RYAN LA SALA ON THE HONEYS
The novel takes place in a very traditional setting for horror stories and thrillers: summer camp. What about that setting intrigued you and made it the best fit for this particular story?
Summer camps are intriguing because they’re such paradoxes; they purport to be these encounters with nature in community, but they’re completely constructed and the wilderness is illusory, or at least it hopes to be, because it’s supposed to be safe. But the fact of the matter is, summer camps also try to give kids the opportunity to push their own boundaries. As a kid at summer camp I loved exploring new identities. I was a total liar. I would show up at camp and I would just invent a new person to be every year, and that gave me a lot of agency when it came to my own identity of exploration. At the same time, though, it rendered me very vulnerable, because I was exploring my own queer identity, much in the same way that Mars is in the flashbacks.
Camps are set up around a binary for the protection of their children, but what if you’re a child who doesn’t fit into that binary? And what’s between the boys’ and girls’ camps? Well, wilderness, the woods, places where you’re vulnerable. It’s very much a metaphor for Mars’s position in between the two safe nodes. But it’s also a real-life gauntlet for children who don’t necessarily fit within that. I loved camp, I had a great experience at camp. But I also had some pretty dangerous ones. And I wanted to pull on all of that because I didn’t want it to be demonizing to summer camp. I did want to sort of peel back the candied nostalgia that a lot of people have around it and report on the stuff that actually happens there.