Please describe The Night Eaters for our readers.
The Night Eaters is about what happens when a Chinese immigrant mom decides she's going to teach her adult children a lesson — inside a haunted house.
This story occurs during the pandemic (this is still pretty rare in recent fiction). Why did you choose to include this real-life scenario in your graphic novel?
I can only speculate on why the pandemic hasn't been touched on more. Is it because of its divisiveness? Because it's something people wish could be forgotten? Because it's still ongoing, and therefore too close, too raw, too real? I honestly don't know. Maybe it's all those things — or none of them.
For me, though, it didn't make sense to ignore the pandemic. No matter what your political beliefs are, that's like pretending WWII didn't happen. COVID-19 stopped the entire world. Millions died. And if you're Asian or Asian-American in the US, there was a lot of cruelty directed at us. And that's worth remembering, even in a small way. But it's also worth remembering that the world has its pandemics, its wars, its endless crises and cruelties — and yet, life still goes on. Even supernatural lives.
Has the pandemic changed how you write? Or what you write?
That's a great question, and I don't know if I have the full answer yet — except to say that the pandemic absolutely affected how I think about life, how I approach life. I've spent the last two years contemplating mortality and compassion. Even before COVID, that had been on my mind — it's what happens as you get older and have a couple health scares. And maybe to some it will seem strange to link death with kindness, but I believe they go hand-in-hand because we don’t have limitless time. We're not here forever. Humans suffer from the same amnesia: we forget that each day could be our last. And I can totally imagine someone reading that and saying, "Oh, my God, how grim," but for me I've found the integration of
that truth to be quite motivating, and empowering. I've had to ask, "What matters?" And my answer has been, "To live with compassion." Compassion for myself and others. To have a practice of kindness, patience, and tolerance.
And maybe to some it will seem strange to link death with kindness, but I believe they go hand-in-hand because we don’t have limitless time.
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One character, Milly, had been studying for a professional degree, but instead started working in the service industry — I can relate! — why did you make this choice for the character, and what does it say about the world and Milly’s place in it?
In something I was recently working on, a character says “Maybe it’s only after we die that we get to be our true selves.” And I wonder if that’s the reality for a lot of people. We hide ourselves, or we ignore ourselves, or we don’t think very hard about who we are or who we want to be, or we let the pressures and expectations of family and friends run roughshod over us.
And I think that's the situation Milly is in, after having left medical school to run a restaurant that doesn't make her happy. I see her as someone who, when she was a kid, in her teens, was very idealistic and hopeful. She wanted to help people, be useful, and also follow a path that she thought would please her parents. She wanted to be a good Asian daughter. Which is super ironic, because that's the
last thing her parents were worried about — she just couldn't see it. But who we are in our teens isn't who we are in our twenties (or thirties, or forties, and so on), and the changes we go through can be stark, and unsettling. Milly, somewhere along the way, lost her idealism. She got scared, consumed with self-doubt and unhappiness, and ran from medical school. But she never worked through, or even thought about, where all those feelings came from in the first place.
But who isn't plagued with doubt? I stopped being a lawyer to write romance novels, and even though I knew that was the right choice for me, I felt so guilty for making it. I felt like I had to work extra hard at being a novelist to make up for the fact that I wasn't practicing law.
The Night Eaters is being categorized as horror/fantasy. I’m curious about your relationship to genre: did you plan from the beginning to create a work within a genre or have those labels been applied after the book was written? How do you feel about these kinds of classifications being placed on your work?
I don't mind at all. I was a child who constantly escaped into fantastic realms, who craved the supernatural as an antidote to reality. I was, as some might say, disassociated — one foot here, another foot elsewhere, very far away. As an adult, I'm far more grounded — and yet, I'm still elsewhere. That said, I never plan ahead and think, "Well, today I am writing a fantasy." I just write, and let everyone else worry about where the stories fit.
The horror genre is rapidly increasing in popularity lately. Do you have any theories as to why? Do you think you, as a writer, are responding to the same forces?
I think that horror is one area, particularly in film, where we're still encountering new, fresh, and original storytelling. Not remakes, not sequels, not franchises — but very strange and unsettling stand-alone narratives that pierce us in ways that many other stories don't. That's the nature of horror, though — to stick a hook in us, and then drag us through an encounter with the terrifying reality of our mortality, and our fragility. The real world is violent. Literally, objectively, violent — with actual sticks, stones, knives, and bullets. What else is horror but a space in which we can metabolize the underlying anxiety that many of us repress in our daily lives? I think that's why I found horror movies so cathartic during the pandemic.
That's the nature of horror, though — to stick a hook in us, and then drag us through an encounter with the terrifying reality of our mortality, and our fragility.
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But as for my own work — I think I've been engaged with horror for some time in
Monstress. The horrors of war, colonialism, intergenerational trauma, possession, self-loathing, all combined with the fantastic.
The Night Eaters is an extension of that work, but set in
this world, in a haunted house where the children of immigrants begin to learn all the secrets their parents have kept hidden.
This book is illustrated by your longtime collaborator Sana Takeda. Maybe the answer to this question is obvious — she’s an incredible artist! — but many comics creators change collaborators regularly; can you talk a little about your enduring partnership and why you continue to work together?
Sana is a creative powerhouse, a wonderful human being, and maybe the hardest working person I know. She's also my friend. And if you examine the body of our work, from
X-23,
Monstress, and
The Night Eaters, you'll see a visual style that shifts radically from project to project — because Sana is a true storyteller. She isn't content to keep doing the same thing over and over — she looks at each project, decides what it needs, what will best serve the story, and then creates the look. It's absolutely incredible. I mean, I have no idea why she continues to work with me — but I'm super grateful she does, because I couldn't imagine working with another artist.
The Night Eaters is coming out between arcs of Monstress. Why did you and Sana Takeda decide to shift to a new series?
To spice things up!
Monstress is going to run a long time, but we're two creatively hungry people who like to do new things, and I think both of us were feeling the itch to test ourselves with something completely different.
Unlike Monstress, which is published monthly and then collected, The Night Eaters is being published as an original graphic novel. What are the advantages to the longer form? Are there any drawbacks?
They both have their pleasures. The great thing about a monthly comic is that it comes out relatively fast — but the graphic novel form allows me to tell a story all at once. The experience is a little closer to what it feels like when I write a novel, and I realize I've missed that.
This story is largely about parents, children, and the relationships between them. Was the story built around those dynamics, or did they present themselves as it developed?
I usually begin with a central question, and expand from there. In this case I imagined what would happen if my grandmothers and aunts encountered a haunted house — which I found hilarious, because all the ghosts would be annihilated. But I wanted this to be a closer, more intimate story than that, so I began writing about just one mother and her family — and as I wrote, the dynamics presented themselves, flowing out of my own lived experiences as a mixed race Chinese American daughter of an immigrant. This is a horror story, yes, but it's also a book about an immigrant family and their secrets, a graphic novel about two adult children who love their parents, but are also tired of feeling like they're disappointments to them. I also knew this was a story about a mother who regrets how she raised her children, and is now trying to fix her mistakes.
In this case I imagined what would happen if my grandmothers and aunts encountered a haunted house — which I found hilarious, because all the ghosts would be annihilated.
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What have you read recently that you’d like to recommend to our readers?
I've been reading a lot of nonfiction.
Ducks by Kate Beaton is an amazing graphic memoir, and I've also enjoyed (and been horrified by) Timothy Winegard's book,
The Mosquito, which details in excruciating detail how mosquito-borne diseases have affected mankind. I've started reading
Babel by R.F. Kuang, and love it — as well as
The Great Exodus from China by Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang.
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Marjorie Liu is an attorney and New York Times bestselling novelist and comic book writer. Her work at Marvel includes the series
X-23,
Black Widow, Han Solo, Dark Wolverine, and
Astonishing X-Men. She is also the cocreator of
Monstress from Image Comics, which has won multiple Hugo Awards, British Fantasy Awards, the Harvey Award, and five Eisner Awards, making Liu the first-ever woman-and woman of color-to win an Eisner in the best writer category. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.