So I sat down with Charlene Elsby‘s Poor Damned Souls one evening and found myself reading a book about a relationship about to collapse. That quickly turned into something much bleaker, which evolved into a scenario that left me wondering how much worse things could get. It’s transgressive fiction at its best, and I chatted with Elsby to learn more about this book’s genesis.
This novel involves sex, betrayal, and murder – but what’s just as vivid is the quotidian sense of working in a dead-end (and, arguably, predatory) job. Did one element come before the other, or did you always envision the two as being connected?
Oh, nice question. The day-job aspect of the book is an essential part of the context of her story, and so are the events that punctuate it — the sex, the betrayal, the murder. In reality, these things could never be separated. So they appeared as always connected, because they are. There’s no type of leave we can use for murder sex. The things that appear to us as significant diversions from our daily lives are actually intertwined, because (at least in my experience) financial necessity makes sure we always have to show the fuck up back to work. I remember my colleague once asking if she could have the day off to get married, and the manager asked her, “Could you just do the morning?” So we’re going through her daily life and as much as the book is about violence and betrayal, it’s also about how those things happen in the context of a mundane life that’s under constant stress from having to continue existing in a society, with all its associated costs.
Speaking more broadly, this is not your first novel with a memorable workplace setting. What draws you to these kinds of locations and the dynamics found within them?
Some of the workplaces are central to the development of the novel — and here I’m thinking of The Organization is Here to Support You. That book recognizes the horror of being trapped in a corporate setting and having your stream of consciousness replaced by the preferred script of the shareholders. I was thinking of the alienation from ourselves that we experience because of capitalism, when we take on the desires of another to meet an unrelated survival need. But some of the other workplace settings, like how in The Devil Thinks I’m Pretty, the narrator works as a waitress at a trailer park diner — that is a job I had as a teen, so when I reflect on that time period or write a character of that age, it seems an integral part of her experience, even if the connection to the plot of the book is less clear. It’s just part of the experience.
Poor Damned Souls goes into a lot of detail about hacking into a spouse’s phone and computer. When it comes to something like this, how much of that ends up being research and how much ends up being speculation?
I had to make some things up. I don’t know of any specific messaging apps that appear to be other things on your phone to hide illicit communications. I know about keyloggers and their capacities, but my surveillance tactics are all from the early 2000’s and long since retired, so I made up the phone stuff. I suppose research was an option too, but I did not.
The first few pages of Poor Damned Souls include a lot of details about Scott – arguably, more information than we learn about the narrator. What does it mean to include more details about the target of someone’s anger than the source of that anger?
I think that’s a result of one’s consciousness being overrun by the other. We become so obsessed that it’s like the experiencing subject is nothing but the experienced object. This question gets me thinking about consciousness and whether we actually have any defining characteristics or whether we are a compendium of the objects we have experienced or choose to think about. We could be just the structure under which the objects of our cognition are interpreted. She is angry, so angry, and because of that — or perhaps it was always the case — whatever she is, is completely subsumed by her concerns about him. She is ultimately an emptiness, or unformed anger, and thinking about Scott all day every day provides focus and an object, but does nothing to affirm her as her own entity. She’s deleting herself in her attempt to enter his consciousness, figure him out, why he would do this to her, and ultimately she needs to become him to understand.
As the saying goes, things escalate quickly here. Did the evolution of the story surprise you in any ways as you were writing it?
I am always surprised when I sit down in front of a blank page and something happens. I think it’s magic. I don’t go into things with a plan, so it’s all surprise.
I wouldn’t call the narrator of Poor Damned Souls unreliable, but it slowly becomes clear just how much anger she possesses, and where it could be directed. How do you convey anger through prose without it seeming cartoonish or unrealistic?
I hope I did. I think that some of the context I provided from her past, and the fact that Scott is an actual monster, serves to justify to some extent her rage. She’s hurt, she’s scared, and she’s lashing out like a cornered animal, which is a dangerous sort of person to be around. But she’s also extremely restrained in how she expresses that rage. Like, for most of the book she’s going to work and going home to Scott and pretending everything is fine. Maybe she’s envious that Scott managed to find an outlet for his anger, and she wants that for herself. At the same time, her rage seems more justified than Scott’s, and he is arguably angrier, Scott being the primary murderer in this book.
What’s next for you?
The next thing is going to be my novel with Shane Jesse Christmass. Inside the Castle has plans for that in 2026. I think we accomplished something special. When I read part of it at the Lizard Brain launch in Detroit, someone told me it felt like machine gun fire. Someone else told me my reading opened the space for vulnerability. I think it’s both.