreclosure; a homeless guy named TK is right there, even before they leave, to strip the house of anything valuable left behind. In some ways that’s the ultimate American nightmare.
A: Before I signed the contract for “The Shining Girls,” I didn’t know how I was going to pay for my own house. I didn’t know how I was going to pay my mortgage, because I was really broke. So that resonates with me, this idea of losing your home. But that idea of home is also a sort of idealism, an idea of who we are and what we stand for.
Q: I hope you won’t take offense, but might there be other reasons for your choice of American settings for your last two novels? It occurs to me that an American book-buyer might be more inclined to purchase a novel set in the United States as opposed to, say, South Africa.
A: It is definitely more commercial, and my American publisher actually specified that they wanted the second book to be set in America. But I don’t feel like I’ve compromised myself in any way, or the story in any way. I feel the story belongs in Detroit. I might return to South Africa for future books, and I might not.
Q: Did you spend time in Detroit?
A: Yes, I did two research trips, one at the beginning of the novel and one after I finished the first draft. I hung out with Detroit homicide detectives, with teenagers, artists, photographers and so on. I got driven around in a funeral-home van by an artist friend. I went into abandoned buildings. I worked in a soup kitchen and spoke to people who were living on the street; a lot of TK’s story is based on a man I met there. But I also hung out in Eastern Market with artists and went to amazing parties and saw a whole other side of Detroit. There’s more research and reality in this book than in any of my previous books.
Q: In telling the story, you use what’s known as the “shotgun” point of view — which is to say, it’s told from the perspective of the particular character who’s directly involved in the action at that point. What are the advantages and disadvantages of that?
A: I think the advantages of that are you can leave spaces for the reader to see how the characters’ perspectives are distorted — which of course is reality; we all have slightly different perspectives on how events play out. It’s interesting to play with the idea of an unreliable narrator and to see how wrong some characters are. Somebody described my books as literary puzzles that the reader has to work a little bit to put together. The disadvantage, of course, is that you might leave the reader confused, or that the reader might not be able to fill in the gaps. So it’s a tightrope, and I hope I’ve managed to walk it.
Q: “The Shining Girls” was a kind of genre mashup: a serial killer novel and also a time-travel novel —
A: And a historical novel.
Q: Right. “Broken Monsters” is both a detective story and a horror story with elements of the supernatural. What’s the appeal for you in mixing genres?
A: I guess it’s because I read very widely, across genres and writers and literary conventions and styles. Although I never set out to take, say, the Western and add aliens.
Q: Someone did that very thing in a movie.
A: “Cowboys & Aliens,” yes. I wish I hadn’t seen it. It was terrible. (Laughs.) But it just seems natural to bring in everything I’m interested in. And I think that using weird elements, elements of the fantastic allows me to play with reality in an interesting way. And I think in society, we have issue fatigue. Look at what’s happening in the world right now, from Gaza to Ferguson to Syria to Ebola. It’s really hectic out there and exhausting. So by twisting reality slightly, I can still talk about the big issues in a way that doesn’t automatically turn you off. It’s a distorting lens, which allows us to see more clearly.
Q: But counterintuitively, in a way, you’ve written a horror novel here.
A: (Laughs.) Well, you know, we need to confront fear. A lot of these issues going on around the world right now are about humanity at their worst. People often talk about monsters — “Oh, that man is such a monster, he murdered all those people. He’s inhuman. How could he do that?” But the fact of the matter is, there aren’t any monsters. It’s only us and everything we’re capable of. And I think we absolutely have to look that in the eye, unflinchingly. We have to confront the darkness, and stare at the abyss, and find that the only thing staring back is us, and what we do, the good and the bad. And we have to find a way of living with that — of living with ourselves, and also attacking it.
Q: One of your chapter titles in “Broken Monsters” is “Unspeakable Things.” Which is ironic, because you do speak the unspeakable in your book.
A: There’s that whole idea that if you name something, you take away its power, but I don’t necessarily think that’s true. You can name something, and it’s still big and scary and horrible. But you still have to face it.
Kevin Nance is a Chicago-based freelance writer and photographer. Twitter: @KevinNance1.
“Broken Monsters”
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By Lauren Beukes, Mulholland, 442 pages, $26