 |
|
| (photo: Anne Raftopoulos) | |
Owen King is the author of Double Feature and We're All in This Together, and co-author, with his father, Stephen King, of the horror novel Sleeping Beauties. His writing has also appeared in various magazines and journals, including a short story in Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet that inspired his third solo book, The Curator (Scribner, March 7, 2023), a fantastical tale of a city on the brink of revolution and a woman making her way between worlds. King lives in upstate New York with his wife, novelist Kelly Braffet, and their cats, described below.
You've spoken before about your growth as a writer--and editor of your own work--over time. Did the process for The Curator feel different from your previous books?
The process of writing The Curator was a little different initially, because it was based on a short story called "The Curator" that I published a few years ago in the wonderful magazine Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet. The story was its own, fully realized piece, but it was tightly contained; there were all these shadowy implications in the background, and I could see the shape of a bigger, wilder narrative that I wanted to tell. I also just really loved the main character, D, and the way she handled herself, her bravery and her secrets.
It's hard not to love D! What was it like to develop the short story into a full-length novel?
Once I committed myself to an attempt to tell that bigger, wilder narrative, it did take a little while for the novel to sort of absorb the story and move beyond it. The book is based on the short story, but I want to add that, ultimately, they only share a few elements, and even the elements they do share are often altered in significant ways.
The "bigger, wilder narrative" is just that--big and wild, fantastical and horrific and marvelous all at once. With so much wildness, not just in the imagined city against which the novel is set but also in the storyline itself, how do you describe this story to folks who ask what you're working on?
It's a challenge! That said, D is at the heart of the novel, and her narrative is the book's mainline, so probably the simplest way to describe The Curator is as the story of a domestic servant in a familiar but unnamed Victorian city who discovers a supernatural conspiracy.
Noting that your past works have been widely described as comical and The Curator, while it has moments of a biting kind of humor, is quite dark--what, if anything, felt different going into this story idea?
The fantastical elements of The Curator are front and center, as is the quasi-Victorian milieu; I'm not sure I've ever written anything that's so much of a "yarn." At the same time, I do hope that readers feel like the characters are "real," that their hardships and their desires and their senses of humor ring true. In that sense, The Curator is like any other fiction: its transportive pleasures depend on how compelling the characters are to begin with.
Fiction has that unique power to transport, as you mentioned, while also inviting new ways of thinking about our world and our lives within it. The Curator poses some big questions about power, voice, work and storytelling. Were there ideas or curiosities you hoped to inspire in D's story?
The world D inhabits doesn't think much of her--in fact, it often doesn't think of her at all. She's consistently underestimated and overlooked. There's so much to D, these great strengths and sorrows, and I hope readers respond to her point of view, and root for her, and feel like the narrative does her justice.
There are so many layers built into the world of The Curator and the city that you describe as unmappable... did you map it in any way in your head as part of the writing?
The city is dense and sprawling, a combination of late 19th-century London and late 19th-century New York, but most of the action takes place at a few key locations, so I had a concrete plan for where those important spots were in relation to each other, and that informed my mental map.
There's a fairly epic scope to the cast of this novel: Did you have a favorite to write and/or a favorite because you'd want to hang out with them?
D is absolutely my favorite character to write, probably ever. Her point of view is a pleasure to adopt: I greatly enjoy seeing the way she sees, the clarity of her observations, the specific tilt of her imagination.
Most of the characters in the book are a handful! There are not many I would like to hang out with, although they have their charms. There's an important character named Ike, a teenage thief who becomes friends with D, who would be fun to spend an afternoon with, although at some point we'd probably end up running from constables. There's also an animal character, the mascot of a luxury hotel, a cat named Talmadge XVII, who plays a crucial role, and I'd like to meet her. She'd be indifferent to meeting me, however.
Noting the ways you've woven cats into the narrative, I'm curious: Do you have a cat? Are you a cat person? A dog person? (Must we choose?)
My family has two tabby cats, Barney and Frankie, who are not very alike, but get along beautifully. Barney's a gentle older fellow, and Frankie's kind of a wild card. They enrich our lives a great deal. I love their serenity, and I love their purpose, the intense way that they do every single thing. I've probably had, oh, a half-dozen cats in my life, and they're all special to me.
I do love dogs, as well, but since we always have a cat, it never seems quite right to bring a canine home. --Kerry McHugh