[ Pride In Horror Month ] - Double Feature: Part 2 of 2 - Interview with Aaron A. Reed, Author of Subcutanean
THE INTRO
Isn’t it awesome when you discover a new author of merit? It’s especially satisfying when they’re still unknown, as if you’ve discovered a golden nugget buried in your backyard. Aaron A. Reed - author of the trippy and suspenseful novel, Subcutanean - is one of those golden nuggets. Not only is Subcutanean expertly written and designed, it’s unique and emotionally gripping. For our Pride in Horror celebration, I got in touch with Aaron to talk about the book, his background in videogames, dreams and fears, doppelgangers, and what comes next.
THE INTERVIEW
AM: Your latest book, Subcutanean, features the tagline, “A novel where no two copies are the same." Could you explain this to our readers who do not yet know about this release?
AAR: I come from a background of writing for videogames, and did my PhD on new ways of making stories interactive other than "choose the left door or the right one." Subcutanean is an experiment in taking some of the aesthetics and technology of game writing - around assembling procedural text, and around knowing there's other ways a story might turn out - and applying those to a static novel. So it's not a "Choose Your Own Adventure" where you make choices; the book reads just like a regular novel. But behind the scenes, each copy has been printed with slightly different text. The overall story is always more or less the same, but some versions will have different moments or even entire scenes that differ from others. And this mirrors the plot of the book, which is about two friends who get trapped in a labyrinth of parallel universes where they're never quite sure which version of reality they're in, and which, if any, is the right or "best" one.
AM: How did you come up with this idea?
AAR: Subcutanean started as a regular novel, a break from my dissertation writing, but I wasn't quite sure how it should end or if the story was going to work. It suddenly dawned on me that the story was fundamentally about instability and the lack of definitive truths, and that connected back to the work on interactive narrative I was trying to escape from.
Once I started thinking of the story as a possibility space, a network of related stories with no one definitive version, it became clear to me that this was the right way to tell this particular story.
AM: How does it work? The printing, the changing of text...?
AAR: The book was written in a custom syntax that allows me to easily write alternate versions inline. [Note: I wrote a bunch of design posts about this indexed here: https://medium.com/@aareed/subcutanean-design-posts-e25d9c158cce]. Unlike some procedural text projects that use neural nets or other AI tech to generate content from scratch, all the text is hand-written: I wanted to stay completely in control of the possibility space. But what happens is that each time a new book is generated, a Python program I wrote looks at each of those places where text can vary and "collapses" a single book from those possibilities.
This goes beyond just a random choice: for instance, there are some bits that, if they're selected, cause other bits to appear earlier or later in the book, maybe setting up foreshadowing or paying something off. The program also has the concept of a consistent narrator, so for one book it might decide this narrator doesn't like to use metaphors as much, or doesn't like to swear, or prefers a more flowery way of saying things, and then makes consistent choices across the generation of that book to ensure that style comes across.
The collapsed version is then output and fed into more Python that typesets it for whatever the output is going to be (print on demand, epub or mobi, etc.). I'm working with a particular print on demand service that doesn't require human approval of proofs for updated manuscripts, so for each order I just replace the book contents with the newly rendered version, and ta da: no two books are exactly the same.
AM: How did you choose the text that would change? Just how many scripts exist to make this possible?
AAR: One concept I latched onto was the concept of "pivot words," where a single word or two can change how you feel about a whole scene. It's the difference between saying, "I can forgive you" versus, "I can almost forgive you." For each chapter, I looked for pivotal moments where the way a scene resolved might color your impressions of the characters or the storyline going forward. A big overall usage of that is in how sympathetic each of the two main characters are perceived: you might get a combination of scenes and moments that give you a more negative impression of Orion or Niko than you'd have gotten from someone else's version.
It's a horror book, so I also had a lot of fun with making little scares or creepy moments that are subtly different from one book to the next. The end of the first chapter, for instance, has a scare that has three different variables that can alter the moment's details, like whether the shadowy figure Orion sees at the end of the hall is facing him, or facing away from him (I love that both of those are creepy in different ways).
All told there's a little over 100,000 words of prose in the master version, and any given rendering will be between about 61,000 and 65,000 words.
AM: You have also done some other writing, like Blue Lacona. Tell us about those stories.
AAR: Blue Lacuna was a text adventure I released back in 2009 that was, at the time, the longest text adventure that had ever been written. (It's since been surpassed by some truly epic competitors!) Since then I've written a couple other more traditional interactive stories - one of them, "Hollywood Visionary," was published by Choice of Games - but have also done a lot of experimental work pushing at the boundaries of what interactive stories can be and how they can work.
One of my favorite projects is "The Ice-Bound Concordance," which combined an iPad app with a physical art book to tell a story about a writer's digital ghost trying to finish his [incomplete] masterpiece. The idea was you could show the character in the game pages from the physical book to influence how he thought about the story. This was around 2014, and we were using some early augmented reality tech to recognize which page of the book the camera feed was seeing. The choice of what pages to show the game character then affects how he thinks about the unfinished story and what the right way to end it should be.
AM: In Subcutanean, just how much of Orion is meant to be a representation of you?
AAR: Orion was drawn quite a bit from my own experiences growing up and finding myself. We both came out in red states in the '90s and had a rough time breaking out of our shells in college. I read a lot of queer YA in the mid-2010s, trying to sort of see if there were stories that would have resonated for me had I read them at the time, and I felt there was kind of a lack of what I think of as delayed coming-of-age stories ... i.e., not the classic YA formula where the protagonist figures out all the tough stuff about who he is and what he wants out of life just in time for high school graduation. It didn't work out that way for me at all: it took most of my twenties to gain the kind of self-confidence I needed to be happy, and I wanted to capture that kind of a growing-up experience.
At the same time, as I began to develop Orion as a character, he of course diverged from me in all kinds of ways and took on a life of his own, and that's always good. It let me see him as his own character with his own unique story, which was an important step in figuring out what kind of journey he needed to go on to make that story a good one.
AM: The relationship between Orion and Niko - is it based on one that left an impact on you in reality?
AAR: It's really a composite of a number of my own experiences - friendships I messed up, relationships that didn't work out - plus some of the experiences friends of mine have had with toxic relationships, which can be especially hard to escape when neither side realizes they're in one. I think the situation of two people who each need something the other can't give, or doesn't know how to or doesn't realize they can, and each are convinced that that person is the only one who can give it to them, is surprisingly common. It's definitely resonated for a lot of folks who've read the book.
AM: This story deals in doppelgangers. Do you have a real fear of losing your individuality, of finding others like you?
AAR: Doppelgangers are one of my favorite monster archetypes; I actually did a project about them in grad school as part of my research for the Ice-Bound game, the plot of which centers around an A.I. recreation of a dead writer. Monsters as a cultural force are all about violating boundaries that are supposed to be impermeable: between life and death, between human and animal, and so on. I think doppelgangers as a concept are so terrifying because they're violating one of the most foundational boundaries to our model of how the world works: the one between self and other. They seemed such a natural fit for Subcutanean, which is already so heavily charged with projections of self onto others and a malicious environment that picks that up and multiplies it.
AM: The Mimickers are only briefly present in this book, but they held terrifying possibilities. Any chance we will find them elsewhere? Another story or even a game?
AAR: For those who haven't read it, they're these weird mute doubles who look like the protagonists and show up on the edges of light, never really a threat but always edging slowly closer, a step or two at a time. They personally creep me out more than almost anything in the book! I do kind of wish they showed up more, although I also like the way you hear about them more than see them. I also love introducing them late in the book, which makes readers question whether they might be explanations for certain things that happened earlier, even though the book explicitly doesn't draw that connection for you. (In part, how much you think they showed up earlier will be based on which version of the book you have...)
I don't have specific plans to re-use them again elsewhere, but you never know.
AM: Obviously, this story deals in being lost in a variety of ways (physically, one's identity, one's feelings...). Was a multiplying labyrinth an obvious setting for you, or did you go through other ideas before coming to that? And why a basement door under the bed? Where did that idea come from?
AAR: The book started with the setting, actually. I had a series of strangely lucid dreams a few years back where I was exploring Downstairs almost exactly as described in the book. I eventually tried to write it into a story, but it wasn't going anywhere. I showed it to a friend who immediately picked up on a bunch of subtext I hadn't consciously been aware of (like the entrance to Downstairs being under a bed, or just the phrase "going down" in general) and he started asking questions about who, exactly, I'd been exploring it with in my dream, and we started unravelling why I had had this particular dream and what it meant. In a way it was kind of embarrassing I hadn't figured it out on my own, but later when I started over and tried to turn the thing into a proper story, it struck me that this was kind of a beautiful way of representing the blind spot the two protagonists have, where there is this huge elephant in the room of their relationship that they're unable or unwilling to confront.
AM: What's next from Aaron? Any new books in the works?
AAR: I've always been pretty scattered in my creative output! My next novel will probably be SF, about the survivors of a lunar colony cut off from Earth generations ago who have to return back for supplies to what's essentially a monstrously uninhabitable planet now from their perspective (crushing gravity, disease-laden winds, etc). It's still in the planning stages though, so probably won't be out for at least a year. My last few games have been tabletop RPGs, and my next will probably be one called Skycrawl, about procedurally generated adventures in an infinite world of floating islands. I'm also kicking around ideas for a nonfiction book about the history of text games - 2021 will be the 50th anniversary of the original version of The Oregon Trail, which seems like a nice thing to commemorate.
IN CLOSING
The amount of work that went into Subcutanean is staggering. This is a masterful novel, so do yourself a favor and pick up a copy today - https://subcutanean.textories.com/
Feature by Aiden Merchant
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