We chat with author Seamus Sullivan about Daedalus Is Dead, which is a delirious and gripping story of fatherhood and masculinity, told through the reimagined Greek myth of Daedalus, Icarus, King Minos, Ariadne, and the Minotaur.
Hi, Seamus! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
Hi there! This is my first book, and when I’m not writing books I am a tired stay-at-home dad in Jersey City. I used to do theater in DC and still miss it. Free DC!
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
Sometime in grade school I started making my own comics about a superhero called Lightning Man, who was basically Superman but with a red motorcycle helmet because I didn’t like drawing faces. The very first one was a complete rip-off of Bill Amend’s Slug-Man comic from Fox Trot, but I kept at it for… I want to say almost two years, doing one a month, and I introduced some more original characters and ideas over time, and showed them to all my family members, who were very kind and encouraging about it. They may still be in our attic somewhere.
Quick lightning round! Tell us:
- The first book you ever remember reading: Hard to say, but I remember my first-ever comics in the 90s. I remember seeing the Death of Superman trade paperback through a comic shop window in Rhode Island, this is the one where Superman is dead and shirtless in a weeping Lois’s arms and is covered with blood but they don’t want it to look too gory so the blood is black instead of red which makes the whole thing look even more surreal and awful, but I remember insisting that my Dad get the comic for me then and there, because they killed him, my God! Superman was really dead and totally not coming back! This would have been 1993 probably, so I would have been six or seven. So I devoured that and then made my poor Dad get me World Without a Superman and then the saga with the four Supermen and then a subscription to one or more of the monthly Superman comics after that. He kept gently trying to cut me off from these, looking back, very dark violent 90’s comics where Superman had a mullet, he would go, “Okay, I think we’re all caught up with Superman now,” and I kept insisting “No Dad there’s more!” The stunt worked, DC comics. You got me.
- The one that made you want to become an author: The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. The cover has a Martian wearing a gemlike blue mask with red eyes… this was one of the first things I picked up when I wandered up from the kids’ section of our library, which was on the basement level, up to the ground floor where they put the adult sci-fi and fantasy section, which was pretty small, just two rows of shelves meeting a third and forming a somewhat claustrophobic dead end, kind of an intimidating spot compared to the kids’ section. But that book, holy shit. That did it. I couldn’t believe humans could write a book like that. Especially “Night Meeting”. I had to be a writer too.
- The one that you can’t stop thinking about: My sixth grade teacher found out I liked sci-fi and loaned me her copy of Dune to read. I was not nearly old enough to understand Dune but I was impressed and touched by her obvious excitement about the Fremen and the stillsuits and everything, and of course I wanted to show that I could take on a big giant book like Dune so I read the whole thing even though it confused the hell out of me, and then I kept going and tracked down the other books which get progressively weirder and made it all the way to, I think, Heretics of Dune until things became entirely too weird and I got scared and stepped away from the Duniverse for a while. But the movies became a nice excuse to reread the first book and appreciate all the amazing things it’s saying about chosen ones and the smallness of individual goodness in the face of massive systems of oppression. I remain very grateful to that teacher and hope she’s been able to enjoy the Dune revival we’re in.
Your debut novella, Daedalus Is Dead, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Don’t build a Labyrinth, dude.
What can readers expect?
I have very much benefited from the ongoing boom in fairy tale and mythology retellings and I am grateful for that. But my take on Daedalus is less of a straight retelling and more of a twisty dark fantasy continuation interspersed with a highly subjective retelling. About half of the book is Daedalus trying to track down Icarus in the afterlife and half is Daedalus going over his own memories and justifications for what he did when they were both living on Crete, building the Labyrinth and so on. My hope is that if you’re already familiar with Daedalus and Icarus and the Minotaur and Ariadne and Persephone you’ll enjoy reading a new take on all of them, and if you’re more of a horror/dark fantasy person who is mythology-curious this can be a good gateway drug for you.
Where did the inspiration for Daedalus is Dead come from?
Elevator version: I became the father to a baby boy shortly before the first COVID lockdowns, learned how to parent during what I think I can safely say was a shit year for everybody, and near the end of that first year of parenting, having seen the Once and Future President make the pandemic death toll far worse than it had to be, having seen police brutalize protestors, having seen the goddamn January 6 insurrection, I ended that first year as a father and I was angrier with men than I have ever been angry with anyone in my entire life. And as the new father to a son, this anger was mixed in with guilt for all the ways I’ve been enlisted in my life to prop up the systems that made 2020 such a shit year for everyone, and sorrow at the idea that my son would grow up to be enlisted in those systems himself. And for me, Daedalus and Icarus and the Minotaur and the Labyrinth were the only way I could write about that and get all that horror out of me, at the time.
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
Persephone in particular was a nice surprise. I realized early on that her position in the underworld, where she’s both a prisoner and a sovereign ruler of one third of creation, makes her way more complicated and twisty and dangerous than her husband, because she has more to prove and more to lose. She’s the god we spend the most time with, and I tried to make her presence overwhelming and dizzying and to use lots of imagery of decay and regeneration.
Did you face any challenges whilst writing? How did you overcome them?
It is hard to find time to write when you have small kids, so I do a lot of work in the early mornings, when no one else is up yet. Making that part of my routine has helped a lot.
What’s next for you?
I’m working on a new novel about superheroes, fascism, parenting (again), and what the last twenty-five years in America have felt like. I’m very excited about it.
Lastly, what books have you enjoyed reading this year? Are there any you’re looking forward to picking up?
My kids are creature kids right now, they love anything to do with science and nature and animals, and my sister got me into Stephen Jay Gould by suggesting that they might like Wonderful Life, his illustrated book about Cambrian fauna, all these incredible creatures that look like space aliens, Hallucigenia, Opabinia, Anomalocaris, creatures like that. And I’ve been getting into Gould’s essays, which are the most curious and humane science writing I’ve ever read. It has given me a perspective on our smallness, the brevity of humanity’s time here, and the randomness of our universe, in a way that I have found deeply comforting.
Now that we’re getting into spooky season I am beginning to hoard spooky books again. I recently tore through A Game in Yellow by Hailey Piper in about three days. That’s about using the madness-inducing play The King in Yellow as a BDSM tool to spice up a struggling relationship. It’s perfect. I have the new John Langan collection and can’t wait to crack that open. Victor LaValle is one of my favorite writers in any genre and I have Big Machine in my TBR and am excited for that. And I am looking forward to scooping up Bat Eater and Other Names for Cora Zeng by Kylie Lee Baker. I’ve been seeing that on a lot of folks’ best horror of the year lists, and I think pretty much all of us have a lot of unprocessed trauma from living through a pandemic where a lot of politicians and media outlets were minimizing how terrible it was at the time, and minimizing how much anti-Asian racism in particular metastasized during the pandemic thanks to the Once and Future President and his ilk, so horror set during that period, any emotionally honest stories set during that period, I think, are going to be essential for helping us to get caught up on feeling everything we were encouraged not to feel back then, and since.
