the resonance of hunger, and, book deal!
in which i flipflop between officially being a debut novelist and a She Is A Haunting stan account
cutting to the chase: I sold my debut novel!
I came up with the idea for this book on 27 May 2021, when my first manuscript w like it was looking like it was dying in the query trenches. This was the first book I wrote with full awareness of the market and querying; it was also a book I wrote very much for what I needed at the time. They say write the book you want to read:
So — THE DARK WE KNOW is the book that I’ve variously referred to on social media as SpringWIP or Those You’ve Known, its original title—a Spring Awakening and Pied Piper-inspired YA horror about grief, shame and connection that’s sort of like, what if the found family was killed before the book started? What if she was the final girl, but the evil isn’t done yet? What if I took this play/musical about horny German kids in the 1800s and made the angel and wind metaphors about sex an actual entity? What if I took my pandemic depression and yearning for my friends and made it everyone else’s problem?
I’ve just started revisions with my editor, and it’s both strange and comforting to dive back into a book I haven’t touched in a year but have come to know so well. I know these characters like corners of my own heart. This new draft will take them to slightly different places, but it’s the same story at the core of it, and I’m excited to cut even deeper and also make it creepier. At the same time, I’m at a place now where the book isn’t just my own—it’s a collective product shaped by the publishing team as well, and it’s a whole new experience both knowing we’re preparing together to launch it and working collaboratively, as a writer who usually siloes herself.
Last Sunday I was working on the new outline for the revision, and someone I met for coffee asked with genuine confusion why I was working on the weekend. Why indeed. Because I’ve decided to try and monetise my hobby and become perceived, I suppose. But it’s been a strange thing in the past few months where I’m talking about this as a job I do, a thing I am actively working on—I’m also a writer, my book is coming out next year, etc etc—and it’s slowly solidifying into something that feels real. Even as I, admittedly, struggle to find a balance between this and my day job, I always think that this is what I dreamed about as a child.
I’m planning to share more about writing, querying and selling this book as we go! In the meantime, you can:
The resonance of hunger: Food, Asian family, colonialism and diaspora in She Is A Haunting
Speaking of YA horror, SHE IS A HAUNTING by Trang Thanh Tran debuted February 28! Trang is one of my closest writing friends, and totally coincidentally, The Dark We Know and She Is A Haunting share some weirdly niche similarities: they star angry haunted bi Asian girls with bad dads who cook, sleepwalking sisters with locked bathroom scenes, rats in their house, and who end up with a hammer at some point. But I digress—Trang has written a YA horror novel to refresh the genre. It’s about a girl and her estranged dad in a haunted colonial house in Vietnam. It’s about angry final girls; it’s about family, the legacy of French occupation, and it’s about hunger.
I read SIAH while it was still in edits, and right from the first chapter, I was thinking about how much I resonated with food and hunger used as key motifs in a book exploring queerness, colonialism, diaspora, and an Asian family. Fast forward, and The resonance of hunger: Food, Asian family, and colonialism in She Is A Haunting is now on Tor.com! Here’s an excerpt:
"This house eats and is eaten," begins Trang Thanh Tran's debut gothic horror novel She Is A Haunting. The book opens with Jade, a closeted Vietnamese American girl who reluctantly travels to Vietnam for the first time to spend the summer in the colonial house her estranged father is renovating as a B&B–only to find that the house has other ideas.
Along with refurbishments, the house is given a new local name: Nhà Hoa, Flower House. Ba wants to make it their new family home, replanting roots in the country he had to leave as a child. Yet Nhà Hoa’s dark past is still lurking in the too-fertile flowers, the relics of the missing sixth bedroom, Ba's nostalgic white business partners, and the looming portrait of Marion Dupont, original madam of the house–mistress to Jade's great-grandmother, who worked in the house as a child.
Jade believes that the house isn't quite right, but Ba is only convinced she's trying to ruin their new life. He cooks Vietnamese dishes for dinner, the way he used to when the Nguyens were still loving and intact. He is sure they can go back to it if they try. Jade is determined to prove otherwise, even as she also yearns for that family too. Ba is manipulating her with the food in several increasingly sinister ways, but it's also the one thing still tying the family together: the mandatory dinners are the only time the family unites; the kitchen is where conflicts are finally confronted or resolved. Meals remind Jade of warm kitchens on weekends and families that could be. She notes that odd moments like peeling eggs are some of the only times her parents share bits of their families’ pasts. Her mom’s first question on the phone is whether she’s eaten. In the background, unknown relatives laugh over clattering dinner bowls, the family her mother's finally reunited with.
The first time Ba laughs, he and Jade are cooking together and he tells her how her great-grandmother liked the dish. As they prepare the same food, they exist in the same space for a moment, going through the same ritual side by side. When Jade stresses in this rare pocket of happiness, “It’s always water, sugar, lime, garlic, chilli peppers, and fish sauce, but in what order? What amounts? How do I make it perfect the first time?” – you get the sense she’s not only talking about the food. Despite her anger at her father, she simultaneously remembers the man who smiled at her as he taught her how to loop fishing lines, for dishes he cooked best.
But then one night Jade finds a ghost rooting through the fridge with clammy hands. The dead bride, the Vietnamese wife of a French officer who lived in the house, says Don't eat.
You can read the rest on Tor.com here!
currently consuming
The Saint of Bright Doors by Vajra Chandrasekera — dense but fantastical and makes my mind spin in a good way; a strange, voice-driven genre blend that reminds me somehow of the Locked Tomb series
Weekly episodes of The Last of Us, The Bad Batch and The Mandalorian
I recently read the latest Wayward Children entry from Seanan McGuire, Lost in the Moment and Found, which was one of my favourites in the series yet
And I just finished If These Wings Could Fly by Kyrie McCauley — gorgeous and powerful; instantly one of my new favourite YA contemporaries (with a spec bent — can we get more of this genre please)