The Bright Lands
whose debut novel, The Bright Lands, will be published in July by Hanover Square Press.
JOHN Fram’s debut novel, The Bright Lands, is a gripping exploration of queerness, masculinity, monstrosity, and small-town football. This book is True Detective meets Friday Night Lights but even darker. No, darker than that. The Bright Lands is a deft combination of genres—suspense, horror, comingof-age—that shines a light on the monsters that spread when secrets are hidden for so long they take on a life of their own. I’ve never read anything like it. I had the immense pleasure of reading an early copy of The Bright Lands and the even bigger privilege of discussing it with Fram. A transplant from Waco, Texas, to Manhattan, Fram brings a uniquely tender perspective to a story only he could tell.
What sent you down the road that led to your writing this particular book?
This book grew out of two desires that, from some angles, might seem contradictory. The first was the desire to see a queer hero in a crime story. Who could be a better amateur detective than a gay man, someone who has trained himself from childhood to sniff out other people’s desires, who survives on little signals, codes, secrets? The fact that I had never read a story with a queer hero in the genre made the idea of writing one feel both daunting and incredibly exciting. I knew the second I started, however, that I was on the right path: By centering a narrative around a queer man, I was able to bring into focus a larger cast of misfits, weirdos, and Others, all of whom have the chance to be heroes.
The second desire came out of a simple itch to write about Texas, a state that has complicated opinions of queer heroism, to put it mildly. While I’d left Texas at twenty-five, I never felt like I’d left it. I still dreamed about it, even missed living there more days than not, but I’d like to think I was never too
nostalgic about my old home. As kind as the people there can be, as pleasant and progressive as the cities are, if you’re not a white, straight Christian, you don’t have to go very far to find a town that’s scared to death of you and all that you represent. You can’t ask for a better wellspring of Gothic dread.
An editor once told me that the way to write a truly great book is to scare yourself while you’re writing it. Did anything about this book scare you? How did you handle that fear to get to the place you are now?
I think that most horror is actually rooted in very simple truths. H. P. Lovecraft has been deservedly eviscerated by modern critics as a racist and all-around piece of garbage, but he was right that we are tiny creatures adrift in a vast, unfeeling universe. Stephen King has built a career around the fact that we often can’t protect children from a violent world. Edgar Allan Poe understood that our bodies and our minds will fail us, often when we need them the most.
The horror at the root of The Bright Lands is a simple one: Your home is not safe. If you’re queer, a person of color, a woman, you will always be the first person thrown overboard when a storm hits the ship. You will always be the first subject of suspicion when a corpse turns up in a creek. It took me about four months of hard writing to articulate this, but the moment I realized how deeply this simple fact scared me, it turbocharged the rest of the book. It gave my heroes something to fight against, even if some of them, I knew, would ultimately lose.
The Bright Lands is in many ways a horror story about the way our conception of and adherence to a performance of masculinity can become a poison, for a person and for a community. How has your relationship to masculinity shifted over the course of your life?
You know what’s so gross? I realized the other day that the practice I’d had in hiding who I was— in modulating the way I walk and dress and talk— still has its uses. Even in
Manhattan, strangers treat me with more courtesy when I keep my hands in my pockets, deepen my voice, and pull on the idea of “a man.” While I seldom feel like it’s keeping me safe from physical harm the way such a performance used to, I also remember the years as a kid when I’d forgotten it was a performance at all.
How did it shift while you were writing this book?
Oh, writing this book just made me angrier and angrier. I realized that, after a childhood around Nice American People, I’d come to believe that any pain I endured as an obviously queer man was both deserved and undeserving of concern. Women are implicitly taught this, as are people of color, as is any other Other. Crime fiction is a weirdly conservative genre, one devoted to the purging of a few small undesirable elements from society—a murderer, an arsonist, a thief—so that everyone can return to a safe and secure status quo. The fact is that status quo—a culture of silence, of shame, of normalcy at all costs—is incredibly toxic. I wanted to write a book whose revelations were so shocking they would permanently destroy such a status quo. I wanted to take no prisoners.
This is a dark book that doesn’t shy away from examining how a culture of secrecy hurts queer people and can lead us to hurt one another. How do you hope this project lands with queer readers?
I feel most qualified in talking about other queer, cisgender men, but maybe this answer will apply to others. I sometimes think it’s a testament to our power that queer men are able to function at all. We get the worst from both worlds. As men, we’re raised from birth with the understanding that this planet is made for us, while as queer people we’re taught early on that there’s something wrong with us, that nowhere is made for us. This can lead to entitled, toxic, unhealthy behavior that is just tacitly accepted in queer society. I remember how, when I first started going to gay clubs in my early twenties, I would fear for days that something was wrong with my hair, my clothes, my face, if I wasn’t groped by an older man while I waited for a drink at the bar. It was as if sexual harassment were the best yardstick to my own value—a man wants me, so I must be worth something. If just one young queer person can read The Bright Lands and gain the wherewithal to shut down that sort of behavior in their own life, I’ll be happy.
Secrecy is a hallmark of many stories of queer survival—but secrecy can also serve as an atmosphere that welcomes predatory behavior, because no one can speak up about what’s happening to them. This is especially true when the predators are the only ones who are defining the limits of normalcy. The Bright
Lands engages with this subject in such a careful way that makes space for all the nuances of villainy. Why was that important to you?
Primarily I think I did this because there’s nothing more boring in art than a lazily drawn bigot. Nobody comes out of the womb hating queer people or women or people of color, and there’s a regrettable tendency among well-meaning authors to depict villainous people with toxic opinions— these villains typically come from rural America—as nothing more than “evil.” This might earn you a salutary review in a coastal magazine, but readers from the rest of the country will see right through it; you clearly aren’t engaging with the people they meet every day on the trip to the grocery store. That reader’s pharmacist, hopefully, isn’t Jeffrey Dahmer, but his voting record is arguably far more harmful to far more people. Surely there’s something more frightening in the fact that the villains in The Bright Lands are simply products of the world in which we all live. We can work to understand a person’s awful behavior without excusing it. If we don’t, how will we ever learn how to stop future generations from repeating it?
The cost of secrecy is a major theme in
The Bright Lands. What made you want to explore that theme?
If you want to survive this life, you have to figure out how to keep a secret without letting the secret keep you. Keeping the truth about my sexuality concealed arguably kept me alive in Texas, or at least kept me from enduring even more trauma than I did. When I started writing The Bright Lands, I was sick of the way some sides of queer culture behave as if breaking free of the closet is the panacea to all woes; how ludicrously privileged do you have to be to believe that? Both the heroes and the villains in this book keep secrets, often for good reason. The deck is stacked against most of us, to greater or lesser degrees, and sometimes you have to do things you aren’t proud of just to keep your chips on the table. Does that excuse the awful behavior that some of my characters perform? No. But I felt like it was time to give a more honest account of the challenges we’re up against and the limited tools most of us have to face them.
Let’s talk about queer joy and queer
tragedy. How do you bring those concepts into your work? How do you hope they show up most in The Bright Lands?
It’s funny—even after all that I just said about the need for secrets and the persistence of trauma, I knew that I didn’t want to write a queer tragedy. We have enough of those already, and frankly most of them have come to feel less like tragedy and more like bourgeois self-pity. I don’t have time for that. We have a tyrant to unseat and a patriarchy to shatter.
I’m fortunate that my home state has a mordant sense of humor, and so once I figured out my characters’ voices it was a pleasure to realize how much comedy I could slip into a story so dark. Moreover—and it’s difficult to go into details without spoiling too much—I found that by periodically tapping the brakes in my narrative, I could create little bubbles of space where my characters could find pleasure, satisfaction, success. Our little lives might be small, but they have meaning, and they have joy. If I’m proud of one thing in this book, it is how many people have written to tell me it made them laugh or cheer or swoon, even as it scared the hell out of them.
I worry I haven’t said enough about the terrifying monster that lurks beneath the surface of this story. It is a gorgeous mirror to the monstrosity of several of the characters. What made you choose to include a monster in this book that might or might not be real?
I’ve wondered that myself! Growing up, my two biggest influences were Final Fantasy video games and the Bible, neither of which are known for understated conflict or a fear of metaphor. I think there’s something so powerful in the potential of the supernatural. It’s an elegant way for the writer to organize themes and allows the darkness at the heart of a story to bend the rest of the book, so to speak. As to whether there’s an actual monster in Bentley, however, I’ll leave it to readers to discover that for themselves.
Surely there’s something more frightening in the fact that the villains in The
Bright Lands are simply products of the world in which we all live. We can work to understand a person’s awful behavior without excusing it. If we don’t, how will we ever learn how to stop future generations from repeating it?