Lauren Beukes is a South African writer who made a splash with her first two novels, Moxyland and Zoo City, stories set in a Johannesburg full of futuristic technology, magic and much more. Last year Beukes also wrote a story arc of the Vertigo comic Fairest where she told the story of Rapunzel and tied her tale to Japanese folklore. The collection, Fairest: Hidden Kingdom will be out in July.
Beukes new novel, The Shining Girls, tells the story of a serial killer who stumbles onto a way to jump through time and crosses decades in Twentieth century Chicago hunting down women with great promise. Its an intense thriller, but it also demonstrates Beukes incredible skill of depicting different time periods and describing vivid characters. Its weird, unsettling, colorful and fun and we chatted over skype while she visited the U.S.
ALEX DUEBEN: Where did this idea of a time traveling serial killer start?
LAUREN BEUKES: Obviously there are all kinds of subconscious influences, but it started with a throwaway tweet. I was messing around on twitter and for once that paid off. [laughs] I say that, but Ive met a lot of great people on twitter; I think twitter is really great generally. I was having a random conversation with a random stranger and I said oh, I should write a book about a time-traveling serial killer. Then I thought, no wait, I should. That would be amazing. I thought I could have a lot of fun with it and do some interesting things with it. It wouldnt be Jack the Ripper stalking Shakespeare and Hitler.
AD: The book is set in Chicago over roughly sixty years. Why Chicago?
LB: I knew I couldnt set it in South Africa, which is obviously where Im from and where my previous two books were set. Because I was interested in the Twentieth Century and how the Twentieth Century was shaped, if I set it in South Africa, it would immediately become an Apartheid story and that would have just overwhelmed absolutely everything. I was thinking about cities where Ive lived because I really feel strongly about being as authentic as possible. I think cities have personalities. Ive lived in New York, but New York seemed kind of overplayed. The other places Ive spent a lot of time in were London and Chicago and Chicago just felt right. It has a lot of similar issues to South Africa. Its one of the most racially segregated cities in America. Theres violence and crime and corruption. And Chicago is just a great place, its the birthplace of modernism and the skyscraper. Its a bright shining city but with all these problems as well. And the more I got into the history, the more right it felt.
Its a wonderful really amazing city. I went back for a research trip last year for two weeks and I interviewed a whole bunch of people from cops to historians to architects and people were incredibly giving and generous. Im a big believer, as an ex-journalist, of stealing real stuff because real stuff is really good. Its often better than anything you can make up. There was a real life radium girl, a glow girl who danced in radium paint. I actually lifted some quotes directly from the story that the Milwaukee Sentinel had done on her. It was from 1936 and so I changed her name and moved it to 1931 but I kept some of the original dialogue from the interview including all the crazy French stuff like zee boys, I tell them I love them. That was in the original article. I e-mailed the Sentinel and said, can I quote it and they said absolutely.
AD: This idea, of jumping from one decade to another and killing young women with possibility, essentially
LB: Its very nasty.
AD: it is and its easy to think about it in terms of metaphor and the Twentieth century. How did that aspect of the book come from?
LB: Obviously Im working within the serial killer genre which means that there are certain rules you have to play by. It also reflects that I did a lot of research into real serial killers. Ive had some people comment on, we never get to know why Harper does it or understand him, but if you look at real serial killers a lot of them dont know why they dont have any real idea. Its often just a compulsive act and theyre often impotent and losers and are using violence as a way of expressing themselves in the world and finding some kind of power in the world. The Hannibal Lecter model is very appealing, but its a pop culture model. Thats generally not what serial killers are. Im not saying we can rule out that, but for the most part, theyre not. Theyre empty-headed violent losers and we see them as monsters but theyre not. Thats why I had to up the violence as well. Serial killers always have a type that they look for. I thought what if it wasnt a physical type, what if it was a characteristic or a personality and thats where I came up with the idea of these remarkable women.
Since I had the idea of time traveling serial killer, I had this mental image of Harper limping across the grass to little girl Kirby playing and giving her this impossible present, this pony which didnt exist yet. I knew that he would take totems from the other women and then had to figure out what those totems were, and who the women might be, and do research. I knew I wanted to do something about activism and the womens movement. There is obviously the straight literal reading that this man kills all these different women and you can read it as a straight thriller, but I did want it to be allegorical as well. And it is. One review talked about how hes almost the spirit of misogyny come to life. I think thats a valid reading. But it also comes out of how we look at victims and how often, especially in crime fiction, its a sexy girl with her blond hair spilling into a pool of blood and one high heel cast off and thats all we know about her. She is the sum of her wounds and a bloody puzzle. In the news shes a statistic. We never get to know the victim, so it was really important to me that we get to know the victims and also that the violent scenes be told from their perspective. That were not complicit in the action. That were not riding along the killers shoulder and kind of getting off on it. Its from their perspective and its about how scared they are and how tragic it is and what theyre going through at that moment. We need to keep in mind that every dead woman we see on the news was someone and she went through this experience and shying away from that titillation factor.
AD: You mentioned that your next novel is set in Detroit and if Chicago is the American city thats prospered in the past few decades, Detroit is the one that has not.
LB: Its the birth and death and possible resurrection of the American dream. Its also my sneaky way of writing about Hillbrow again, which is where my second book Zoo City was set, which is in the inner city of Johannesburg. People have preconceptions of a place from the outside. Its also what you see on the news. I went to London just after the London riots and the South African government actually issued a warning saying we recommend that South Africans not travel to London. I get to London and Im nervous and Im texting my friends, where shouldnt I go and they were like, what are you talking about? Its the same with South Africa. Everyone sees the high crime stats and Oscar Pastorius and think its such a violent society well every mugging story you tell me I can tell you 5,000 people who have never been mugged. Zoo City was about looking at inner city Johannesburg and Hillbrow this community that was apparently hell on earth where paramedics are afraid to go into but its also a community where people live. And yes there is all this stuff happening, but I wanted to play with those preconceptions and subvert them. But Im also very interested in dreaming generally and a citys unconscious. Its going to be a strange book. [laughs] I think all my books are strange books.
AD: Youre fascinated with cities and I think you can look at the history of the novel as being very much about a history of the city in the modern era.
LB: Absolutely. In novels you have to have conflict and you have to have drama which have much more resonance in cities. Of course you can have really interesting rural stories or suburban stories, But I grew up in cities. I grew up in Johannesburg which gets talked about as the New York of Africa and it is this incredible clash of culture and economics and class. We have a Lebanese population, a Jewish population, Cameroonians and Zimbabweans and everyone living together in one place. Thats really interesting. I find cities electric and a reflection of where we are right now and where were going. Its a microcosm of all our problems and each city will have resonances with other cities. Every city has its good neighborhood and its poor neighborhood and hipster gentrified one.
AD: I remember reading Zoo City and a lot of the conversation tended to be, its from a South African writer and its a little different. The same kind of conversation happened when the movie District 9 was released. Were there moments reading things where you thought, its strange and fantastic because its a strange and fantastic story, not because Im South African?
LB: Yeah, its preconceptions of what science fiction is. I think the fact that it was in Johannesburgand people werent that familiar with the city or not familiar with it outside of the horrible crime stories or riot footage from the Apartheid erapeople reacted very strongly to it. And the fact that I wrote real Johannesburg. If you go there you will recognize all of that. I just added a layer of magic on top of it. Everything else is all real and genuine. I think people responded to that, that this place is so strange but again resonances with what Im familiar with. That distorting lens that fantastic fiction does so well, distorting it just enough to give you that extra level of distance to re-engage with something thats become tired or that youre fatigued about. If I had written a book just about refugees and criminals and 419 scamsI could have written that as an absolutely straight storyI dont think it would have been as fun.
AD: How did you end up writing a story arc of Fairest and writing about Rapunzel.
LB: I met Bill at WorldCon in 2009. It was the first convention Id ever been to. Being in South Africa everything is so far away and really expensive. I was there for Moxyland. I was having this conversation with this guy at the bar. I think Paul Cornell introduced us. He introduced himself as Bill and about halfway through the conversation I realize its Bill Willingham and Im like, oh fuck. [laughs] I need three more scotches to be able to continue this conversation. I think he felt sorry for me because I was very nervous about my reading so he came along as moral support but I saw his face change as I was reading from youre a fun person to hang out with to hey maybe you might actually have it. After that he sent me a text message saying I had to go see his editor in New York, Shelly Bond at Vertigo. I was like, what are you talking about? I mean Ive always loved comics. I grew up with 2000 A.D. The American comics didnt come in so regularly so you couldnt follow stuff sequentially, but I read what I could when I could. I go to see Shelly and Im completely nervous and she was really nice and amazing and we got on fabulously. She came back to me a couple weeks later and said Bill and I want you to pitch on this new idea. Which of the female characters would you like to do a story? I said Goldilocks because shes batshit insane. [laughs] Bill was using her in Jack of Fables at the time and said no, so he said, what about Rapunzel? She would come up on the message boards a lot because shed only been in a four page story. I thought about it and I think they were hoping Id pitch something African but the fact that Rapunzel is all about the hair and Japanese horror is all about the hair just felt like it couldnt be a coincidence. And to be able to bust open this whole world of Japanese fables and to be able to create new characters was amazing and irresistible.
AD: What was it like working with Shelly Bond and artist Inaki Miranda?
LB: Its way more fun than writing novels, let me tell you. Though, if I could only chose one form for the rest of my life it would be novels. It was super fun. Its really fun to collaborate and Inaki Miranda was incredible to work with and really patient with me. We had a big fight and it was over something really silly. I write the script and Shelly approves it and edits it and her suggestions are often, do want to change this line? Im like, yes, thats what I meant, glad you see that. [laughs] Then it goes to Inaki and does pencil sketches and a very basic layout and we discuss whether that works or not. He sent this one sketch back where Rapunzel has hooked up with Tomoko, the Kitsune, whos a female fox fairy. I sent Inaki an email back saying, dude, thats really beautiful and really cool, but honestly, we cant show them scissoring. I got a bit preachy about sex in comic books and he wrote back this very nuanced long e-mail about how he agrees and sex in comic books should be handled with care and much more about the erotic rather than just boobs everywhere. Finally got to the end and he was like, and theyre not scissoring, its her tail. [laughs] Then it became a running joke. I would say, is that panda scissoring Jack? [laughs]
AD: Do you want to say anything about your new book?
LB: No, Im still figuring it out. Its called Bright Monsters. Its set in Detroit and these weird bodies start turning up. Its about a female police detective whos trying to deal with this and her relationship with her daughter. Its so nice to be back in the Twenty-first century and to have the internet available and the full repercussions of that. Obviously in The Shining Girls I set the end in 1993 because I didnt want to deal with Kirby having a cell phone or more importantly for her to be able to post a picture of the 1943 baseball card online and have reddit and 4chan solve the case in four days flat. Lets face it, If that kind of evidence showed up now shed be able to create a website dedicated to it and have victims families be able to contact her. It would be so easy to deal with now. And use CCTV cameras and google earth to find the house. Its very nice to be back and be able to play with all of that.
Beukes new novel, The Shining Girls, tells the story of a serial killer who stumbles onto a way to jump through time and crosses decades in Twentieth century Chicago hunting down women with great promise. Its an intense thriller, but it also demonstrates Beukes incredible skill of depicting different time periods and describing vivid characters. Its weird, unsettling, colorful and fun and we chatted over skype while she visited the U.S.
ALEX DUEBEN: Where did this idea of a time traveling serial killer start?
LAUREN BEUKES: Obviously there are all kinds of subconscious influences, but it started with a throwaway tweet. I was messing around on twitter and for once that paid off. [laughs] I say that, but Ive met a lot of great people on twitter; I think twitter is really great generally. I was having a random conversation with a random stranger and I said oh, I should write a book about a time-traveling serial killer. Then I thought, no wait, I should. That would be amazing. I thought I could have a lot of fun with it and do some interesting things with it. It wouldnt be Jack the Ripper stalking Shakespeare and Hitler.
AD: The book is set in Chicago over roughly sixty years. Why Chicago?
LB: I knew I couldnt set it in South Africa, which is obviously where Im from and where my previous two books were set. Because I was interested in the Twentieth Century and how the Twentieth Century was shaped, if I set it in South Africa, it would immediately become an Apartheid story and that would have just overwhelmed absolutely everything. I was thinking about cities where Ive lived because I really feel strongly about being as authentic as possible. I think cities have personalities. Ive lived in New York, but New York seemed kind of overplayed. The other places Ive spent a lot of time in were London and Chicago and Chicago just felt right. It has a lot of similar issues to South Africa. Its one of the most racially segregated cities in America. Theres violence and crime and corruption. And Chicago is just a great place, its the birthplace of modernism and the skyscraper. Its a bright shining city but with all these problems as well. And the more I got into the history, the more right it felt.
Its a wonderful really amazing city. I went back for a research trip last year for two weeks and I interviewed a whole bunch of people from cops to historians to architects and people were incredibly giving and generous. Im a big believer, as an ex-journalist, of stealing real stuff because real stuff is really good. Its often better than anything you can make up. There was a real life radium girl, a glow girl who danced in radium paint. I actually lifted some quotes directly from the story that the Milwaukee Sentinel had done on her. It was from 1936 and so I changed her name and moved it to 1931 but I kept some of the original dialogue from the interview including all the crazy French stuff like zee boys, I tell them I love them. That was in the original article. I e-mailed the Sentinel and said, can I quote it and they said absolutely.
AD: This idea, of jumping from one decade to another and killing young women with possibility, essentially
LB: Its very nasty.
AD: it is and its easy to think about it in terms of metaphor and the Twentieth century. How did that aspect of the book come from?
LB: Obviously Im working within the serial killer genre which means that there are certain rules you have to play by. It also reflects that I did a lot of research into real serial killers. Ive had some people comment on, we never get to know why Harper does it or understand him, but if you look at real serial killers a lot of them dont know why they dont have any real idea. Its often just a compulsive act and theyre often impotent and losers and are using violence as a way of expressing themselves in the world and finding some kind of power in the world. The Hannibal Lecter model is very appealing, but its a pop culture model. Thats generally not what serial killers are. Im not saying we can rule out that, but for the most part, theyre not. Theyre empty-headed violent losers and we see them as monsters but theyre not. Thats why I had to up the violence as well. Serial killers always have a type that they look for. I thought what if it wasnt a physical type, what if it was a characteristic or a personality and thats where I came up with the idea of these remarkable women.
Since I had the idea of time traveling serial killer, I had this mental image of Harper limping across the grass to little girl Kirby playing and giving her this impossible present, this pony which didnt exist yet. I knew that he would take totems from the other women and then had to figure out what those totems were, and who the women might be, and do research. I knew I wanted to do something about activism and the womens movement. There is obviously the straight literal reading that this man kills all these different women and you can read it as a straight thriller, but I did want it to be allegorical as well. And it is. One review talked about how hes almost the spirit of misogyny come to life. I think thats a valid reading. But it also comes out of how we look at victims and how often, especially in crime fiction, its a sexy girl with her blond hair spilling into a pool of blood and one high heel cast off and thats all we know about her. She is the sum of her wounds and a bloody puzzle. In the news shes a statistic. We never get to know the victim, so it was really important to me that we get to know the victims and also that the violent scenes be told from their perspective. That were not complicit in the action. That were not riding along the killers shoulder and kind of getting off on it. Its from their perspective and its about how scared they are and how tragic it is and what theyre going through at that moment. We need to keep in mind that every dead woman we see on the news was someone and she went through this experience and shying away from that titillation factor.
AD: You mentioned that your next novel is set in Detroit and if Chicago is the American city thats prospered in the past few decades, Detroit is the one that has not.
LB: Its the birth and death and possible resurrection of the American dream. Its also my sneaky way of writing about Hillbrow again, which is where my second book Zoo City was set, which is in the inner city of Johannesburg. People have preconceptions of a place from the outside. Its also what you see on the news. I went to London just after the London riots and the South African government actually issued a warning saying we recommend that South Africans not travel to London. I get to London and Im nervous and Im texting my friends, where shouldnt I go and they were like, what are you talking about? Its the same with South Africa. Everyone sees the high crime stats and Oscar Pastorius and think its such a violent society well every mugging story you tell me I can tell you 5,000 people who have never been mugged. Zoo City was about looking at inner city Johannesburg and Hillbrow this community that was apparently hell on earth where paramedics are afraid to go into but its also a community where people live. And yes there is all this stuff happening, but I wanted to play with those preconceptions and subvert them. But Im also very interested in dreaming generally and a citys unconscious. Its going to be a strange book. [laughs] I think all my books are strange books.
AD: Youre fascinated with cities and I think you can look at the history of the novel as being very much about a history of the city in the modern era.
LB: Absolutely. In novels you have to have conflict and you have to have drama which have much more resonance in cities. Of course you can have really interesting rural stories or suburban stories, But I grew up in cities. I grew up in Johannesburg which gets talked about as the New York of Africa and it is this incredible clash of culture and economics and class. We have a Lebanese population, a Jewish population, Cameroonians and Zimbabweans and everyone living together in one place. Thats really interesting. I find cities electric and a reflection of where we are right now and where were going. Its a microcosm of all our problems and each city will have resonances with other cities. Every city has its good neighborhood and its poor neighborhood and hipster gentrified one.
AD: I remember reading Zoo City and a lot of the conversation tended to be, its from a South African writer and its a little different. The same kind of conversation happened when the movie District 9 was released. Were there moments reading things where you thought, its strange and fantastic because its a strange and fantastic story, not because Im South African?
LB: Yeah, its preconceptions of what science fiction is. I think the fact that it was in Johannesburgand people werent that familiar with the city or not familiar with it outside of the horrible crime stories or riot footage from the Apartheid erapeople reacted very strongly to it. And the fact that I wrote real Johannesburg. If you go there you will recognize all of that. I just added a layer of magic on top of it. Everything else is all real and genuine. I think people responded to that, that this place is so strange but again resonances with what Im familiar with. That distorting lens that fantastic fiction does so well, distorting it just enough to give you that extra level of distance to re-engage with something thats become tired or that youre fatigued about. If I had written a book just about refugees and criminals and 419 scamsI could have written that as an absolutely straight storyI dont think it would have been as fun.
AD: How did you end up writing a story arc of Fairest and writing about Rapunzel.
LB: I met Bill at WorldCon in 2009. It was the first convention Id ever been to. Being in South Africa everything is so far away and really expensive. I was there for Moxyland. I was having this conversation with this guy at the bar. I think Paul Cornell introduced us. He introduced himself as Bill and about halfway through the conversation I realize its Bill Willingham and Im like, oh fuck. [laughs] I need three more scotches to be able to continue this conversation. I think he felt sorry for me because I was very nervous about my reading so he came along as moral support but I saw his face change as I was reading from youre a fun person to hang out with to hey maybe you might actually have it. After that he sent me a text message saying I had to go see his editor in New York, Shelly Bond at Vertigo. I was like, what are you talking about? I mean Ive always loved comics. I grew up with 2000 A.D. The American comics didnt come in so regularly so you couldnt follow stuff sequentially, but I read what I could when I could. I go to see Shelly and Im completely nervous and she was really nice and amazing and we got on fabulously. She came back to me a couple weeks later and said Bill and I want you to pitch on this new idea. Which of the female characters would you like to do a story? I said Goldilocks because shes batshit insane. [laughs] Bill was using her in Jack of Fables at the time and said no, so he said, what about Rapunzel? She would come up on the message boards a lot because shed only been in a four page story. I thought about it and I think they were hoping Id pitch something African but the fact that Rapunzel is all about the hair and Japanese horror is all about the hair just felt like it couldnt be a coincidence. And to be able to bust open this whole world of Japanese fables and to be able to create new characters was amazing and irresistible.
AD: What was it like working with Shelly Bond and artist Inaki Miranda?
LB: Its way more fun than writing novels, let me tell you. Though, if I could only chose one form for the rest of my life it would be novels. It was super fun. Its really fun to collaborate and Inaki Miranda was incredible to work with and really patient with me. We had a big fight and it was over something really silly. I write the script and Shelly approves it and edits it and her suggestions are often, do want to change this line? Im like, yes, thats what I meant, glad you see that. [laughs] Then it goes to Inaki and does pencil sketches and a very basic layout and we discuss whether that works or not. He sent this one sketch back where Rapunzel has hooked up with Tomoko, the Kitsune, whos a female fox fairy. I sent Inaki an email back saying, dude, thats really beautiful and really cool, but honestly, we cant show them scissoring. I got a bit preachy about sex in comic books and he wrote back this very nuanced long e-mail about how he agrees and sex in comic books should be handled with care and much more about the erotic rather than just boobs everywhere. Finally got to the end and he was like, and theyre not scissoring, its her tail. [laughs] Then it became a running joke. I would say, is that panda scissoring Jack? [laughs]
AD: Do you want to say anything about your new book?
LB: No, Im still figuring it out. Its called Bright Monsters. Its set in Detroit and these weird bodies start turning up. Its about a female police detective whos trying to deal with this and her relationship with her daughter. Its so nice to be back in the Twenty-first century and to have the internet available and the full repercussions of that. Obviously in The Shining Girls I set the end in 1993 because I didnt want to deal with Kirby having a cell phone or more importantly for her to be able to post a picture of the 1943 baseball card online and have reddit and 4chan solve the case in four days flat. Lets face it, If that kind of evidence showed up now shed be able to create a website dedicated to it and have victims families be able to contact her. It would be so easy to deal with now. And use CCTV cameras and google earth to find the house. Its very nice to be back and be able to play with all of that.