St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

Swamplandia!

Rivka Galchen: Karen, one of the things we learned about each other this year was that as kids we both liked to sit in an empty bathtub—the quietest place in the house, and a storm shelter to boot—and we both turned away from reading books about girls and their horses in order to read tales of alien invasions or battles with evil. What might have been the draw, do you think, of, say, Day of the Triffids, which I know was an early find for you?

Karen Russell:

Yeah, the fear of end times is somehow always also a titillation, right? It seems evil to want to be present at the suffering from which we’ve been spared—seems wrong to think of other peoples’ suffering like it was Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride at Disneyland—but all that said, are there catastrophes you wish you’d been present for? And why?

Candid Camera

Vesuvius in Eruption

Titanic

In the house of a childhood friend there was this amazing painting of the moment of rapture; it was sort of a Hieronymus Bosch’s latter-day and left-handed country cousin in acrylics—and you just thought, seeing these car crashes and stricken dinner parties—that the rapture did at least look interesting. Any hopes for future catastrophes? What about something clean in which no one really gets hurt, just everything ceases to exist? Like all those articles they were running a while back about the possible universe-ending black hole to be caused by the Large Hadron Collider?

too

That’s true, it seems like the lure of catastrophe is its promise of revelation—like finally the world might need my special skills with paper folding. Or my inappropriate rage has found an objective correlative in the onslaught of an army of androids. That feeling of dread and terror is a complicated one, all stitched through with fluorescent joy, right? Like all those strange and new feelings we’ve been cataloguing this year?

A Paradise Built in Hell

this

this

homeless

that

Absolutely. It’s such a persistent, and persistently embarrassing, realization: that there might be a heaven that looked like ramen noodles and the downing of all radio, internet, and phone communications. I guess it’s the underneath-it-all-shy person’s dream. I remember there being a related happiness I used to get when I was working in a hospital, especially at night, especially in the ER, when, say, there was a car-accident victim to attend to, this alongside some drunk who keeps getting up from his gurney and wandering around naked, dragging an IV fluid machine along behind him… I used to love that feeling of everyone basically in pajamas, doctors and patients alike, padding around, and knowing what their job was: look up lab results, report pain symptoms, whatever.

So what would belong on the playlist for the apocalypse?

that

Dawn of the Dead

I tried to learn more about it and found out: It was probably the last song Cash ever recorded, the lyrics are from Revelations, and Cash died just before the album that included it was released. Maybe we should also add “Folsom Prison”—because it’s unclear whether that’s where we’re coming from or going to—either way is arguably the preferred.

Inferno

Hey, speaking of children, I know we both devoted a fair amount of adolescent time to Stephen King. I remember loving how in The Shining, when the caretaker looks into his handkerchief to see his own snot, it was sort of as scary as any of the other scenes. All this horror and disgust in the ordinary setting of, you know, a young lovely family, a romantic old hotel, the miracle of snow!

Maybe we can end on a more straightforwardly happy note? The catastrophes that prove not to be? Maybe like those animals you used to tell me about from your time working in the vet hospital? The ones dropped off early in the AM for their surgical procedures?