You can’t have a story these days, in any medium, that’s about a pandemic without someone assuming it’s all about Covid.
But while Sunny Moraine does say Covid was the “immediate inspiration” for the short story they turned into their horror novella Your Shadow Half Remains (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), in the following email interview, they explain how it’s more about things they’ve been writing about for years.
To start, what is Your Shadow Half Remains about, and what kind of a world does it take place in?
Your Shadow Half Remains is set in an indeterminate near future, several years after the world has been hit by a persistently unexplained “pandemic,” the only symptom of which is suicidal and homicidal insanity triggered by eye contact with another person.
The book isn’t really about that, though, so much as it is about what the ensuing years of trauma and isolation have done to the mind of one particular woman, and what happens when a stranger moves in down the street and seems interested in forming a connection in spite of the lethal danger.
Where did you get the idea for Your Shadow Half Remains? What inspired it?
The most obvious answer is the Covid-19 pandemic, and more specifically, what it felt like to live through 2020 and the first months of 2021. That’s likely the most immediate inspiration, and I did write the short story and longer draft that became the book during that time, but mental illness, isolation, and the terror of intimacy are all themes I’ve been writing about for many years. So COVID didn’t inspire me to write about them so much as it instilled a new kind of intense urgency.
So, is there a significance to it being eye contact that triggers things as opposed to some other form of connection?
That’s honestly something I haven’t thought much about. I think I settled on eyes / eye contact in part because it’s so unavoidable in regular human interactions, even if it’s accidental and fleeting. There’s also the fact that many people — especially neurodivergent people — can find eye contact intrusive and even threatening, as at times I do. Plus it’s so often an expression of deep intimacy. It’s simultaneously a totally mundane form of human connection, and something powerful and potentially overwhelming. It’s a device for working through some deeper stuff.
Also, do people only get sick when they lock eyes with the infected, or is it a case where everyone is infected, you just don’t develop symptoms until you lock eyes with someone?
The mechanics of the virus are frankly not clearly laid out, and that’s actually a huge part of the point of what I’m doing in the book. For me, one of the most terrifying things about the early days of COVID was how no one knew quite what the rules were, how to best avoid infection and how to manage infection if it happened, and as a result the most normal and commonplace activities became fraught with danger. That’s one of the things I most wanted to write about: the evident fact of the danger coupled with the fear inherent in not totally understanding it and therefore not knowing how to make yourself safe, and the deeper fear in confronting the possibility that it might just be inexplicable. So I’m way more concerned with digging into that fear than with explaining how any of it actually works. It’s never even made clear whether it’s a virus or a bacterium or what.
But in short, we all do appear to be infected. Eye contact isn’t safe for anyone, and even if there might be a small minority of people who are immune, it’s not the kind of thing one would care to test, and there’s no other way you’d know.
Your Shadow Half Remains seems to be a post-apocalyptic sci-fi horror novel. Is that how you’d describe it?
I have mixed feelings about the label “post-apocalyptic” when it comes to this book, because it really isn’t presenting the kind of total social collapse that we usually see in those stories. It kind of isn’t post-anything; society has continued to grind onward, nothing has really fallen apart, but it’s in a state of slow decay with everything gradually getting worse and worse, a kind of zombie society. Which is honestly much more frightening to me, and feels much closer to home. At least in a total collapse, there’s the possibility for something truly new and better to rise from the ashes.
But the core meaning of “apocalypse” is “revelation,” and as we’ve seen, when things start to fail, a whole lot of other things become much clearer than they were. So in a sense, yeah, it fits pretty well.
I’m also not sure I’d categorize it as science fiction, because again, I’m not spending much time digging into the science part of what’s going on. It’s just not a concern for me in this case. Unless we’re talking social science.
Whatever, genre is a cage.
Moving on to questions of influence, who do you feel are the biggest influence on what you write about and how you write about it?
While I find influence everywhere, Stephen King is probably one of the bigger names for me (as is true for a huge number of us), not only in terms of writing horror but in terms of a certain kind of tightly person-focused storytelling.
Same with Neil Gaiman, though I’ve drifted very far afield from the sort of fantasy stories he inspired in me when I was much younger.
In regards to prose, the name I come back to over and over is definitely William Gibson. Octavia Butler single-handedly changed how I thought about sociological speculative fiction; same goes for Margaret Atwood. Paul Tremblay has more recently been big for me in terms of how to write stories that are at once brutal and deeply humane.
And then are there any writers, or specific stories, that had a big influence on Your Shadow Half Remains but not on anything else you’ve written?
Not really. I recall that I wrote the book in a state of not only physical and social but sort of creative isolation; I was feeling very adrift and disconnected and unable to draw on anything but what was unfolding inescapably all around me. Josh Malerman’s Bird Box is the most obvious point of comparison, and I did read and enjoy that book when it came on the scene, but I don’t remember consciously drawing on it for Your Shadow Half Remains, and in my opinion the premise is where the similarities between the two largely end, because I think I’m doing something pretty starkly different from that book.
What about non-literary influences; was Your Shadow Half Remains influenced by any movies, TV shows, or games? Because your publisher has compared it to Bird Box — which most people know more as a movie than a novel — as well as the video game turned TV show The Last Of Us.
Again, I can’t say that I recall anything specific. I’ve always been drawn to stories like The Last Of Us, to films and games and audio dramas and really anything that explores the warring light and darkness in human beings and how we handle situations where everything is going to pieces on both an individual and a social level. So probably all those stories have some sort of influence; everything is material in the end. But I can’t point to any particular thing.
And what about your cats? What influence did they have on Your Shadow Half Remains?
We actually lost one of them quite recently: Sadie, our wonderful snuggly tortoiseshell girl. She was almost 19, so we had a good long time with her, but it’s still hard. Our other one is Evel, her full name being Evel Catnevel. It was given to her by my former housemate; she was the first in her litter to try boldly exploring the room on her tiny wobbly legs, and my housemate cried “Look at that little Evel Catnevel!” We meant to give her a proper name later on but of course it stuck.
They were both very important editorial assistants during the writing process. Their feedback was invaluable.
Sadie, Evel Catnevel
Out of love for my cats, and annoyance with the horror trope of introducing a cat specifically in order for something awful to happen to it, I’ve committed to trying to include at least one cat in every horror story I write, which will never experience anything bad and which will only ever be happy. Hideous things may happen to my human characters, but the cats (and the dogs) will always be fine.
You previously wrote a series called The Root Code Trilogy. Is Your Shadow Half Remains the first book in a series as well?
Nope. It’s definitely a stand-alone. I’m sure there are more stories one could tell in the world I set up, but at least for now I don’t feel inclined to tell them.
It initially wasn’t even a novella / short novel. It started life as a longish short story, and I did pretty much everything I wanted to do in that one stretch of words. Then I started thinking that if I wanted to further explore some of the ideas I was working with, there was probably room to make it a good bit longer. But it’s such a tightly character-focused story and it’s so concerned with what’s going on in that character’s head, I knew from the start that it was never going to be a long novel, much less a series.
Earlier I asked if Your Shadow Half Remains had been influenced by any movies, TV shows, or games. But to flip things around, do you think Shadow could work as a movie, or a TV show, or a game?
I think it could potentially work as a film, yes. I love the medium of film, especially for horror, and now and then I’ve felt like a bit of a frustrated screenwriter just in terms of how stories unspool in my head (I’ve never sat down and properly learned how to write scripts, though).
But there would be some really interesting challenges inherent in filming it, most immediately the one presented by eye contact; in order to get the same feel of anxiety and alienation I was shooting for in prose, I don’t think you could show anyone’s eyes other than my main character’s. I’d honestly love to see someone try that.
And if someone wanted to adapt Your Shadow Half Remains into a movie, who would you want them to cast as Riley, their neighbor, and the other main characters?
I’m terrible at things like this, in part because my imagination is almost totally face-blind; I could not for the life of me tell you what Riley looks like aside from the most general details and I’m flexible on even those. Fan-casting is virtually impossible for me.
I have much stronger feelings about music. Like if anyone wants to make this book a film, please, please, please let me have input about the music. Clint Mansell, Cliff Martinez, or Jessica Curry would all be go-tos for me, for whatever it’s worth.
So, is there anything else people need to know about Your Shadow Half Remains?
Please give it a shot, I’m very proud of it and I think it’s quite good and I genuinely do not always feel like that about my writing, so I’m going to go ahead and say that since for once I feel like I can say it sincerely.
Finally, if someone enjoys Your Shadow Half Remains, what book of someone else’s that’s kind of in the same vein would you suggest they check out?
Either Paul Tremblay’s The Cabin At The End Of The World or Survivor Song are great picks.
Brooke Bolander’s novelette No Flight Without The Shatter is a gorgeous, elegiac tale that everyone seems to be sleeping on for reasons I can’t fathom.
For something that could be about the world of right now, again, whoever hasn’t read Octavia Butler’s Parable novels needs to remedy that immediately. Likewise, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx And Crake.
