Adult author Marisha Pessl (Special Topics in Calamity Physics) follows her YA debut Neverworld Wake with suspense thriller Darkly. When 17-year-old Dia sees an ad from the Louisiana Veda Foundation—founded in honor of the long-dead creator of the complicated board games, now collector’s items, known as a Darkly—seeking seven teens for an unusual summer internship, she knows she can’t pass up the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. But after Dia and her fellow interns are transported to a small North Sea Island off the coast of England, they quickly find their job to be much different—and far more deadly—than advertised. Pessl spoke with PW about the influences behind her work and the differences and similarities between writing for children and adults.
Your entire backlist—both adult and YA—is thriller and suspense. What initially drew you to this genre?
I love taking the reader on this wild ride and surprising them by taking them to a place they didn’t previously think they were going. It’s also my Trojan horse for plumbing the space between coming-of-age themes and what happens when a young person comes up against some of the realities of the adult world.
Where do you pull new ideas from?
I don’t leave anything to happenstance. I do a lot of preparation before I write. I love a very clean plot, and so all my clues are laid out well before I begin writing. I do a lot of brainstorming using pen and paper and, usually, I know the ending fairly early in the writing process. It’s just a question of how to get there.
As for where I get my ideas, I don’t really know. I suppose I get them from living as vibrant a life as I can and filtering all of that into my writing.
Were there any specific themes or moments that you wanted to work through in Darkly?
I used the elements of a locked room mystery structure, the island setting, and the forced companionship of strangers as a jumping-off point. I love what happens with proximity friendship because it forces you to try to understand where everyone else is coming from, what they’re hiding, and what common goal you’re working toward.
What influenced the gaming aspects of Darkly?
I was inspired by my own childhood. I played a lot of board games growing up. I also wanted to explore the idea of a work of art through Louisiana. She came about after I read a great many biographies of industrialists and business magnates like Henry Ford and George Washington: their personal stories, what they went through to build our culture and become part of the firmament of our world, and the dichotomy between what was happening around them and the fruits of their labors, good or evil, was just so fascinating to me. I wanted to create this long-deceased female character who was lost to the past; I wanted to try to understand what her story was.
Assorted letters, news stories, and other visual ephemera depict events throughout the book. Were these elements something you imagined being in Darkly from the start?
I use the same technique in [my adult novel] Night Film. Including them was about emulating all this ephemera we have in our present world. From these vestiges and the tiny pieces of story they tell, we have to put them together like archeologists to understand the full skeleton. I’m hoping it’s fun for the reader to start piecing those together before the final truth comes out. There are definitely a few Easter eggs for any reader who takes a lot of care to go through them.
When you were writing Darkly and your first YA novel, Neverworld Wake, did you find it challenging to channel a younger voice than with your adult works?
In terms of writing, young adult has more of a speed and velocity that feels a little bit different from adult. But I think even my adult novels deal with that coming-of-age theme, so I’m not consciously shifting the subject matter. I’m especially interested in the moment a child’s world collides—often in a violent way—with the horrifying truths of the adult world, how that new understanding continues to unfold, and exploring what that space looks like for the individual trying to find their way in the world.
Do you plan on returning to YA in the future?
Definitely. I love the YA world. I love the readers. I’m probably going to go back and forth for a long time.
Darkly by Marisha Pessl. Delacorte, $19.99 Nov. 26 ISBN 978-0-593-70655-8
