Q&A with Willa C. Richards

From my Q&A with Willa C. Richards, author of The Comfort of Monsters: A Novel:

photo credit: Emma Daryl Richards

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I think the title of my book The Comfort of Monsters is a good entry point into the novel’s thematic heart. Interestingly enough, it was a late piece of the puzzle. I had a couple of other working titles. For a while I was very fond of The Torturer’s Horse, which is a reference to the W.H. Auden poem “Musée Des Beaux Arts”. I was thinking about the ways that smaller, or perhaps more specifically, less visible kinds of suffering are always going on in the shadows of more public, more visible kinds of horrors. This is certainly the situation in my novel, in which a teenage girl named Dee McBride disappears in the city of Milwaukee, at the same time that Jeffrey Dahmer’s crimes are discovered by the MPD.

But The Comfort of Monsters came to me from a book by Jack Halberstraam called Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. This book investigates a few films, one of them being the Silence of the Lambs, in order to discuss how the monsters in these movies are indicative of our culturally conditioned fears. One quote from the essay, which also appears as an epigraph to my book, proposes that modernity has ended the comfort monsters could provide for us. Partly because, as demonstrated in Nazi Germany, for example, modernity has...[read on]

Visit Willa C. Richards's website.

Q&A with Willa C. Richards.

--Marshal Zeringue