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Supernatural Threat
Awakening follows a group of neighbors caught in a bizarre and increasingly terrifying fight for survival when an ancient fungal intelligence awakens beneath a Los Angeles hillside. Where did the idea behind this novel come from?
I think it was really a combination of several ideas.
Part of it came from looking back on my youth, when taking mushrooms that somebody handed you without giving it much thought seemed like a perfectly normal thing to do. I liked the idea of a kind of perennial adolescent—someone who never quite felt the pressures of adulthood and was therefore still willing to do some of the foolish things the rest of us eventually learn not to do. That became Rage. I wanted him to be a little dim, but in an entertaining way, particularly in contrast to his much more cautious, rule-following roommate, Tim.
Navarro actually came from somewhere else entirely. Years earlier, I had written a short story about a long-dead murderer and sexual predator lying in his grave twenty years after his death. There was almost nothing left of him but his skeleton and one eye, and he spent his days trying to move a finger and thinking about how terribly unfair his situation was.
What I liked about that story was that, over the ten minutes or so it took to read it, you could actually begin to feel sorry for him—until you gradually realized what a terrible person he had been. More importantly, he never realized it. He still saw himself as the victim.
I liked the character enough to bring him into Awakening, and eventually he became connected to the fungal network that resurrects him.
From there, I mostly let the story go where it wanted. I spent years rewriting and playing with it while I was gainfully employed and had no particular expectation that it would ever become a published novel. At various points it was really a couple of smaller books that I eventually stitched together and fussed over until they became Awakening.
Underneath all of that, though, is an idea that still fascinates me: there’s much more to the world than what meets the eye, and sometimes those of us who become a little too civilized miss out on quite a lot.
How did you balance the book’s gruesome body horror with its dark comedy?
Realistically, I think almost everything is funny—or at least has a funny side to it.
Some of the grotesqueries in Awakening are so outlandish that I find them difficult to take entirely seriously. Rage is deliberately a little ridiculous, and putting someone like him in the middle of genuinely horrifying circumstances naturally creates humor.
But I don’t think I ever consciously sat down and decided, “I need a joke here.” Humor is just the way I tend to look at things. It makes the medicine go down a little smoother, particularly when the writing itself has a somewhat self-deprecating quality.
I also think horror sometimes takes itself too seriously. Horror is, after all, frequently absurd. Terrible, frightening things are happening that shouldn’t be possible in the first place. There’s something inherently funny about that absurdity if you allow it to be funny.
For me, the comedy doesn’t diminish the horror. If anything, I think the two work better together. You laugh, relax for a moment—and then something awful happens.
What drew you to fungi as the source of the novel’s supernatural threat?
As I may have already given away, I was a bit of a fan of fungi when I was younger. When I started writing Awakening, I was looking back on some of those years with considerable fondness.
What’s funny to me now is that I ended up turning the fungus into the apparent bad guy when, personally, I have rather warm feelings toward mushrooms.
But Mother—the fungal intelligence in the book—isn’t really evil. She’s amoral. She consumes dead and sometimes dying material and incorporates it into herself. The intelligence—or, if you want to call it that, the soul—of everything she consumes becomes part of her collective consciousness. In that sense, Mother isn’t an individual at all. She’s a family.
And she’s starving.
If you’re starving, you eat. Mother isn’t setting out to be cruel or malicious. She’s trying to survive, and unfortunately her idea of survival can be rather unpleasant for everyone else.
So despite having made a giant fungal intelligence the supernatural threat in a horror novel, I don’t really think of fungi as the bad guys. Mother is dangerous, certainly, but I think she’s also terribly misunderstood.
Can you give us a peek inside Book 2 of the Mother’s Little Helpers series? Where will it take readers?
One of the biggest changes in ReAwakening is that the center of the story shifts.
Rage is the protagonist of Awakening, but the person who suffers the most at Navarro’s hands is Pippi, the ten-year-old girl who fancies herself after Pippi Longstocking. ReAwakening begins within about an hour of the end of the first book, and Pippi realizes very quickly that whatever happened between her and Navarro isn’t over. Somehow, he is still affecting her.
Rather than retreat from that, she has to grow up a little. She has to decide what she’s going to do about it.
And ultimately, she becomes the hero of the second book.
Rage and Alicia are still there, as are the other characters from Awakening. In fact, pretty much everybody from the first book makes it into the second one, whether they’re alive or dead. We also add several new characters, so the world and the strange little family at the center of it become larger even though the book itself is a little shorter.
Someone who proofread Awakening once told me, “Rage is a jerk, but he’s kind of my spirit animal.” I loved that, because I think you have to be a certain kind of person to really root for Rage.
Pippi is different. I’d be hard-pressed to imagine anyone not rooting for her.
The threat is bigger in ReAwakening, the cast is bigger, and dealing with what’s happening becomes much more of a group effort. But at its heart, I think it’s Pippi’s book. She was the victim in Awakening. In ReAwakening, she gets the chance to become something else.
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If it helps you find love and happiness, is it really so bad that it wants to kill and eat you?
Rage Sutherland, an unemployed, foul-mouthed 30-year-old, has never once made his dead parents proud—or tried to, for that matter. Instead, he lives happily in his consequence-free forever-adolescence in the house his parents left him.
Down the hill behind his home, Mother, a massive underground fungus, is having an existential crisis. Starving and desperate, she births a new offspring—a mushroom that promises boundless love, followed by a slow, blissful death.
When the mushrooms pop up in his yard, Rage can’t resist. One bite, and his world explodes into overwhelming ecstasy.
Meanwhile, Emile Navarro, a long-dead murderer, is resurrected into a fungus-fueled hunter to find Mother fresh food. Navarro, a remorseless sexual deviant who never found satisfaction, is determined to get this new life “right” this time.
As the mushrooms spread, Rage isn’t the only one pulled into Mother’s strange new world. There’s his rule-following college-student roommate, Tim, and ten-year-old Pippi, who catches Navarro’s attention as something more than just food.
For perhaps the first time in his life, Rage is genuinely happy. But before long, the last person anyone would mistake for a hero has people other than himself to worry about—and doing the right thing may mean giving up the best thing that’s ever happened to him.
Awakening
Chafin’s approach to horror relies heavily on the collision between the grotesque and the absurd. Navarro gradually assembles a functioning body from fungus, bones, animal remains, and human remains, creating some of the novel’s most disturbing images, yet his monstrous transformation is repeatedly interrupted by dogs stealing bones, neighbors misunderstanding what’s happening, and Rage responding to genuine supernatural danger with the judgment of a perpetually intoxicated adolescent. Fatty, Rage’s dog, is especially effective in this respect. His simple canine priorities repeatedly place him at the center of events, sometimes making him comic relief and sometimes making him unexpectedly consequential. The humor gives the novel an energetic, unpredictable rhythm, while the body horror becomes increasingly elaborate as Navarro acquires senses, limbs, voices, and greater knowledge of what Mother can do.
Beneath that surface, Awakening is deeply concerned with interconnectedness. Mother experiences life through a vast biological network, while Navarro’s resurrection gradually erases the boundaries separating one organism from another. Lisa’s consciousness becomes trapped within him after he incorporates her remains, animals contribute their senses and voices, and Rage experiences the fungus as an almost spiritual connection to other people and the earth. At one point, Mother is described as “a few million threads that wound together into a sort of democratically elected her,” an image that captures the book’s unusual conception of identity. Chafin repeatedly asks what remains of an individual when bodies, memories, desires, and consciousness can be absorbed into a larger living system. That idea gives the novel substance beyond its outrageous situations, particularly through Lisa, whose struggle to preserve her identity inside the man who murdered her adds a grim moral dimension to the supernatural premise.
The novel’s strongest quality is the way its separate characters and tones steadily converge. Rage’s mushroom-fueled experiences, Dora’s memories of her first husband, Pippi’s search for Bruno, Don’s determination to deal practically with an impossible threat, Lisa’s imprisonment, and Navarro’s growing ambitions all become parts of the same conflict. By the final confrontation, events that initially seemed like comic detours have acquired real significance, and even Rage is forced into a moment of genuine responsibility. Chafin closes the main story with consequences for both the survivors and the consciousnesses caught within Mother’s network, while leaving the larger biological threat alive for the series to continue. Awakening is an energetic mixture of supernatural horror, ecological speculation, irreverent comedy, and ensemble storytelling, held together by a striking central idea: life beneath the surface is conscious, hungry, interconnected, and beginning to wake.
Pages: 432 | ASIN : B0DJB23JGC
