"It's not reassuring when reality mirrors your very dark fiction"

Author Sara Sligar on updating the first American horror novel, switching POVs late in the game, and her timely new novel, VANTAGE POINT

Check out the collection of past Words With (Author) Friends, wherein I g-chat with an author and you get to read over my shoulder, and order Sara’s layered psychological tale, out now.

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Me: Sara, hi!

Sara: Hi Andi!

CONGRATS on all the love and buzz for VANTAGE POINT!

Thank you!

How are you feeling post-launch?

Congratulations on all the buzz for THE LAST FERRY OUT, too!

Thank you! What a time to be writing queer characters and tackling social-justice issues, whew

I'm feeling good! It has been kind of a crazy month since it was also the start of the semester (I'm a professor) and the fires in Los Angeles. So this month [January] has felt 10,000 years long and very hectic.

But it's nice that the book is out in the world and I was very excited to get some lovely reviews!

10,000 years of hecticness—that is visceral.

But yes I've loved seeing all the terrific reviews and seeing it front-and-center at bookstores.

Can you share what the book's about, in your own words?

Sure! It's about an old-money family -- with a curse hanging over their heads -- that's torn apart when a series of possibly deepfaked videos goes viral. They live at an old family estate on a remote island in Maine, so a lot of creepy Gothic things start happening too.

I guess on a thematic level it's about doubt and trust and whose word is seen as more reliable.

I LOVE how you do spooky settings and complex relationships so I am so, so excited to dive into this one.

So much timely stuff in that pitch (especially the deepfakes, an AI nightmare). Where'd the idea come from?

The seed of the idea came from a 1798 novel by Charles Brockden Brown called WIELAND -- the first American horror novel. That novel is about a ventriloquist who has the supernatural ability to imitate each other's voices, and he uses that ability to turn family members against one another. It's a parable for the democratic process (the novel came out in the early days of the American republic, so everyone was very anxious about this new democratic experiment).

In the 2016 presidential election, there was a lot of discussion about fake news and misinformation, and so I started thinking about the parallels between WIELAND and our present day, and wondering if I could do an updated version of that. Then deepfakes entered the chat around 2017 and freaked me out, so I wanted to explore those more. The plot of VANTAGE POINT ended up diverging a lot from the original the more I worked on it, but that was the beginning of the idea.

How interesting! And so wild to revisit that 1798 handwringing about the democratic experiment and to have your book come out riiiiight as Trump takes office...and so many experts (and voters!) fret that this is the end of democracy as we know it.

You said the plot diverged a lot from your original idea—how'd you go about shaping a plot around those seedlings?