PAUL TREMBLAY
IT’S ALWAYS BEEN ONE OF MY BIGGEST FEARS that I would live to see the end of everything,” says Paul Tremblay, speaking to SFX from his Massachusetts home in the middle of lockdown. It’s a singularly peculiar time, and a peculiar interview for him to give, considering that his latest novel, Survivor Song, is set during the outbreak of a virulent and deadly virus. Conceived in the summer of 2018 and completed in October 2019, it’s a prescient novel which talks about the strain put on medical staff, hospital overcrowding and insufficient PPE.
Tremblay has always been preoccupied with the apocalypse: you can see this theme appear time and again in his short stories, and in his last novel, The Cabin At The End Of The World. “I think part of it comes from growing up in the ’80s, where my biggest fear was dying from nuclear war,” he explains. “I think that’s why the first few weeks of the quarantine was really hard to deal with: this book I just wrote, and one of my biggest fears, is happening.”
While it deals with an outbreak, Survivor Song was inspired by a different horror staple, though. “[Earlier book] Head Full Of Ghosts plays with the trope of exorcism and Cabin At The End Of The World plays with home-invasion stories,” says Tremblay. “I thought, ‘What other trope could I play with?’ I wrote down ‘zombies’, and that sparked something that made me think of rabies.”
Though zombies might have been the jumping-off point, don’t expect any shambling undead. After his breakout hit
A Head Full Of Ghosts, a twisty, terrifying and tragic tale of a young girl who might be possessed, Tremblay has made a name for himself as a master of literary horror – or “sad horror” as he laughingly calls it.
“I don’t use ‘literary’ as a term of quality, but as a description of another genre of fiction,” he explains. “Literary fiction really concentrates on character over plot. I do feel like this book is probably my most plot-heavy, though, because it is such a compressed timeline.”
Excluding the prelude, interlude and postlude, the action of Survivor Song takes place over just five or six hours, “almost the time it takes you to read the book in total,” Tremblay points out. It’s a love letter to friendship, following Natalie, a heavily pregnant woman who’s been bitten by an infected man, and her best friend Ramola, a paediatrician who’s trying to get Natalie to a hospital. Like much of Tremblay’s work, it’s lyrical and soaked in poignancy.
“The book sets up that this is not a fairy tale, this is a song,” he explains. “I tried to undercut that at times by referencing Grimm’s Fairy Tales here and there. Whoever succumbs to the virus is speaking gibberish – but the gibberish they’re speaking is lines from Grimm’s.”
The American horror author on his emotional new infection novel
THE MOMENT OF TRUTH
Tremblay is self-deprecating and softly spoken. He lives with his wife, two children and his dog, and his office is filled with cool horror paraphernalia – as well as a whiteboard he panic-bought at the start of the lockdown, to help with his day job as a maths teacher. Though his work is dark and emotional, he finds some comfort in his genre.
“A horror story can be boiled down to the reveal of the terrible truth, and I find hope and value in the shared recognition,” he says. “We know something is terribly wrong, and even if we don’t survive or even if things are awful for a really long time, there’s hope and value in just their shared recognition.”
The book’s pop culture intertextuality includes the frankly devastating return of two characters from Tremblay’s 2017 novel Disappearance At Devil’s Rock, who comment on the action at times as if it’s a movie. He has already had preliminary talks about optioning the book for a film. The Cabin… has been optioned by FilmNation, while a movie of A Head Full Of Ghosts was making headway before the lockdown, with Antlers’ Scott Cooper attached to direct and Once Upon A Time… In Hollywood’s Margaret Qualley set to star. “If all goes well they can start shooting late summer – but who knows,” he says.
Meanwhile, Tremblay is already working on his next novel, which he describes as “a fake memoir, not of me precisely, but maybe an alternate universe me. A different, really disastrous path that I could have taken.”
Easter eggs and references are a preoccupation of the author, with real-world details often brought in; characters at the end of Survivor Song are named after some of his friends, for example, while his dog Holly is a main player in the highly self-reflective story “Notes From The Dogwalkers”. Publishing a book about the outbreak of a virus during a global pandemic has turned out to feel more close-to-home than Tremblay had bargained for though, and he’s sure of one thing: “My next book is definitely not gonna have anything to do with the end of the world!”
Survivor Song is published by Titan Books on 7 July.