We chat with author Wen-yi Lee about The Dark We Know, which is an intimate and gripping exploration of trauma, healing, and the lasting power of friendship, as a runaway teen must finally face the sinister forces that defined her childhood, and in doing so, demand her right to survive. PLUS we have an excerpt to share at the interview!
Hi, Wen! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
Hi! I’m Wen-yi Lee, a speculative fiction writer from Singapore. My young adult horror The Dark We Know is my debut novel from Gillian Flynn Books.
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
I’m the kid who was a reader early and who’s been the reader ever since; library cards maxed out every trip, etc etc. I’ve been writing little books since I could write. It’s never felt like something I discovered, only cultivated, but I probably have my mom to thank for it! She was always the one reading to us to start, and a lot of my early favourite books were all ones she passed down to me.
Quick lightning round! Tell us:
- The first book you ever remember reading: Enid Blyton books
- The one that made you want to become an author: Reading Zen Cho’s Spirits Abroad was specifically the moment I started seeing what Singaporean and Malaysian speculative fiction could look like, and that was like a second starting point for the writer I am now.
- The one that you can’t stop thinking about: The Vegetarian by Han Kang. I’m marinating a weird cannibalism/feminism idea right now, so my mind’s been looping back to this.
Your debut novel, The Dark We Know, is out August 13th! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Haunting; healing; girl returns home.
What can readers expect?
A book about loss, families, being known, and healing. It’s a hopeful book, ultimately. I was always writing towards connection and tenderness and sustaining the belief that despite loss you can find your way back to a sense of beauty and wonder and love. But yes, there’s ghosts along the way, and cruel people, and a haunting.
Where did the inspiration for The Dark We Know come from?
It was inspired by Spring Awakening! The play ends with the main character’s dead friends persuading him from beyond the grave to continue living, and I wanted to explore what the haunting of that loss–and that weight of living alone accompanied by those ghosts–looks like in a longer term. My main character, Isa, is inspired by a fourth character from the play, an old childhood friend who ran away but lingers on the margins of the story. I wanted to force her to return to grapple with the story’s events–and with the angel that recurs in the musical’s songs.
The play’s themes are also just forever universal; about shame and expression and connection, and conservative elders failing their children by refusing to educate them about their own bodies. That also led me thematically to the Pied Piper, which sounds like a strange mashup unless you think about it. It’s about kids paying the price for their parents’ hubris, ultimately.
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
There are two characters who are dead by the time the story begins, but they haunt the narrative and the main characters circle back to them a lot like missing limbs from their childhood friend group. But because of the second set of chapters the book has, I did actually get to explore a few scenes from their point of view and really dive into them as unique characters. I really enjoyed getting to spend time with them and figure them out, and I’m so attached to them now I always feel bad that we never get to see them all alive together!
I also had a lot of indulgent fun in adapting some of the key scenes from Spring Awakening. One of the first scenes I ever wrote for the book, which has stayed mostly intact from the first draft, is a midpoint scene where they hold each other while it rains outside, and it’s a much more tender and less, uh, controversial version of the play’s midpoint hayloft scene (in which the male lead has ambiguously consensual sex with his love interest). There’s a lot of easter eggs and references to the play in there for those who know about it to find.
This is your debut published novel! What was the road to becoming a published author like for you?
I had a couple of short fiction pieces out at that point, but I started seriously looking into getting a book published during Covid, like a lot of people. I revised a full manuscript for the first time ever and learned how to query agents. That first manuscript didn’t work out, but in the process I wrote The Dark We Know while in pandemic isolation and having graduated into a very empty feeling, so it came out very quickly from grief and turmoil, faster and more whole than probably anything I’ve written since, and I managed to get representation a couple of months later.
We then sold it a year later to Gillian Flynn’s imprint, which was a huge surprise–we didn’t realise she was even interested in YA, much less that the publisher was sending it to her to consider, until we got the offer. I’d been a fan for a long time, so it was such a shock to hear she’d read and loved it. One of the coolest phone calls. Since then it’s been a lot of changing gears towards being in a professional space, learning ropes, laying next steps, and furiously juggling my work-life balances. Being more immersed in this space has connected me with authors I admired from afar and brought me into opportunities to do some really cool projects, and I feel very constantly lucky.
I won’t pretend like it’s been all fun; there’s been a lot of ups and downs, a lot of which I think come with making your personal passion into a career and into a commercial object shaped by a team and intended for marketing and consumption. I think becoming An Author has changed my relationship to my writing pretty irrevocably. But I’ve been very grateful to have people around me, both fellow debuts and slightly more established authors, to commiserate and share advice.
What’s next for you?
I can finally talk about this, after keeping it a secret for months!! My next book is my adult fiction debut, a sapphic historical fantasy called When They Burned The Butterfly. It’s set in an alternate 1970s postcolonial Singapore where the Chinese secret societies gain magic from gods, and it follows a girl gang sworn to a fire goddess. It should be out in fall 2025.
I also have something else YA horror related in the works that I’m super excited about, but I’ll have to keep quiet about that one for now!
Lastly, what books have you enjoyed so far this year and are there any that you can’t wait to get your hands on?
Off With Their Heads by Zoe Hana Mikuta and Midnights With You by Clare Osongco are two incredible YAs I’ve been thrilled to read this year. For those that I’m eyeing, have some more spooky Asian books! I’m really looking forward to Bat Eater by Kylie Lee Baker and The Manor of Dreams by Christina Li. In general I’m also just hanging out waiting for R.F. Kuang’s next book, Katabasis, and whenever Alecto the Ninth emerges.
I’ve never liked being home. I was always elsewhere, outdoors or being taken in by the Carvers or the Tais. As a kid that made me “social” and “adventurous.” Later it started making me an “ungrateful child who treated her parents’ house like it was hers to come and go from.”
Art students eat up a shitty-parent backstory. You’re not even an art student if you don’t have some kind of trauma to mine. Here, though, my childhood stops feeling like a party trick. On the left is the bathroom, door the same rusty color Trish taught me to scrub out of my sheets the first time I woke up with blood between my legs. Opposite is Trish’s room, then mine, and at the very end is the bedroom I never entered, where my parents slept. The hallway is suffocating, especially because the vinegar smell is thick here, and the air’s staler than it should be. I finally let myself think something’s wrong. But the smell seems to be coming from everywhere.
With the lock taken off a long time ago, my old door swings wide easily to reveal emptiness. My things are gone, thrown out or burned, maybe. I can imagine Dad taking out his bruised ego on whatever I left behind. I try not to think about whether that included Trish or Mom.
In here, the vinegar draws me to the window. Without thinking I tug the curtains aside to let the remaining daylight in on the sulfur yellow wallpaper, revealing the Carvers’ house across the yard. The window that faces mine is open, and behind the fluttering curtains, Wren’s room is hollow. I can almost see the indent of her in it, palm lifted, nose scrunched to her eyes so I can make out her dimples even from here.
I wrench myself from that image and finally figure out where the stale smell is coming from. Someone’s caulked the window— not just the outside frame but the inside, too, making the pane immovable. What? I scratch at it, wondering if it was a mistake, but by the way the smell is everywhere, all the windows must have been sealed like this.
Trish wouldn’t have done this. It’s Mom. She’s always hated opening windows and curtains, and she won’t leave the house unless she has to. Now that she runs the place, she’s just gone wild with it. The trapped fumes are starting to make me feel lightheaded. I almost don’t realize I’m being watched until my neck prickles, directing me to Mr. Carver staring up at me from his driveway. When our eyes meet, something flickers over his brown face.
He turns sharply away and disappears into the house. I hate my immediate urge to call after him. I didn’t go to Wren’s funeral. Couldn’t. Got the hell out of here instead with an acceptance letter and stolen cash, leave or die. I doubt I’m welcome at the Carver house anymore.
I leave him and the caulked window. No point unpacking completely, but I unzip my bag to grab fresh clothes. I brush the folder at the bottom of the bag and suddenly feel my classmates’ stares all over again.
A rat scuttles overhead. They were the original tunnelers around here, until the mines sent them scurrying out. In most places in Slater, humans are the only things that breathe—other living things seem to avoid these mountains. In this house, though, there’s always a few hundred heartbeats in the walls. You can’t leave any food out here, or the rats will be on it the second you leave. We can’t catch them fast enough.
Someone once scrawled plague eater on my locker after one snuck into my backpack and scrambled out in the middle of the cafeteria. There was a big plague decades ago that forced the Vandersteens to close down the quarry, clogging the river with rats—before the town was saved by holy intervention, if you believe how blessed the Vandersteens supposedly are. Maybe they’ll think differently now Paige is missing. Bad things only happen to sinners, isn’t that right?
Trish enters with a towel and a blanket. “You okay?”
Probably what she was trying to ask me in the car, but I wouldn’t have told her anyway. She doesn’t need more things to worry about. “What’s up with the windows?”
Trish leans against the doorframe. “It made her feel better.”
So did turning a blind eye when Dad locked me out of the house. “I’m not staying if I’m going to die in my sleep from breathing in chemicals, no matter how much the inheritance is.”
“I’ll get a fan in here. We might sell this place soon anyway.”
“Oh, so now you’re a ‘we’?” I sound like a whiny kid again, but I can’t help myself.
Trish’s mouth purses. “I ran into Mason a couple weeks ago. He asked how you were doing.” She pauses. “He’s always asking.”
I have the renewed urge to jump out the window, sealant or not. Trish eyes me. I fill in the rest: You should have texted him. You could have at least sent a letter; you know how he is about letters. You could have at least waited until his girlfriend—Our neighbor! Your best friend! The girl you were secretly pathetically in love with!—was in the ground before you ditched town.
“I didn’t know you guys talked.”
“I saw the four of you grow up.”
“And then there were two.”
Trish looks tired of me. It’s such a Mom look. How do I deal with Isa today? Once, Trish would’ve known how to instantly make everything better, and part of me wants to believe that magic still exists.
But she just says, “You’ve had a long day, Isa. Take a shower.”
“Close the door!” I yell as she exits.
She rolls her eyes but pulls it shut behind her.
I sink onto the mattress, where the pillow still has the faint dent of my head. I can’t imagine this place ever selling. Every floorboard and wall is knotted with crying girls, secrets, and starving vermin. I imagine a contractor ripping down the wallpaper to find them crawling on the underside: knife-eyed rats in death throes, women on their knees clawing at the fleur-de-lis, their limbs contouring out the stripes. I used to think I heard their voices sometimes, slipping out the edges and becoming garbled. But then I realized it was probably just Mom, talking to herself in a language I don’t understand.
More likely, this house will just become another abandoned building in this town, taken back over by the vines. Better that way. The rock irises might be able to give it the color we never could.
Forgotten Places. If I can focus and draw, Slater should theoretically be perfect.
When I’ve scrubbed off the long drive in scalding water, I finally pull out my portfolio folder. I haven’t opened it since the showcase. Now the cord bites at my fingers as I unwind it; the plastic crackles as I pull the cover open.
The canvas backs are all the same scratchy off-white, blasphemously folded into quarters, but my fingers gravitate toward one portrait that I spread out on the bed. The pallid face unfurls in the falling dusk. Air whistles—distant wind through some crack in Mom’s sealant, or else breath through my teeth.
I used to take stoneworking lessons at the Vandersteens’ sculpture workshop, but I started in pencils and it’s still my primary medium. Graphite is cheap and dark. It can suggest entire worlds just with the contrast of negative space. Like this:
The girl is lying half-buried, roots winding through her skin. Pale skin, paler hair. She smiles vacantly at the sky, and it would be almost peaceful, if her neck wasn’t slanted at a forty-five- degree angle. This was the first piece I unveiled at my showcase a few days ago, one portrait out of four that I don’t remember creating at all.
It’s a dead Paige Vandersteen.
Who’s now missing.
Across the bare garden, Wren Carver’s curtains flutter like wide lashes, and an ancient song rolls in from the valleys.
The rich dark tremor shudders softly through me, and thoughts flicker up in its echo: Wren, and then Zach—and then Mason Kane, out there somewhere at the center of them all, and the only remaining person alive outside of this house who once truly knew me.
I squeeze my fists. “No.”
The song drops away, a mute button suddenly hit. My breath calms. I shove the involuntary memories away, shut out everything except what I need to do: Bury Dad. Finish my portfolio. Get my money. Get out. It’s almost unsettling how easily that instinct returns.
People hear lots of things around here; the land is old and hollowed out enough to sing. For some, the mountain songs tell of the coming weather, or where the first flowers will bloom in spring. Some say it’s a chorus of witches in places the ginseng doesn’t grow. The really upstanding ones will say they hear holy spirits. All I’ve ever heard is a song that drags up my lies and transgressions from where I’d buried them, reminding me how much I shouldn’t be here. Growing up, I had to learn to block it out. I’ve just slipped after being away for so long, and met the consequences. It’s a good reminder that surviving here isn’t the same as anywhere else.
Night falls. Mom and Trish bake potatoes that are already sprouting. I pull out clothes for tomorrow’s funeral, draw and then throw out a few sketches, and then get into bed. I don’t remember it being so small.
