Amber Dawn’s newest book Sodom Road Exit has been described as “part broken family melodrama part lesbian supernatural thriller.” It was this description that piqued my interested, the novel’s enthralling narrative that prevented me from putting it down, and all the ways Amber Dawn interweaves the complexity of relating to each other—across difference and in difficult situations—that has me thinking about Sodom Road Exit long after having finished it.
In the interview that follows, we ask her about fear, love languages, and who we should be reading next.
GUTS: As the editor of Fist of the Spider Woman, and a self-described genre-hopper, Sodom Road Exit isn’t your first foray into what I’m going to call “scary” writing, such as thriller, horror, suspense. What’s your relationship to genres that work through fear? Do you watch or read a lot of these kinds of works?
Amber Dawn: The first two books I fell in love with were Katherine Dunn’s novel Geek Love and Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. While they are wildly different books, expressions of fear are palpable in both: fear of the unknown, fear of the other, fear of being othered, fear of not belonging, fear of oneself. Fear—whether expressed through a fictional character or by a nonfiction narrative voice—often helps reveal just what is at stake. When reading, I often focus my attention on what the characters or narrator is afraid of, what external forces are causing those fears, and what choices (or lack of choices) are being made during times of narrative tension and fear.
… Read the full interview at GUTS magazine online