(typewriter dings) - Hi, I am Ryan La Sala and this is "Beholder".

(somber music) It is this dark, glittering trap of a novel about a kid trying to unveil a mystery in the art world of Manhattan and engaging with a hereditary curse in order to do so.

(dramatic music) - Immediately in the book, the relationship between Athan and his grandmother sets what I think is kind of the tone of the book.

- [Ryan] Yeah.

- She's afraid for him.

He's weary of her fears.

He's kind of tired of that, but it turns out there's a lot to be afraid of.

- Yeah, yeah, she's not wrong.

I mean, look, I come from a Greek family and I grew up around the superstitions that are often really common in Greek households.

So like the evil eye.

And honestly, all cultures have some sort of form of this superstition.

This sense that there's this like evil entity.

So we guard ourselves against accomplishment, achievement, and victory.

Like, I don't wanna celebrate too soon.

I don't want to count my chickens before the eggs hatch.

These are sayings that basically kind of ward off the idea that like we're sure in what we've gained 'cause it can be taken away.

And I was raised with that, so I wanted to kind of put some of that into this book.

But I mean, as you see when reading it, she's not entirely wrong about this sense of some sort of doom out there stalking the family.

(dramatic music) - Where did the idea for "Beholder" come from?

- It was a few different things, it was "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gillman, which is a story is about a woman who is basically driven insane by really ugly wallpaper in this nursery that she's being kept in for her own sake, she's told, and there's much more to the story, but that's kind of the basic premise of it.

And then during COVID, when we were all locked inside, I was in my own apartment by myself for a year and a half, and it was hard.

And I began to kind of scare myself with just I would see things outta the corner of my eye.

Like I would be talking to myself constantly.

And I mean, I was never really in any danger, but I was sort of fixated on how all of us, once trapped inside, began this pursuit of changing our rooms to sort reflect ourselves, like people started redecorating.

And I began sort of following the pursuit of that, well, all of us have inner demons.

What if someone sort of traveled a little bit too far into their interior and in an effort to kind of produce art, unearthed something that really should have been kept on the inside out.

And what if they put it on the walls?

And then what if other people had to look at it?

And that combined with "The Yellow Wallpaper" to kind of form the basic premise of this book, it kind of goes from there.

(dramatic music) - [Interviewer] So you got an eye for interior design?

- I don't know about that.

I mean, I would say so, but if you saw my house, you'd be like, this is ugly.

- Really?

- I think so.

- Really, because.

- I know what I like.

- What inspired that to be part of this book?

Is it just an interest in it or what is it?

- Living alone for the time that I had when I was by myself during the lockdown with COVID, I wasn't worried about zombies and I wasn't worried about vampires, nothing like that.

I was worried about sort of the everyday objects around me that could potentially hurt me if I slipped and fell.

And so I wanted to kind of dig into how the spaces that we're often in are designed to kind of put us in a specific spot, even, we're on a set right now.

That probably looks really real to the people around us but the reality is, is that we're in just a big empty room right now on a stage with some screens and some cameras and some lights.

And I love the idea that like, if an interior designer was savvy enough, they could hide certain things in plain sight and we'd never see them.

And that's why wallpaper is such a thing that I'm interested in, because wallpaper is fundamentally a design that wraps around us.

It's art that's invisible to us.

It sort of contains our every move.

And I thought that that would be such an interesting and inventive way to maybe push people to the brink of whatever their reality is.

- Yeah, my wife is obsessed with wallpaper.

- Is she?

- Is obsessed.

- Ah, be careful.

- Right?

So now I'm gonna be thinking what Ryan said about it.

I'm like, what are you hiding in this wallpaper?

- Well, do you know there's actually a historical precedence for some of the stuff in this book?

- Did not.

- Lemme tell you a fun fact.

- Please do.

- So in the Victorian era, when suddenly we had light bulbs in homes, all these homes across the United States lit up and we were suddenly were like, oh my God, these walls are so drab and ugly.

Let's introduce some color.

So color for wallpaper became very popular.

However, at the time, the color stabilizers people were using in this wallpaper was made with arsenic.

So all of these homes got papered in these beautiful greens and yellows and reds.

And these papers slowly poisoned all the families within these houses.

And no one could figure out why for a really long time.

And even when they did figure out it was arsenic, it never actually became outlawed.

It just simply went out of style.

(dramatic music) - What draws you to writing horror, specifically?

- Humans have been telling stories about what scares them since the dawn of the species.

It's sort of the like primordial form of storytelling is what's beyond our campfire, what's hiding in the dark.

And I think it's this effort to basically draw monsters out into the light where they can be conquered.

And when you write horror, you get to make up monsters and you get to assign things to those monsters and what they represent.

So for me, when I'm writing horror, I'm taking something that frightens me and something that's amorphous and sort of undefined and I'm putting it in a physical form where I can handle it, where I can look at it directly and do something about it through one of my characters.

- I think that's what is almost cathartic about horror.

And that's almost the antithesis of what people think of with horror.

They think, oh, I'm going to see something that scares me, that bothers me, that's gonna trigger this.

But when I read and write horror, it's exactly that.

It is overcoming the fear.

- Yeah absolutely.

Horror I think the modality of it is to see how scared we can get, but it's also to see how brave we can be.

(eerie music) - Why do you choose to so often write about the queer community facing the supernatural?

- As a queer person, I have always been in dialogue with monstrosity.

Because for a long time as a child, I was the monster in the room.

I was the thing that people were scared that their child was gonna befriend or invite to a sleepover.

And I didn't even know what that meant.

I didn't even know what it meant to be gay.

But I sort of learned about it through people avoiding me and bullying me and things like that.

And so growing up, my best adaptation was to learn what people considered monstrous and how to outsmart that, how to figure out those things about myself so that I could adapt and blend in.

And then eventually, when that was no longer a choice, 'cause you can see I'm a very flamboyant person.

I had to learn how to be bold enough to kind of outshine whatever that monstrosity was that people saw within me.

And now I think that queer characters in horror is sort of the the exact right people to put into a situation where they're fighting for their lives because we're experts at adaptation.

And oftentimes I think the best horror looks at what we consider monstrous and asks us to reconsider that in order to outsmart it or survive it.

- I hope you're talking to young readers about this book and what you just said.

- [Ryan] Yeah.

- Because I think that is such a rally, a way to cope with what you're going through at that age.

and I hope you're sharing that.

It's a really beautiful thing, I think, to say.

- Well, I'm trying, thank you for having me.

- Yeah, absolutely.

And I'm just really proud of you for saying it.

(eerie music) What do you want your readers to take away from a Athan's story specifically about what he endures?

- Oh man, Athan is, to me, a character that is new to me.

Typically, when I sit down to write one of my, like, main characters and all of them are gay or queer in all of my books.

I tend to write people that are kind of like myself.

They're crafty, they're ambitious, they're a little neurotic, and they're totally okay with not being liked 'cause that's who I had to be as a kid.

I had to be smart and I had to be cunning and all of these other things.

And when I sat down to write "Beholder", I really wanted to write the inverse of that.

So I wanted to write a character that instead of being, instead of having this total disregard for society and what people thought of him, he's actually completely concerned with what other people think.

And he's this way because he understands that if he's attractive enough, if he's charming enough, if he's a good enough conversationalist at a party, people aren't going to ask too much of him.

They're not gonna dig too deep and they're not going to really remember him.

He's just gonna be the cute kid at the party.

And then they'll move on.

And he'll never actually have to risk having a real personality or a real engagement with a person, which he really can't afford.

Because as you find out really early in the book, he's hiding quite a lot of things about his own life.

And he doesn't want anyone looking too closely at him.

And so he kind of puts up this veneer, this affectation.

I think a lot of us do this.

I think a lot of us don't even realize that we do this.

And all of us in some way are choosing to perform our personality when we get up in the morning.

And sometimes that goes really well.

And sometimes it's exhausting and shocking is the time when we're suddenly talking with somebody and we realize that they can see right through it.

And that's what happens to Athan.

He meets another character Dom in the book who immediately is like, "Hey this act, like the flirtation, all of this, you need to can it and put it away because it's not gonna work with me.

And also, if you can't focus on the actual bad things happening right now, 'cause you're too concerned with making things feel easy, we're gonna die.

Something horrible is gonna happen to us, we're not gonna survive this."

- It's a message of you've gotta be authentic.

- [Ryan] Yeah.

- Knock off the rest of the stuff, just see what it is, be who you are.

And I think that's so important.

Ryan, thank you so much for being here.

- Thank you for having me.

- And thank you for watching "A Word on Words".

I'm Jeremy Finley, remember, keep reading.

(typewriter dings) You're a young writer, one day you will be.

But one day you will be an older writer.

(overlapping chatter) (both laughing)