The Electric Kingdom is New York Times bestseller David Arnold’s most ambitious novel to date; Station Eleven meets The 5th Wave in a genre-smashing story of survival, hope, and love amid a ravaged earth.
With the release of his new novel now here, Melissa Albert, author of The Hazel Wood, speaks with David about The Electric Kingdom!
Melissa: Since your contemporary debut, MOSQUITOLAND, you’ve made this glorious sideways creep into speculative fiction. But this book is your first explicitly fantastical/science fictional story. Can you talk about the origins of this postapocalyptic wonder tale?
David: I’m a firm believer that story input equals story output. Over the last few years—ever since I saw the movie Arrival, really, and then discovered the brilliance of Ted Chiang—I’ve found myself craving heady sci-fi, alternate universes, post-apocalyptic and Black Mirror-type stories where the scale of reality tips slightly one way or the other. The genre pivot wasn’t a conscious choice on my part, so much as—these were the kinds of stories I’d been consuming. Funnily enough, I actually first had the idea for The Electric Kingdom back in Fall of 2013. I was a stay-at-home dad of our one-year-old, putting the finishing touches on Mosquitoland. when the image of a family in a boarded-up farmhouse popped in my head—in the middle of the woods, with a bell tower in the attic (because obviously)—and I wasn’t sure what to do about it. It would be years before I understood who the family was, why they lived in a boarded-up farmhouse, or what the bell tower was all about. Some ideas sprout wings overnight; others need years in a cocoon, developing gangly limbs in the dark, never quite sure when or how to be born. This was definitely one of those gangly ideas that evolved over a long period of time.
M: This book is so BIG and AMBITIOUS and densely woven. Did you always know it would be told in all these interwoven ways or did the layers/perspectives keep coming? And did you ever feel nervous about or surprised by the scope of what you were attempting?
D: As a writer, if you decide to construct a story with four separate nonlinear timelines, you better have a brilliant editor. Luckily for me, I do. I spent countless hours on the phone with Dana Leydig at Viking, trying to put these pieces together. In its earliest form, the manuscript was actually a series of interlinked but distinctly separate narratives, which I’d decided to nest into one another (a la Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell). After finishing a draft that way, I realized I was sacrificing story at the altar of format, which is never a good thing. So I scrapped it, and just decided to tell the story in its most natural form, which ultimately meant alternating between three separate POVs (plus a 4th in the prologue), all of which needed to come together in the end. I almost quit a number of times. But it’s like anything that feels too big, or too impossible to tackle—you find one small thing, and you focus on that. Then, once that’s done, you find another small thing, and that’s how you trick yourself into thinking the thing you’re working on isn’t so big. It’s the only way I ever get anything done.
M: This book joins the canon of postapocalyptic lit, but as I read, I also felt these resonances with other media I love, including The Twilight Zone, Ray Bradbury stories, Lost in its best seasons. What for you are its pop cultural precursors?
D: I know I already mentioned him, but I can’t overstate the Ted Chiang effect. In 2015, I walked into a movie theater to see what I thought was an alien movie, and when I walked out, I was a different person. Which, kudos to Eric Heisserer who wrote a brilliant adaptation, but also, that movie led me to the source: Ted Chiang’s short story collection Stories of Your Life and Others. I’d always assumed science fiction was one kind of story, but Chiang set me straight: you can do sci-fi in a million different ways. Station Eleven was another huge influence, the way Emily St. John Mandel built an apocalyptic backdrop of such enormous scope, but then told these more intimate, character-driven stories right in the middle of that—I loved that dichotomy. Aside from books, The Electric Kingdom is also a product of soundscapes: I constantly wrote to the scores of Jóhann Jóhannsson, Hildur Guðnadóttir, and Max Richter, as well as music from bands like Slow Meadow and Hammock. And the movie Interstellar was a big influence, not only in the way Nolan constructed intricate nonlinear stories, but the idea of a father skipping out on the rest of his kid’s life in order to save her life (and ultimately, the rest of humanity)—it was just the sort of a paradoxical ethical dilemma I wanted to try for myself.
M: Your end of the world (as we know it) scenario has elements of virus, infestation, body horror, and manmade apocalypse. How did you come to create the Flies?
D: When I think back on the Flies, it’s hard to remember when they showed up. I don’t think they were around in the early manuscripts, but ultimately, I needed some added elements of danger, something outside my characters’ control. I know at one point, they were just swarms of literal houseflies, and one of my early readers—author extraordinaire Jeff Zentner—was like, dude, houseflies can’t do this. He was the one who helped me brainstorm the housefly/honeybee crossbreeding experiment gone wrong, which I owe him for. But just like the apocalypse itself, I didn’t want to spend too much time dissecting the how. The book is set eighteen years after the apocalypse, and most of the characters were either newborns or not yet born, so all they know about how the world ended is what their parents told them, and what they read in books. It was important to me that the reader feel what these kids felt, which meant including just enough information to keep them invested, but not so much that they ever felt comfortable.
M: How do you feel about the book coming out at a time that resonates painfully (and I assume quite unexpectedly) with some of its themes—particularly those of isolation, limited communities, and loss?
D: So even though the idea first came to me in 2013, I didn’t fully turn my attention to this story until early 2017. I’m very type-A with some pretty obsessive tendencies, which means once I get my head into an idea, it’s hard getting it back out. So when that idea is a dark place, guess where I wind up? 2019 was a rough year for me. I landed in the hospital a couple of times, and that’s when I learned firsthand the connection between mental and physical health. I’m not saying it was my book’s fault, but I will say, I don’t think I could have spent much more time writing it. And not just because of the toll it took on my health, but also because of timing. I wrapped up revisions right at the end of 2019. I was taking care of myself, I’d gotten into therapy, found a medication that worked. And then 2020 happened. So on the one hand, it might seem like bad timing, but honestly, I’m grateful I got all my stuff figured out before the isolation of quarantine. And just an aside: part of why I love post-apocalyptic fiction is that the story isn’t about the apocalypse—it’s about what comes after. The Electric Kingdom is less concerned with how the world ended, and more concerned with how the survivors navigate a new world. In that sense, the book offers quite a bit of hope (I hope), which I think the world can use right now.
M: Becoming a parent has made me more sensitive to certain narratives as both a reader and a writer, and parts of this book were difficult to read. It has so much to say about the parent-child bond and the loss or metamorphosis thereof—as a parent did you feel it was particularly hard for you to write these things, or necessary?
D: Oh, I 100% relate. I think writing teen characters is always hard as a parent, because an integral part of the teen experience is making bad choices. So as a storyteller, not only are you watching it happen, you’re making it happen. And yes, in the world of The Electric Kingdom, this can be the difference between life and death. I have a lot more I want to say on this subject, but I don’t want to spoil anything, so I’ll leave it here: distilled to its purest, this book is about one father’s attempt to spare his daughter pain and suffering and even death itself. (I regret nothing.)
M: Over this past year, as a writer/parent/author in the runup to a book release, have you learned anything useful about how to find creative headspace under difficult circumstances? Was your process changed by it?
D: I’m so lucky in so many ways. Not only has my family stayed healthy, my wife and I have kept our jobs, my kid has done really well in virtual school. It’s the three of us at home all day every day, but we’re basically obsessed with each other, so that’s not been an issue. To answer your question, I’m also really lucky to have a very walkable neighborhood. Every morning, I listen to Benedictine monks and take long walks. A steady diet of that, therapy, and family hugs has kept my head from exploding multiple times over.
M: One of your protagonists, Nico, grows up in a farmhouse with only her parents, dogs, and a limited library for company. You name-check titles including The Phantom Tollbooth and Tuck Everlasting as part of her collection, which makes me wonder: What would be in your postapocalypse library?
D: Well, I’ve already mentioned Station Eleven and Ted Chiang. I’d also want something with lush language to get lost in, so let’s include On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and Salvage the Bones. Maybe the greatest quarantine-lit ever, A Gentleman in Moscow, and one from the other side of the world, Disappearing Earth. On the YA side, I think Wilder Girls by Rory Power makes sense for this collection, and I adore Kelly Loy Gilbert, so let’s toss Picture Us in the Light on the pile. Lastly, I’d want an immersive world with dynamite characters and top-notch writing, so how about The Hazel Wood series.
M: And moving over to Kit, who grows up spending his life largely in a movie theater and library in an empty small town: What building would you choose as your personal headquarters in a postapocalyptic ghost town?
D: Actually, the theater Kit lives in is based on a real place, which is also my answer to this question: the Kentucky Theater. It’s this gorgeous old theater in downtown Lexington, which I was lucky enough to get a full, behind the scenes tour of prior to its tragic closing due to covid. But those scenes in the old twin cinema were some of my favorite to write because I felt I’d really been there.
M: Can you share anything about what’s next for you?
D: I’m working on a speculative romance, as well as a graphic novel, both of which are new territories for me. Nothing official yet, still in the early goings, but I’m enjoying the process, so we’ll see!
