Editor's note: Check back on September 17 for the full podcast audio.
Observer, Nicholas Russell’s debut novel, begins with Renata, her aunt and her cousin, who live together, receiving a huge shipment of Renata’s mother Corinne’s belongings. The aunt and cousin assume Corinne is dead, and that whoever she’d been living with shipped all this stuff to them as closure. But Renata isn’t convinced her mother is gone, and she sets out on a trip into rural Nevada to find out for sure. The story unfolds from there, and, although it’s a horror novel in generic terms, there’s a lot more going on in this book than creeps and scares. (Although, to be clear, there are also creeps and scares!) I had questions, which I put to Russell for our podcast, Desert Air.
The essence of Observer — a child loses, and then tries to find, her mother — is actually pretty sad. Why start a horror story there?
Observer started at the end, which we really can’t talk about in order to avoid spoilers, but I will say that it did start with an image of Corinne in my head. And for a while the novel was going to follow Corinne, but there was something about her character that was necessarily mysterious. I wanted to preserve that mystery, and that just meant that we had to be a certain distance away from her, and the longer I thought about it, the more it seemed appropriate that the best vantage to get Corinne was from a family member’s perspective.
… In the novel, Corinne has a sister named Tara, and for a little bit I was playing with that perspective, and maybe it would be a novel about sisters, but ultimately I was more compelled by this character that was taking shape that eventually became Renata, and the idea of a parent, and specifically a mother, who doesn’t want to be a parent, and who makes, depending on your point of view, either a very mature decision or a very irrational one to give her child to her sister and sort of abdicate responsibility and the fallout of that. … Renata’s journey throughout the novel, and the novel’s narrative theme, is one of accepting ambiguity, emotional ambiguity, historical ambiguity.
You’ve written widely and thoughtfully about so many things: politics, social issues, film, literature, pop culture, I could go on. How did horror become the vehicle for this story?
It was always going to be a genre novel. I knew that from the beginning, and most of my fiction is what you would call speculative — you know, it’s sort of either vaguely sci-fi or weird fiction or horror, and it’s just a mode I really love. The term gothic kind of gets thrown in with horror these days, and I was reading a lot of gothic literature while I was writing Observer. In my head it reads more to me as a gothic novel, but horror is interesting, especially now because it’s so popular …
And I was interested in writing a novel set in Nevada. I think it’s a perennial point of irritation to talk to people who are interested in reading any kind of literature — whether its fiction or nonfiction — about the state or set in the state, and (they) point to the same three authors, or three books, even. … I think that the desert presents a unique environment for horror to take place in, not only because the landscape is so varied, and so you can have a lot of different kinds of environmental spookiness, but (also because) I am drawn to horror where certain limitations allow you or force you to take certain things into consideration.
Watching is key to the story. The name, Observer, projects this, and the book is full of eyes and spying — the feeling of being seen by unseen forces. I couldn’t help, in my reading, but link this to the ever-present nature of social media and both people’s need to be looked at there, through their photos, and also their inability to look away from it. Am I on to something with that?
The social media aspect, I'll be honest, did not occur to me at all, but I think it makes sense in that there aren’t really phones in this book … The voyeurism comes in a weird way from Renata looking in on her mother’s life through this trove of journals that she gets with the other effects that are delivered to her, and the journey that Renata takes is one where all of the looking that she’s doing is not revealing the things that she wants it to. There’s a parallel there to the function that her photography fulfills, which is almost as an auxiliary kind of memory, like she distrusts subjective experience, and photography is a way of supplanting that mistrust. It’s in some ways more objective, but … she’s still choosing when to take a picture, she’s choosing the angle, she’s choosing how far away she is. There are all these other considerations that place authorship over the images that she’s capturing, and I think over the course of the novel she starts to interrogate what exactly you can know, no matter how much data you’re presented with.
Is there an aspect of ecological apocalypse to this story?
The environmental aspects of the novel are interesting in that it is both a consideration I had and one that I wasn’t trying to push too hard, which is to say, as someone who grew up and lives here, it’s impossible not to be thinking of the environment a little bit at all times, especially in the desert, where concerns about the climate, heat, water, pollution are things we hear about every year. In order to write a novel that, in some ways, is faithful to being set in Nevada, those things just had to be there. Also, in the research I was doing for the novel, these environmental concerns are just completely woven into the history of the state, and … there are passages in the novel that talk about the geological time scale of this part of the country, before it was a country, and how this used to be a vast ocean, and how, from one vantage point of time, things look completely different than they do now … There are other parts in the novel that are dealing with environmental contamination, and the encroachment of industry and the sprawl that is such an integral part of living here. The novel is not set in Vegas; it’s set in a fictional town in Nye County, but a lot of my experience of the city is woven into that, because I think it is also endemic to just every part of the state, no matter where you are.
The story is set in the Mojave Desert, and you’re also a journalist contributing to Defector and many other publications (including Desert Companion). What was the reporting process like — getting that setting right?
This story started with an astrophysics fascination. … Corinne is an astrophysicist at an observatory in this fictional town called McNairy, and the majority, I would say, of my research was based around observatory technology, around telescopes, around the materials that these telescopes are made out of, around what life was like at occupied observatories, because now it’s mostly automated and people don't live there anymore …
… And you know, it was funny because the desert aspects were sort of the easiest parts to write, if only because I come from a pretty outgoing family and have a lot of very outdoorsy friends, and so my childhood up to now has been just wandering around different parts of Mojave. … Where it became fun in terms of plumbing the depths of what I don't know about the state, was the flora and fauna, just like the wide diversity of life in the state. There was so much I just didn’t know, or maybe knew on an intuitive level, but didn’t know the name for things, didn’t know the exact environment in which certain things grow.
