Ellie Marney’s social media profile picture gives the impression that she is the sort of hard-bitten character such as the ones who populate her most recent novel, None Shall Sleep. The black background conjures the sense of the vaguely sinister, while the shadows which fall on her face are emphasised by the white-blonde of her hair which practically glows against the darker tones.
It’s funny how the impression generated by a single photograph can be at once correct and misleading. We meet via Zoom and the first jarring difference between my expectation and reality is that she’s surrounded by light and colour (although the top she wears is dark-toned). The next, she’s quick to smile and quick to laugh – including at herself. She puts a self-conscious hand to her tied-back hair as we talk about chocolate (I’m quickly finishing off a mid-afternoon chocolate, she’s contemplating digging into her stash of chocolate biscuits), gives a laugh and exclaims, “I look like a complete dag!”
However, there’s an intensity to her that her photograph conveys perfectly, and a care with the way she chooses her words and considers her answers that would not be out of place if exhibited by None Shall Sleep’s teenage protagonist Emma Lewis, who has been recruited by the FBI following her own escape from a serial killer to assist in establishing a psychological profiling unit, but is quickly pulled into an active hunt for a serial killer.
With the release of None Shall Sleep taking place amid the ongoing lockdowns in Victoria due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s impossible to do in-person launch events (or interviews). In the week the book launched, Marney has leaned in to the preponderance of digital events which have filled the void. Two days before we speak, she had a US event with Brigid Kemmerer, and the day after we meet, she has another US event; all in addition to the various Australian digital events that have taken place. Speaking to me from the middle of regional Victoria as she says with a thoughtful eye to the future, “I’m here in the middle of nowhere, and I’m able to connect with other readers and authors all over the world. There are maybe a few things about digital launching that aren’t all bad.”
I open with the question I always ask as a point of professional curiosity: is she a pantser or a plotter (or gardener or architect, if you prefer George R R Martin’s terminology)? “I think the plotter/pantser division is a bit artificial,” she offers. But she goes on to admit that “for the last two I have been a planner; and for None Shall Sleep, I had to plot it out really thoroughly. Just because it was a different environment [the book was set largely around Quantico and Washington], I had to do a lot of research for location, and I had to really track the emotional and character arcs and work out how that was all going to work out in the finale.”
Given the deliberate way Marney speaks, it’s unsurprising that she approaches her writing methodically – the research that went into producing this book, not simply in terms of serial killers, but of the early ‘80s American setting in and around FBI locations and procedures was extensive and it shows in the final product which is a tightly written story. Of her standard process, she says, “I do a lot of longhand writing […] I usually start writing in notebooks. Most of the hard stuff is done in notebooks then I transfer it onto the screen.”
Her pace speeds up as she recounts how she wrote much of None Shall Sleep on an annual family beach camping holiday, and her face creases into a smile: “I can get up and work, early in the morning before everyone else wakes up. I go and sit in one of those dodgy camping chairs on the cliff, but the beach, overlooking the waves.” She seems caught between amusement and wonder at the fact that a book now in the world started out on paper in such a tranquil setting.
Yet Marney is no first-time author. None Shall Sleep is her fifth traditionally published book, in addition to four titles which she’s independently published, a process which she says taught her “a lot of skills, like marketing and promo”. It makes it even more refreshing that she’s so pleasantly surprised by the fact that None Shall Sleep came to be published. “I really wasn’t sure if this book would ever be picked up for publication,” she admits. “I said [to her agent], I don’t know if we’re going to find a publisher for this, it’s really intense, it’s not written in first person, which is not usual for YA, it’s got some graphic violence […] So I was very surprised when it went to Little Brown. The whole editing process, the whole time I was thinking, ‘don’t you want me to take out that horrifying scene?’ It always amazes me how much violence is actually allowed to stay in YA books. I don’t have a personal issue with it, but I got way more emails complaining about the level of kissing in my earlier books. I’ve never had anyone say to me ‘that forensic autopsy scene was so intense, you should take it out’, but I have had people say to me, ‘there’s so much kissing in your books and that makes me really uncomfortable’.” She breaks out into laughter at this.
That intense focus and consideration returns as we move on to the subject matter of None Shall Sleep. Marney enthuses that she could “seriously nerd out over serial killer psychology all afternoon.” The subject matter is curiously engrossing – I once spent an afternoon reading Ted Bundy’s very extensive Wikipedia entry, fascinated despite my revulsion at the man and his prodigious skill at killing women. I note as such to her, and she agrees; “we’re car-crash gawkers.”
But None Shall Sleep layers a nuance over that fascination through the lens of the trauma her teenage protagonists have undergone at the hands of serial killers. In an author’s note at the end of the book, she notes the way Real Crime Podcast, which she listened to while writing, acknowledged the victims of killers. In Marney’s words, “when we talk serial killers and when we talk murder, it’s always on the perpetrator and the crime, we don’t tend to linger on the victim.” While obviously, the fact that this is a Young Adult book would also factor in to what Marney does and doesn’t show, she does not go into details about the atrocities Emma endured, or which Simon (the Hannibal Lecter-esque convicted teenage serial killer who forms an intense bond with Emma) committed, for reasons beyond the mere age range of her readers.
I bring up those exclusions. Her words speed up – it’s a question she’s been asked before. “With Simon, I felt that anything I could describe would be less horrific than what the readers imagination could conjure up.” Marney’s tone shifts when it comes to why she included on the scantest amount of information about Emma’s experience. Like most authors (certainly, it’s true for me), there’s an obvious protectiveness of her protagonist, increased only by what Emma, who she describes as “this really controlled, private person,” has been through. “I fought quite hard with my editors,” she admits. “They said ‘I think we need more scenes of Emma’s flashbacks so we can see what happened to her,’ and I was like, ‘you really want this young woman’s incredible trauma exposed on the page? Do we need the blow by blow? We see this stuff every day in the news, we hear about women being assaulted in domestic violence incidents and being murdered, we get this stuff day to day… do we really need this, and do we want it in a YA book, do we need it, and do we want to dwell on Emma’s trauma?’ ”
She continues, the careful way she chooses returning. “I wanted to trust reader imagination and reader intelligence that they would be into the gaps […] I wanted to be very careful with how much of Emma’s experience I shared on the page.”
One of the things which stuck me about the way Emma navigates the trauma she’s experienced, and the very confronting conditions into which she’s suddenly thrust, was how Marney portrayed a psychologically healthy way to understand and access anger, and employ mental self-care strategies. I mention this, and she enthusiastically responds. “You know, we’re so terrified about portraying angry women. Angry women are not likeable, they’re aggressive, or mean, or bitchy. We don’t like seeing female rage on the page or on screens. I just think that especially for teenage girls, you should be allowed to see occasionally that anger can be a useful emotion, that you can channel it into something productive. You can use it to forge a path forward. Emma doesn’t always handle her rage well, she slips up, she makes mistakes, she lets it overwhelm her sometimes, but she still persists in trying to find strategies to deal with her trauma, trying to get something positive out of it so she can keep living, keep going, keep moving forward. ” With this in mind, the book’s dedication ‘for all the scared, stubborn, angry girls,’ becomes all the more profound. And it’s this which distinguishes the book, despite the parallels which have been drawn between it and Thomas Harris’ iconic Silence of the Lambs, especially in the dynamic between the charming but deadly serial killer and the young woman attached to the FBI behavioural sciences unit.
Marney acknowledges the similarities the two novels before I can bring it up, but she’s quick to draw the distinction: “Clarice was already part of the machine, part of the FBI, she trusted them implicitly, and to a large extent she didn’t realise how she was being used. In Silence, she’s a very innocent and very vulnerable character. Emma is not like that. She automatically suspects that the FBI has some purpose that she can’t establish, and then she starts picking up clues.”
Marney still works three days a week as a Secondary teacher in English and Indonesian (“I’ve lived in lots of different countries and had lots of different weird jobs, and I think all of that life experience comes into what you’re writing down”). We share an amused exchange about the questions often asked of students when interpreting a text, such as “did the author intentionally place the blue door on the side here to symbolise X or as a metaphor for Y?” When it comes to her own work, she confesses, “half the time, people come up and say to me and say ‘I thought these themes were so well handled’, and I say ‘ah…yes’.”
I asked her if she named Donald Raymond, a belligerent (and questionably competent) senior member of the FBI, Donald deliberately she pauses. It’s maybe the first question today she hasn’t anticipated or heard before in some way. Then she dissolves into laughter. “Oh my GOD! I totally didn’t think about that, it was completely subconscious.” Sometimes a blue door is just a blue door.
Yet she’s acknowledged that she does have a specific takeaway from None Shall Sleep, which shines through the story: “It’s all about her [Emma’s] resilience in the face of these horrifying experiences that she’s lived through back then, and is living through now, and how angry she is, and how much that anger fuels her.”
It’s important to remember that None Shall Sleep is a book aimed at a teenage readership, and Marney makes a point that I’d never considered before: being a teenager is a particular kind of horror, which is what can make thrillers so powerful for them. “Teenagers are going through a stage of body horror […] but also the social dynamic as friendship groups all change, you start to think about things like ‘what will I do with my life, I’m approaching the end of high school, what the hell am I doing’, and there’s a whole group of teenagers living in poverty and experiencing financial stress, and there’s climate change, which ain’t looking so hot right now – so to speak – and there’s COVID. So apart from their personal struggles, what’s going on in the world is really tough.” She pauses. “I didn’t really think about it as a theme until after the book was written, but yeah, I think it really is about how you can overcome and have the strength to get through this, you’ve lived through terrible circumstances and survived, and Emma has that litany going over and over in her head: you can get through this, you can do this, you’ve lived through worse, I guess, or once you’ve lived through this, nothing can defeat you, so guess I wanted to give a little of that back to teenagers, that feeling.”
None Shall Sleep is obviously a passion project – it’s presumably why Marney wrote it without pitching it first. I asked if she would have self-published. She contemplates for a moment. “Look, probably, if I hadn’t been able to find a publisher for it.” Then she tells me something that gets me really excited: “I’d love to write a sequel. I’ve already written a few chapters […] because Emma and Travis are just delightful, and Simon is so interesting.”
I enthuse at this prospect like a true fangirl, and express my desire to see the dynamic between Emma and Travis further explored. Without including quotes which could delve into the terrain of spoilers, Marney reveals that “there was a lot of discussion with my editors” about Emma and Travis, and she “fought hard” for the story to unfold the way it did.
There are so many more questions I have for Marney, but time, sadly, does not permit them to be explored, even though we’ve spoken for an entire hour – generous of her to give me so much time, considering how in-demand she currently is. One thought remains in my head for days afterwards, though: I really, really want her to write that sequel.
