We chat with author Cale Plett about The Saw Mouth, which is a heart-pounding rural horror following a genderqueer teen who survives a near-apocalypse, only to be hunted by a mysterious monster whose very existence is entwined with their own.
Hi, Cale! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
Hi! I’m the author of two YA novels: Wavelength, a runaway popstar romance, and now my first horror novel, The Saw Mouth. I live in Winnipeg, Manitoba, but I grew up in a literal house in the woods that left me very fond of nowhere places. And little less scared of them than I should be. I’m nonbinary and genderfluid, so it’s no shock most of characters are queer too. If I’m not writing novels, it’s stories or poems or songs or or or. If I didn’t have another way, I’d probably be scratching words into the walls of a cave.
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
I remember being about six and getting obsessed with any song I’d hear that had characters and a story. Like Jennifer Warnes covering “Joan of Arc.” That’s a weird favorite song for a kid, apparently. I had insomnia for years as a kid/teenager, and I’d tell myself stories to fall asleep, adding a bit each night. The first time I tried writing fiction I was twelve and it was fanfiction of Erin Hunter’s Warriors books. And then I started writing my own stories and just never stopped.
Quick lightning round! Tell us:
- The first book you ever remember reading: Any Magic Tree House by Mary Pope Osborne.
- The one that made you want to become an author: Skybreaker by Kenneth Oppel.
- The one that you can’t stop thinking about: Tell Me I’m Worthless by Alison Rumfitt. That’s so deeply not YA. I’ll give a YA one. What the Woods Took by Courtney Gould.
Your debut YA novel, The Saw Mouth, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
I’ll write again if I see the night through.
(I’m sorry. That’s fully nine words. No walls can hold me!)
What can readers expect?
A story of being hunted by the sins of the past. Awakened machines with tortured souls rattling their cages. Lots of creeping, circling fear. Muggy nights, mosquito whine, sweaty parties. Characters who fight for each other messily and fiercely. Queer love stories – romantic and platonic.
I hope this book feels like getting punched in the teeth and spitting out blood in the dirt as you get back up. Me and Rory Power were talking about it once, and she described trying to write like – and I might be paraphrasing – a razorblade inside a peach. I tried to make The Saw Mouth as sharp and dangerous as it is sweet.
And of course expect horror things! Trauma! Monsters! Big teeth! Humor as a coping mechanism! The deep fear of true aloneness!
Where did the inspiration for The Saw Mouth come from?
There’s a highway intersection a couple hours from where I grew up that started this whole story. It’s out in lake country, where it’s just pockets of dark and darker and the last light was a long time ago and the next one is a long way away. And this intersection had one flickering streetlight against all the blackness. The Saw Mouth came from the darkness around the edges of town, consciousness, memory. Evangaline Gallagher drew it perfectly for the cover. The Saw Mouth is about fear as vast, faceless, and shifting as a nightmare.
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
The Saw Mouth sometimes gets very fragmented in its gentlest and harshest moments. I love writing those. It’s high stakes. Every word counts extra. I’m happiest creating the parts when my characters are joking and flirting and falling in love, though it’s bittersweet knowing I’m about to put them through hell.
Did you face any challenges whilst writing? How did you overcome them?
I wrote about two-thirds of an unrecognizably different first draft of The Saw Mouth when I was twenty, and I didn’t come back to it until I was twenty-five. That first version was a mess. It had way too many ideas. It was murky where I wanted the story to be churning. I’m not usually a brave editor without some help. I had to be for The Saw Mouth. I threw out all the characters and all but two thousand words seeded in here and there. It was like starting to build a house by picking through the heap of scraps that were all that remained of the last collapsed thing I tried to build. I will not be making this my usual drafting method.
What’s next for you?
I have a second queer YA horror novel coming out with Delacorte in fall 2027! It’s called Stranglehold. Think the smalltown, twisted miracle of Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass crossed with the frozen, cosmic dread of True Detective: Night Country. A long, rattling panic attack driven by an ancient god from the old world, revenants serving as its lungs, and a coming harvest that could slaughter the entire population with the hands of their own loved ones. Dun dun dun. I hope it’s as unsettling as hell. If I’m quoting lyrics, The Saw Mouth is “there’s a darkness on the edge of town” and Stranglehold is “everything that dies someday comes back.” And I think if you like the one, you’ll like the other.
Lastly, what books are you looking forward to picking up? Any you’ve read so far this year that you’ve enjoyed?
I’m really excited for Andrew Joseph White’s new book You’re No Better. I’ve got Logan-Ashley Kisner’s The Transition on my nightstand just dying to be read. And I just finished Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin. It burned with this defiant, snarling queer will to survive. That’s how I wanted The Saw Mouth to be, how I want all my writing to be. We can never have too much of it.
