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- [00:00]
Marshall Poe
Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Poe. I'm the editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to the New Books Network, I imagine you like to read and I'm wondering if you have a goal to read more this year. How about a goal to read more of what you love and less of what you don't? The Proofread Podcast is here to help. Hosted by Casey and Tyler, two English professors and avid readers with busy lives, Proofread helps you decide what books are worth spending your precious time on and what books aren't. They feature 15 minute episodes that give you everything you need to know about a book to decide if you should read it or skip it. You'll get a brief synopsis, fun and witty commentary, no spoilers and no sponsored reviews. It's just what Casey and Tyler think. Life's too short to read a bad book. So subscribe to the Proofread podcast today. And by the way, there's a new season coming. Thanks very much.
- [00:51]
Holly Gattery
Every holiday shopper's got a list. But Ross shoppers, you've got a mission like a gift run that turns into a disco snow globe, throw pillows and PJs for the whole family, dog included. At Ross, holiday magic isn't about spending more. It's about giving more for less. Ross, work your magic. So good, so good, so good. Give big, save big with Rack Friday deals at Nordstrom Rack. For a limited time, take an extra 40% off red tag clearance for everyone on your list. All sales final and restrictions apply. So bring your gift list and your wish list to your nearest Nordstrom rack today.
- [01:28]
Marshall Poe
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:33]
Holly Gattery
Hello, everyone, and welcome to nbn. I am your host, Holly Gattery, and I'm excited to be joined today by Manitoba author David Elias, who is here to talk about his new novel, into the Dark, or into the Ark, depending on how you read this. I'm going to ask you about that definitely title once we get started, which was published by radiant press in 2025. Welcome to the show, David.
- [01:59]
David Elias
Thank you. Good to be here.
- [02:01]
Holly Gattery
Oh, it's so lovely to talk to you. And I can't wait to dive into this novel. But first for our listeners, a little bit more about the novel. Rose Martin struggles with the aftermath of a terrible fire that has left her sons, Jake and Isaac, horribly disfigured. The boys have gone to live in an abandoned house they've named Bachelor's paradise, where they spend all their time watching American network television. Their father, Clarence, works day and night in his blacksmith shop. Producing bizarre metallic creations no one can make any sense of. Martha Weep turns to the stifling conformity of the valley to discover that her brother Abe, a preacher, has abandoned his congregation to devote himself to the construction of the ark, a massive and mysterious edifice whose purpose he will not divulge. When the first major snowstorm of the year roars into the valley, it unleashes a pain of bizarre events that the valley may never recover from. David Elias is the author of seven books, most recently the Truth about the Barn, A Voyage of Discovery in Contemplation, published by Great Plains Publications. It was featured in the Winnipeg Free Press as one of the top titles of 2020. His most recent work of fiction is in a historical novel, Elizabeth of Bohemia, a novel about Elizabeth Stewart, the Winter Queen. It was published in 2019 by ECW Press and was a finalist for the Margaret Lawrence Award for Fiction and the Manitoba Book Awards. His previous works have been up for numerous awards, including the McNally Robinson Book of the Year, the Amazon First Novel Award, and the Journey Prize. His short story, novel excerpts and poetry have appeared in literary magazines and anthology across the country. And in addition to writing, he spends time as mentor, creative writing instructor, and editor. He lives in beautiful, snowy Winnipeg, Canada. I actually don't know, is it snowing there right now? David?
- [03:51]
David Elias
It is a bright, sunny day, but we've had snow the last few days, so we have a beautiful, just clear, crystal clear white covering of snow right now.
- [04:01]
Holly Gattery
Oh, that's awesome. So do we. We're not in that grungy point of winter yet. It's just snow, snow, snow, and everything looks nice. And nobody can tell. I didn't do any yard upkeep in the fall, so I love it. Okay, so let's talk about this. I do want to ask about the title, but first I'd like to ask a broader question to help, you know, kind of situate our audience in this book. And that is, where did this book start for you? Where did it come from?
- [04:26]
David Elias
Well, this book, if this book was, you know, a vehicle of some kind, it would have definitely taken the scenic route on its way to becoming published. It started more than a decade ago, and it just has gone through a series of not major changes from the original manuscript, but just sort of it's been altered in one way or another. And it all really started with the idea that there were some characters I wanted to spend more time with that I had originally written about in earlier books, including a book called Sunday Afternoon, where some of the characters first appeared and then also appeared in some of the other stuff I put out. And so I wanted to revisit some of those characters. And that is really the impetus for how things got started.
- [05:37]
Holly Gattery
Okay. But I have to know this because this is a subplot that it's clearly laid out in the book description. But it took me by surprise. I wouldn't even say it's a subplot. I'd say it's a pretty strong, thorough line, and that is that of American tv. The book has this kind of other worldliness about it, like when you stare at static too long. Okay. And for younger people listening, you may not know what I'm talking, but when you've stared at a staticy TV too long, there's. You kind of feel disassociated from reality. And that's happening while the characters in the novel and kind of the world in the novel is first being introduced to American network tv. And I'm wondering specifically, where did that come from?
- [06:20]
David Elias
Well, you know, the book is really a historical novel because we're talking about a life in rural southern Manitoba in the 19th, the early 1960s, which is, you know, a half century ago. And at that time, in the rural area where I grew up, where I've set this book, there was just the beginnings of television in people's homes. And they had built a very tall broadcasting tower just over the line, as we would call it, over the border. We lived right on the U.S. border. And this tower could broadcast American network television. You just needed what they called in those days rabbit ears, which were just a little contraption you'd put on top of your tv. And then there was this network, American network television beaming into your home. And this was pretty new stuff. It really was opening this relatively isolated rural community, opening it up to the larger culture, North American popular culture. It was a pretty big deal. And so that made a very, you know, a very big impact on me. And so I reflect that in the characters, especially the two characters, Corny and Jake Martins, who become basically addicted to what they see, to the point where even. And in those days, there were only some shows, later in the evening, the broadcast day would end and they would sign off and they would put a graphic onto the screen for a while. It was called a test pattern. And that's what the COVID of the book, into the Dark. The COVID is a reproduction of a test pattern that you would have then seen on your television at the end of the broadcasting day. And in the case of people like the characters like Corny Martens, and Jake Martins. Corny is so engrossed in the medium that he keeps watching. He's content to watch the test pattern. After a while, the test pattern would also disappear and there would just be a staticky, snowy sound and sight on the screen. And Corny is even content to just watch that. He says, it's like being inside a light bulb. And what I'm doing there is I'm accessing the idea of an individual who also came along just at that time, lived here for many years In Winnipeg, Marshall McLuhan, who coined the very iconic phrase, the medium is the message. And so Corney Martins would be the physical, human embodiment of what it means to become engrossed in the idea that the medium is the message for him. It's a real thing. And so all of this is going on even though there is another larger backdrop happening at exactly the same time and of course, runs through the book. And that's the Kennedy assassination.
- [10:03]
Holly Gattery
That one surprised me, and I was delighted by it. I really didn't. I mean, I know about the Kennedy assassination the same way, I guess anyone born in 1981 assassination. So I didn't have any deep knowledge of it, but it was definitely a really fascinating point. And I mean, what I kept thinking about as I was reading this book was about how Canadians interpret what's happening in the States and how that's changed and how that hasn't changed. And I was really caught up in that and caught up in. And this is just me in this book serving as a mirror to what I am consumed with, but about how not everyone, but a lot of Canadians seem to think that what happens in the States or what happens in the U.S. art produced in the U.S. movies, whatever produced in the U.S. are so much more compelling than what's happening in Canada. And we're always looking down south, it seems. Now, is this something you thought about when you were writing the book, or is this just me bleeding onto your pages, essentially?
- [11:12]
David Elias
No. I mean, growing up there in the same place where I've set these characters in the same time, living right on the border and driving across the line, as we called it, into a small town called Walhalla, where my mother would take us over there and, you know, we would go to the theater, the movie theater we'd go to. We'd go to the JCPenney store, which was a department store. We'd go to the Ben Franklin Five and Dime store. We'd go to the Dairy Queen. None of that existed where we were. So it was this amazing transformation. You crossed that line, and you were literally in a different world, and there was no escaping it. When you talking about how things flowed in the other direction, which was the media, and again, back to network television and popular music and so on and so forth, all coming in waves over the border, unstoppable. Yeah. So, you know, there was no avoiding was part of what was happening to everybody on the Canadian side, whether they wanted it to happen or not. I mean, and many, many people, young people, embraced it, of course, fully embraced it. But the culture, you know, the particular culture that I was in, which was, you know, kind of a folk society, you know, it was pretty isolated. And so there it was coming, whether the people, you know, wanted it to or not, and changing, just changing everything. But the thing about the Kennedy assassination is that they, you know, as we were sitting there watching, having this new experience with television broadcasting all kinds of shows, here came a live coverage of the aftermath of the assassination. You're sitting in front of the TV and you're seeing live events. You're seeing Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated Kennedy, being brought out of the courthouse on live television and being shot and killed by a man named Jack Ruby. And this is not a TV show. This is the real thing. And in the book, Corny and Jake are watching television, and Corny doesn't quite get the concept. Jake has to explain it to him and say. Because they're watching these live broadcasts, and Jake has to explain to cr no, this is not a TV show. This is not scripted. This is happening for real. And historically, this was the very first time that this sort of thing happened on television. So it was a. You know, in that sense, it was a pretty big deal. And I really wanted to explore that whole. That whole idea and how characters and people were going to react to it.
- [14:40]
Holly Gattery
And it's explored without moralizing it, which I found nice, because I moralize a lot and I don't need any more life. So I like just the exploration of it without. I mean, it was also. It was new, too. So, I mean, I guess moralizing something that's happening is brand new, is a little bit more difficult than moralizing something retroactively. But I really loved the theme of connection and disconnection in the book, too. So we have, you know, the world becoming a little bit more connected through tv. We now know, you know, what's going on the stage. You can see what's happening in real time. It's kind of groundbreaking, but your characters are also really isolated and disconnected. Even the Brothers from each other. Corny and Jake are. Or Jake. I said, yeah, Jake. I thought Jack. Yeah, I was like, Jack, Jake. Okay. No, I was right. They're even disconnected. Even though they're, you know, as close as any of the characters arguably are. But there's still a disconnection between them. As you just mentioned, Corny's a little bit more lost to the. The allure than Jake is. And Jake's pretty involved with new TV as well, but not as much of his brother. There's a little bit of a disconnection there. There's the disconnection between Rose and in Clarence, between Martha and Abe. There's the physical disconnection of where they live in a rather isolated place. And it's something that I just felt profoundly even in the size of the ark when it's being described, which is like obscured by fog. The first time I remember encountering it in the book. And it just seems to be like this never ending wall. Um, this. It's, it's a very unsettling experience. And I mean, I loved it. And I was hoping you could talk a little bit about creating that ambiance of isolation in your book. And I'll say a gently unsettling feeling because it wasn't like so unsettling I had to put the book down. It wasn't like I was reading Pet Sematary again, but it was, it was still, it was still unsettling for me.
- [16:44]
David Elias
Yeah, it's, it's. The book is, is. I don't think anybody would describe the book as a beach read. It can be a little hard slogging at times. And it's interesting that you made those connections between the various characters and events that really represent an overriding theme of disconnection, but which is certainly one of the big ideas I had even, I think at one point, I think I tried the working title, the Moment of Disconnection. So you're bang on there in terms of that being a very big part of what's going on with people. These characters are feeling, they're all suffering for one reason and another. The Martin's brothers have been disfigured. Rose is their mother. She's traumatized by that. Her husband Clarence, who was their father, is also going through a lot of stuff. Every character really has, you know, pulled away from, from every other character more or less. And, and, and the reason I think that I tried to establish is, is pretty, pretty largely related to the, to the idea of suffering and what's what, what suffering does to the human condition, it. When. When. When. When you are, you know, really in a state of. Of deep suffering, you are isolated, you are disconnected. You. You. No one can connect with you. You know, if. If you're. If you're, you know, going through, say, clinical depression, for example, and. And one of your relatives or friends says, well, why don't you just snap out of it? You know, which is like the most laughable thing that somebody could say to a person who's in such a situation. Is Clarence. The character Clarence, is he clinically depressed? Maybe more than that. There's maybe some neurosis or the beginnings of some psychosis or something going on there. Whatever the diagnosis might be, these people are kind of locked into their own world of affliction that they have to deal with. They can't ignore it. It's far too pervasive. And so, yeah, the disconnection is. It's not really because they want to. For example, when Clarence comes in to the house, he imagines himself lying next to Rose's wife, and the two of them are awake, lying in bed in the dark, not saying anything, and each of them desperate to make some kind of connection, but finding themselves unable to do it. So to me, that's kind of like a big deal in the way the human condition operates when there is trauma or there is some element of suffering.
- [20:19]
Holly Gattery
Yeah, that's such a fascinating answer. I'm spiraling out from that. It also, the. Your book also made me think about disconnection today because of being connected to a. Well, I guess a digital tether and how we're disconnected from each other because we're so locked in to a digital tether. Now, that doesn't really apply in your novel, except perhaps to Corny, who is. And. And Jake, who are, like, mostly Corny, though, who are so locked in that their life is passing them by and they don't even realize the squalor they're living in. Bachelor's paradise is hilarious because it's filthy, but you. You don't really get a sense of how filthy it is until you see it through the eyes of Rose, the mother, where she. I mean, you get the fact it's probably not the cleanest place in the world, but just the. The level of neglect is. Is not really obvious until Rose kind of shakes herself out of a feeling. Like a feeling of, you know, being dazed and stunned. And I wouldn't say apathy. I would say, like, being stunned, like she's been slapped so hard she can't focus for a while. And then she goes there. And I found that really, really interesting when she woke up. I'm trying not to give away the end of the novel. So I'm just gonna stop there because I'm inching towards it and I'm gonna pull myself back. I am gonna ask you a question about the. Was wondering if you would read to us from your book.
- [21:46]
David Elias
I think I'll read a small section that kind of relates to what we've been talking about, but brings in the character of Clarence as well. Clarence is the father of Jake and Corny, the wife of Rose, husband of Rose. And since this bad fire that, you know, really disfigured their. Their voice. Clarence is. He's a blacksmith and he's been holed up in his shop there, and he's been producing very kind of strange looking metallic creations. And they live in kind of a village setting there. And so everybody's talking about these things. He, he finishes, then he brings them out to front next to the village street, and people come look at them and shake their heads and don't know what the heck is going on. He's been at it for a while. So the passage I'm going to read is just where Corny and Jake are walking up past these sculptures and they have a little conversation about them. They had just reached the street and started walking between the barren cottonwoods when Jake said, there's a new one. And both of them stopped. They stood before the row of sculptures their father had arranged unevenly along the far side of the fence. The sun was well down, but the last of the twilight still lingered above the slopes of the darkened hills to the west. And in that light, the pieces had an eerie sameness about them, except for the one on the end, which is brighter, shinier, not yet reddened by a layer of rust. Its sinews and ribbons of raw steel were still fresh, while the others had been there long enough to turn various shades of ochre that blended in with the brown stalks of weeds that had grown up around each of them. Some had withered vines entwined into the framework, others, chalky streaks of bird droppings running down their sides. Won't be long before that one. Looks like all the others, said Corney. But this latest creation had the same mystery to it. The possibility of something. The insinuation of a torso, the aspersion of a limb, the contingency of a head and shoulders. Just like the others, this one seemed to have started out as one thing and been transformed into another. There was a certain aspect of Mutation of transformation. And woven through all of this was an unmistakable fabric of disfigurement. Possibly torture. But if either of the Martins brothers thought they detected some semblance of their own humanoid deformity, if they stared intently into the contortions of steel to try and find it, it was never there. Only when they averted their vision slightly, looked off to one side or the other, did they catch a glimpse of their own tetragenic meltdown. As if the idea existed not in the piece itself, but rather hovered near it, never quite able to land or come to rest. You smell that? Said Corny. What's that? Like something burning? I don't smell things, said Jake. Smells like that time Pa burned all the deadwood out by the orchard. Remember? Geez, that must have been 10 years ago, said Jake. We were just kids. The boys had never spent much time with their father. Their earliest memories of him were of a man who worked alone in a dark and smoky world they were forbidden to enter. Remember? Pa threw that rotten log on the fire, said Kearney. And that salamander came crawling out, yellow and black. Yeah. And shiny, like it was wet. The idea of something reptilian, amphibian, often occurred to them when they looked at the patina of their own hands and faces. Like a creature that had just molted and shed its skin. It crawled out of the end of that hollow log, said Jake. And it walked right through the flames like it didn't feel a thing. Made a funny noise, like crackling, like sizzling. Walked right out of that fire and disappeared into the grass. That's the end of the reading.
- [26:09]
Holly Gattery
Thank you, David. I really loved that description. I remember it. And the boys being described with their eyelids half burnt off and the reptilian stare. And what I was grappling with when I was reading, and I mean grappling in the best possible sense, which is what good books make you do, is how you showed how people in a certain time would react to their facial differences. And what is in this case, the result? A disfigurement as a result of an accident being burned. You showed that, and then you also balanced how they felt, their humanity. But there was this real. There was this unease between the two. Am I making sense?
- [27:02]
David Elias
Absolutely. Yeah. No, I mean, it was a time when if somebody was very different in either appearance or behavior or whatever you might choose, then that was. Made them very much the other. In that time and place, conformity was a very big part of the culture. And so anything that didn't conform to the Expectations of the norms was really something that would have to be carried by the person. You know, in this case, these boys who looked, you know, quite, quite badly deformed, you know, their faces and so on the skin having, you know, been very badly damaged, they would have been. Some would outright shunned them. They would simply not have wanted to be anywhere near them. And these boys were very much aware of that. They really internalized it. And that's the reason they literally took themselves out of their surroundings and went to live in this shack called Bachelor's Paradise. They didn't really know what else to do because they didn't feel like they were welcome in the society anymore.
- [28:32]
Holly Gattery
And it's interesting to see their mother and I. I'm. As a mom, I'm sitting. I was reading it going, how would you just let your boys do this? But again, different time. Can't judge necessarily. I mean, you can judge some things through the lens of today, and it's timelessly horrific. But in this case, it's something I couldn't possibly understand. And then Rose also just being disconnected from everything. And I think one of the most wonderful scenes in the novel for me is when she's massaging lotion into their hands, trying to. It's like her way of trying to fix things, at least not letting the skin become hard. But it's actually hurting them. And they don't want to say anything. The boys don't want to say how much it's hurting because they don't want to hurt their mothers. And it goes back to that theme of isolation and trying to protect almost people you love from your own pain and your own isolation and what that does to people. And it's such a really beautiful scene. And it stuck with me. I can still picture the hand in Rose's hand. And again, I loved it. Now, I'm going to ask you finally, because I said at the beginning I'd ask you. And then I completely lost track and got talking about everything else. But tell me us. Or tell me, tell us about the title, because it's. It's into the Dark, but there's a slash between the D and the ark. Tell me about that bit of wordplay.
- [29:57]
David Elias
Yeah, that's an interesting development because there is a character, Abe, in the book, who was a clergyman, a preacher. He's abandoned his congregation and gone to build this large edifice out in the middle of a field. It's huge, completely hollow, empty. Just walls and a roof, and people don't know what he's up to. He won't talk about it. Whenever anybody speaks to him, like, even, you know, his sister Martha, he only answers by quoting scripture, usually from the Book of Job, which is kind of a clue to what's going on. And so they call it the Ark. I think it kind of resembles something like a large ark, a biblical ark. And so the title at one point was into the Ark. Then, along with myself and the publisher, the editor, we talked back and forth, and somewhere the idea was hatched. What about the title into the Dark? Because now we're looking at what happens to, you know, Corny, for example, when he's, you know, engaged in watching television. First the TV show, then just the test pattern, then just snow. You know, he's, you know, sort of being sinking into the. Into the dark. And there's a lot of people in it in a dark place, too, in this, you know, Clarence in his dark, waxmith shot, so on and so forth. So plenty of ways to go with the word dark, but also with the word ark. So we finally came up with let's put a slash between the D and the A in the word dark, and we'll have it both ways. And so that's where. That's how we came up with that.
- [32:01]
Holly Gattery
I just love a bit of wordplay. So I was delighted by it. And tons of meaning and tons of room to explore in your mind all the ways in which that is just such a fitting title. So thank you for that answer. One of my last questions for you is about the writing of the women versus the writing of the men. So we have Rose and Martha, who I felt, while definitely isolated, were more emotionally aware of what was going on. Even at their most unaware. They were 10 times, 20 times, maybe even a hundred times more connected to whatever version of reality, whatever the reality was, than Abe and Clarence. Like, Clarence and Abe are, like, gone. They are on a different plane. Abe. Abe, arguably the whole time, throughout the whole book, Clarence dissolves. He's pretty untethered at the beginning of the book, but he becomes more and more and more and more. He unravels as the book goes on, or ravels, depending on which way you want to look at it. But the. I was wondering if you could talk about that, like, because I. I thought, isn't that just the way it is? Women always have to keep their shit together, and men can just do whatever they want. But I thought, okay, maybe this is just me and my very feminist reading of the book. So I'd love to hear your reasoning behind that theory of mine. If you even agree with it?
- [33:26]
David Elias
I do. I do agree with it. It's very, very true what you say about these characters in the sense that there is a dichotomy between how they carry themselves, how they live in their own heads, you know, like, how does a character like Martha or a character like Rose, you know, we follow them. We get pretty far, deep, pretty deeply into Rose's head here and there in the book, and we get to feel what it feels like to be there, to be there. We get that with some of the other male characters too. But I think you're very astute to point out the difference, and that is that the female characters are willing to do the heavy lifting, maybe try to get at what's happening and what's going on where there's. Whereas the men are more likely just pull. To just excuse themselves from doing that job and putting themselves rather into some sort of an act, you know, an outspoken act, you know, building a big. Building a big barn like structure, big orca, weld. Grab the welder, rod and weld something, you know, make something bang some metal around, you know, or, you know, corny Jake, let's just. Let's just look at. Let's just sit down and look at that thing and whatever's on that screen. So rather than, you know, turning inward. And I think that was, you know, in that place of time where I'm thinking of that rural culture and of the early 50s, 60s in southern Manitoba, there. There was a lot of that going on. The men were not demonstrative. They were not known for their ability to communicate their inner workings with anyone for any reason, really. So if I think of someone, a typical father, you know, this would include my own, I would say, I used to say of him, even when he was absent, he was present because there was this idea of authority that was kind of a big deal. You know, the males were considered the authority figures, right. A preacher, you know, the blacksmith, whatever it might be. I mean, they were, you know, they were doers and they made stuff happen. Right. So you had this idea that even when someone like that was. You had him in your life, even when he was absent, like even when Clarence is absent from Rose, right, He's present. But then, flip it. Even when he's present lying right next to her in bed, he's absent. So you have this incredible paradox between the male characters of presence and absence, whereas the female characters, Rose and Martha, are more present not only to each other, but to themselves as well. Yeah. So I think that's a Very good. Really interesting observation you made there. Yeah.
- [37:01]
Holly Gattery
Yeah. I mean, it's. You know, Rose is the one packing her boy's food, and, you know, you know, the Abe and Clarence have the luxury of just completely losing it. Right. And, you know, like, what a. What, Like, I. I'd love to just, like, release myself from the bonds of reality, but I have stuff to do. People depend on me. And it was just. It was interesting for me to see that portrayed and to just sit with it. And it, again, there wasn't moralizing of it. It's just the way it was. My grandfather was very much like that. I. When I used to hug him or kiss him, he just kind of have this little rise, smile and be like, mush, like saying mushy. And I. I mean, I adored my name, my first kid after him, but it was. It was definitely a generational thing, I think. So I. I felt it. Like, I have compassion for these men, but it's also like, imagine having the Lu. To completely let your mind go. I mean, wow. Because these women, of course, have every reason to become untethered, too. And they. They hold on a bit. That's all. My next question for you is about Clarence, who I found really fascinating, but fascinating insofar as how you created him. So I was interested in the craft of creating someone like Clarence, but specifically the craft of creating the details around his profession as a blacksmith. Maybe this is just because I used to work in a historical village, the village at Black Creek, which is just outside of Toronto, and there was, like, a blacksmith shop. So we had a blacksmith there, a traditionally trained blacksmith that I would get to go around and take groups in and teach them a little bit myself, but mostly leave it to the blacksmith to talk about his trade. And I was wondering about creating Clarence and filling in those details, because, again, this is a bit of a historical read. You could, you know, classify it as historical fiction, and it wouldn't be wrong. Maybe a different kind of historical fiction some of us are used to. Readers of Bridgerton, for instance, might be in for a bit of a shock, but there are some spicy scenes in this, though. We'll say that. But I was wondering if you could talk about creating those details around Clarence's trade and how you managed to put them in without the. I didn't feel like the book was overburdened by them. What I mean is, once if somebody's thinking about their trade, it's not like they're thinking, like, think about every single thing they know about their trade. They're just thinking about the things that are relevant to what they're doing right now, which is how it came across in the book. So. Yeah, I'd love to hear about that aspect of Clarence's character.
- [39:42]
David Elias
Yeah, that's. That's a really good question, because what I was trying to do there was kind of the bridge. To bridge the. The. The. The gap between a person's inner psychology and the physical manifestation of that psychology, or maybe that musicology isn't the best word, but that human condition, you know, the place they find themselves in in terms of their own inner workings. And then. Then. And then you to, you know, extrapolate that to. To give it. To give it physical manifestation. I did it twice. I did it more than twice. I mean, if you think about it, you know, that. That arc that. That Abe is building, that's. That's. That's. That's part of his being that he's trying to display. Same thing with Clarence. So you have this world of the blacksmith shot, all these tools and the welders and the anvil. You know, I mean, every single one of those things is a metaphor, you know, for what and who Clarence is and where he finds himself. And the same thing with Martha, to some extent, I go through the same process where I go into great detail about how she develops her photographs and her dark room. It's the same thing going on there that's going on in the Bachelor's shop with Clarence is that you have the inner. And then you have the outer manifestation of that inner as a kind of expression. And to me, that was a way of writing that I wanted to carry out in a way almost like an experiment in. How do you illustrate. How do you illuminate human psychology through artifacts? Yeah, that's how I put it.
- [42:11]
Holly Gattery
I love it. And I love that you talked about Martha, because talking about her and her photographs was my penultimate question for you about what she is photographing, which I, again, was not expecting her to be photographing was a really interesting part of the story that we have the JFK assassination. But she has, like, a pretty personal connection to that event in history. And I'd love you to tell our readers about it. And I want you to do it more than me, because I don't want to give anything away that you're not comfortable giving away.
- [42:46]
David Elias
Well, I mean, I'm perfectly comfortable talking about Martha, as, you know, having. Okay, so she goes down. She goes down to Dalcy accidentally, which witnesses the Kennedy assassination happens because she's into photography, which she was As a character already in the first time, I had her in another, different book. That was part of what she did. So I just brought that back into this book. So there she is, and she's snapping pictures. But the interesting thing is that where she's standing, she's standing across from the most iconic imagery of the Kennedy assassination, which is the film taken by a man named Abraham Zapruder, standing on what they, you know, they call the grassy knoll. You mean for people like my age, these are iconic. If you say grassy knoll to anybody my age in. In North America or in most of the world, they know it would know instantly what you were talking about. Ah, the grassy knoll. So, you know, the whole. And there's that whole theory that maybe there were other. Other assassins, not just the Harvey Roswell, and that they were shooting from the grassy knoll. So where's Martha? She's down below. So her pictures in her camera would be from the opposite direction. And who knows what she might have caught on her on her film. So, yeah, I mean, that was like, a rather audacious of me, I guess, to, you know, I really kind of thought, boy, do I want. How far up do I want to go with this? But, you know, there really was a woman who showed up in the Zapruder film, and there she is. She's standing on the other side of the street. She's wearing a kerchief in a long coat. She's got a camera, and she's definitely taking pictures. And that woman became known as the babushka lady because she was wearing that kerchief. And they really did look for this woman and try to find what might be on her camera. She was never found. A few people came forth claiming to be babushku women. They weren't. They turned out not to be. And so I embodied Martha within Martha is the fictional Martha is the. Is the. Is the babushka lady. Kind of is the way I played around with the idea. And, you know, that was like, it's a dark novel. And that whole idea was more like kind of almost like a fun thing than I did. If you can have fun writing about an assassination. I don't know, but, you know, it was something. There was a lot of convolutions that I had to figure out to get to make that all work. And actually, really, really, actually quite enjoyed doing that.
- [45:49]
Holly Gattery
I was wondering if Martha and that woman were real, and I had a feeling they were. So I did look that up, and I went down a very dark rabbit Hole. Which is always fun to do, though, when you read a book, because it's. You don't need any more detail in the book at all. But I was thinking, I wonder if that's actually a real person, Like a real. And I thought it's gotta be, because everything else is. It was very validating and fun. And you're right, it was fun for me to. Nothing but the assassination is fun. But that little bit of triad and history was definitely entertaining for me.
- [46:25]
David Elias
And there's quite a bit written about Babushka lady actually on, On. On the Net, isn't there?
- [46:29]
Holly Gattery
Oh, my gosh, there's so much. That's why I said it was like, you know, I look up and it's three hours later and my kids are still awake and I should have put them to bed. Speaking of our digital tethers making us disconnected, I was like, oh my God, it's 11 o' clock on this school night. What have I been doing? So, yeah, that was really fun for me.
- [46:46]
David Elias
Good. Yeah, that's great.
- [46:47]
Holly Gattery
Yeah. I said, penultimate question. But one actually came to mind before the final question. And it's one that I remember thinking, oh, I want to ask about that. And I was like, no, I don't want to ask about that because I don't want to give anything away. So I'm going to put again, the burden on you. And that is to tell me about the ending and how you got there without actually telling anyone about the ending. Because I don't. Shocked the heck out of me. And it was. Felt organic, like it makes sense that that would be the ending and you could feel the narrative taking you somewhere that dark? We were definitely moving there, but I still was not expecting that. I was wondering, is that like an image you had, the ending image that we don't want to talk about because we don't want to give it away. Was that ending image something that you were working your way toward the entire novel? Or is that something that revealed itself to you slowly?
- [47:43]
David Elias
Yeah, that's another really good question. Because I guess what I, you know, I was creating in some places in the book, as the book went farther and farther along, almost like a dreamlike quality to some of parts of it. People could go, oh, you know, I had the strangest dream, and this is what it was about. And, and so, you know, for, for the, for the ending of the book, I wanted to go into a direction like that where there wasn't. There was never going to be a gift wrap, you know, this neat little bow tied up tying everything up. It was. It was never going to be like that. And for any of these characters. And so, and so the book wasn't going to end that way. And I wanted. Yeah, I wanted to. You know, to me, when a book ends in a place where you as the reader feel that you've been taken, you've been transported a little bit, and that even after you've read the last word, you maybe still have a little bit of work to do. I like that idea. And so that was what I was kind of going for is, yeah, okay, so this isn't going to be all that satisfying if that's what you like in an ending. But there's enough here that you can work with and get inside your own head for a while and see how you feel about this. Yeah.
- [49:26]
Holly Gattery
I describe it as what I constantly call, and not many people know what I mean, but an astral projection ending. And what I mean by that is I feel like there's myself, the person holding that book with my mouth wide open at the end, and then there's astral projected, kind of spectral version of me too. And I have to work to like get the two back together again. It's like an ending that was so powerful that it knocked me out of myself and I have to like, work to get myself back together. And I mean that as the biggest compliment. It's not a bad thing. I felt that the ending provided closure, but I did not find that the ending was a pat on the head narratively. It was finished, it wrapped up cool. But no, it wasn't like an easy ending. It wasn't an ending that, as you said, gift wrapped anything. And I'm fine with that. I don't need gift wrapped ending. Life doesn't give me gift wrapped endings.
- [50:26]
David Elias
That's true.
- [50:27]
Holly Gattery
I was okay with the way it ended. I liked it. My final question for you is, what are you working on now?
- [50:33]
David Elias
These days I'm working. I have about three or four manuscripts, but they're all related and they're all about the possibility of some version of memoir, some version of writing about my formative years, I guess, mostly, but also maybe some of my adult life. And I'm working with different ideas about how I want to. What the umbrella, what the big idea is that which is under the umbrella of which these memory, these stories, whatever they might be, anecdotes, ideas will fall. And so I'm toying with ideas that have to do with memory. Of course, time is a big one. The nature of time and the relationship between time and memory, that's really big for me. But then I also bringing in the idea of what it means as a human being to evolve. And I'm really kind of exploring a lot about, okay, what does it mean to be a human and to evolve, to grow. Not just to change for the sake of change, but to kind of try and find an arrow and try to go in a certain direction and then looking at things that I've experienced, that I've lived through, tie those in with some of those larger ideas. But talk about a work in progress. It's. It's a tall task. And right now it's early stages.
- [52:37]
Holly Gattery
Yeah, well, those are the fun stages for me. And I love the idea of working with time and memory. I read a article recently about how or why our perception of time changes as we get older. Like, as I get older, it seems to evaporate. When I was a kid, it was very slow and why that is. Yeah, yeah, it was really interesting. It's basically because as we get older, we don't do enough new stuff and that. Doing new stuff, doing challenging stuff, learning something slows time down. Which is absolutely true is I have piano lessons and that half hour takes forever.
- [53:10]
David Elias
But that's, that's, that's. That's a good way that. Because. That's because you lose track of time. Right?
- [53:14]
Holly Gattery
Yeah.
- [53:15]
David Elias
Or are you. Are you saying you're waiting for it to be over?
- [53:18]
Holly Gattery
Oh, no, I'm not waiting for it. I'm not that I'm not having fun. It's just that when I'm doing something challenging, time is slower for me. That's all. Is that like I feel every millisecond. Whereas when I'm doing something, I can do automatically. Just muscle memory. My way through something, it goes really quickly. Um, so that. That's one. I'm sure there's other reasons that time passes as quick, seems to pass more quickly as we get older. But that's the reason that I came across and I'm really interested. I'm also interested about how people who are neurodivergent experience time differently, which is actually. It's time distortion. I think that's the name for it. Anyways. Yeah. So I can't wait to read what you write next. No pressure. Get going. David. I can't wait to. And thank you so much for joining me today on MBN to talk about your really fascinating book, into the Dark, everyone. It was just published with radiant press in 2025 and you can pick it up anywhere. Books are bought or borrowed. Again, David, thank you so much for.
- [54:17]
David Elias
Joining me and thank you very much. It was a pleasure. Foreign. Everybody knows White Monster, Zero Ultra, that's the OG it kicked off this whole Zero Sugar energy drink thing. But Ultra is a whole lineup now. You've got Strawberry Dreams, Blue Hawaiian Sunrise, and Vice Guava. And they all bring the Monster energy punch. So if you've been living in the White can branch out. Ultra's got a flavor for every vibe, and every single one is Zero Sugar. Tap the banner to learn more.