In the blistering sun of the American Southwest and all its cinematic grandeur, the complicated lives of women and girls are laid bare. Mystery Lights, Lena Valencia’s debut story collection, charts the supernatural and its impact through the all-too-real horrors of girlhood and growth in such a setting. In ten wryly-crafted stories, women and girls encounter multifaceted beasts, from mysterious orbs and urban legends to the death of friendships and old lives. Available now from Tin House, Mystery Lights is a delightful debut that renders our most abstract hauntings concrete.
Valencia’s fiction has appeared in BOMB, Electric Literature, Ninth Letter, Epiphany, the anthology Tiny Nightmares, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2019 Elizabeth George Foundation grant and holds an MFA in fiction from The New School. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, where she is the managing editor and director of educational programming at One Story and the co-host of the reading series Ditmas Lit.
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Emily Collins: Mystery Lights features women and girls navigating ordinary and supernatural dangers in the Southwest, a land known for its criminal and artistic intrigue and haunted settings. But your characters, longing to be the architects of their lives, simultaneously face an additional challenge: their own anger and dissatisfaction with their situations. The lengths they go to get what they want are surprising, hilarious, and moving, yet rooted in betrayal.
I think about Wendy in the title story, a T.V. marketer whose decision to steal her younger assistant’s campaign idea backfires when an influencer’s cult following violently derails its execution. Or the narrator in “Bright Lights, Big Deal,” whose surging desire for relevance results in her betraying her best friend’s confidence by publishing her private business on a literary gossip news site.
What compelled you to write about these women, their pursuits of power, and these types of relationships in the short form?
Lena Valencia: I’ve always been fascinated with very flawed characters. In these stories, these women are dealing with the violence of living in a misogynistic world. These characters have a limited amount of power and they’re using what they can. I wanted to explore what that does to women and their relationships, particularly those with other women. I was especially interested in instances when the monstrosity they’ve experienced gets reflected back onto them. The beauty of fiction is in being able to get inside the minds of characters that you might never want to meet in real life. I think the short form is a great way to really dig into character both as a writer and as a reader. In the same way a small painting invites you to step up and examine its contents more closely, the short story offers a chance for the reader to analyze a character’s behavior in a way that a novel might not.
EC: A number of these stories explore the cultural impacts of B-movie aesthetics and folklore, notably through their focus on and exploitation of women. In the opening of “Dogs” you write, “Ruth had spent the morning thinking of ghastly things that could befall her protagonist.” Ruth, known for her slasher films, has received feedback on her script encouraging her to make those ghastly things worse, to explain her psychology more, and overall, to “Dial it up.”
Ghastly things certainly befall your protagonists, but they are not simply victims. Your stories are also very funny in spite of their horror elements. How did you work out your portrayals of violence against women through humor and the supernatural?
LV: I started writing a number of these stories after listening to Christine Blasey-Ford’s testimony at Brett Kafanaugh’s confirmation hearing, so many of them were coming from a place of anger.
“Dogs” examines the idea that, in fiction, there always needs to be some explanation for a woman’s violent behavior, some sort of origin story—a standard that doesn’t necessarily apply to male characters. This is what Ruth was responding to in “Dogs.”
I’m so glad that you found the humor in these stories. I think that humor or at the very least some form of levity is so important for stories that deal with dark subject matter. It can give the reader or viewer a bit of a chance to breathe before plunging them back into the doom and gloom. I don’t think this means making light of a serious subject, far from it—humor is just another lens to view it through.
Similarly, I think the supernatural is a way to approach experiences and events that might be too challenging to face head-on. I also just love the horror genre—particularly horror films, where things start off in the real world and then increasingly get weirder and more unsettling. I’ve always been interested in recreating that eeriness on the page. I love the push and pull of trying to decide what’s real and what’s imagined as a reader. These stories are concerned with ideas of belief. When you introduce the supernatural in a story, the character has to make a decision and so does the reader. Is the supernatural experience really happening or is the character making it up?
EC: That question makes me think of the non-supernatural, very real hitchhiking scene at the end of “Dogs.” Ruth is solo camping at Joshua Tree to focus on her script. Near the end of the story, she goes for a long walk and encounters a pack of stray dogs. Nervous, she tries to escape and ends up hopping into the car of a man who does not appear threatening. Your book is full of ghosts and phenomena, but I found this scene to be the most haunting.
LV: That scene was actually inspired by something that happened to me when I was on a writing retreat in a rural town in the desert, where many dogs are kept off-leash. I was going on a walk, and some came after me and started barking. I was terrified so I flagged down the first car I saw. I figured I’d rather get in a car full of strangers than face whatever those dogs were going to do.
The people in the car were very nice and gave me a ride. It was a couple: a man and a woman. The man said to me, “You know, those dogs were probably harmless” and the woman immediately said to him, “Don’t say that.”
I thought, “How did the man know this?” It got me thinking about that idea of fear: sometimes what one person might find terrifying might be completely unremarkable to someone else. I wanted to put that on the page. That whole story explores what we find terrifying versus what truly is dangerous. As a plot device, I like the “locked room,” or, in this case, the locked car. It was fun to work with that tension. When Ruth gets in that car, things ramp up quickly. But I was intentional about nothing physically violent happening to her. I wanted to use horror tropes to capture her anxiety.
EC: That point about belief also surfaces in your story, “You Can Never Be Too Sure.” The characters are fixated on an urban legend but must face the very real predators that frequent college campuses. I thought that tension was very well-executed. In the collection, it follows the story “Dogs” which felt intentional and perfectly placed.
LV: Thank you! “You Can Never Be Too Sure” is first and foremost indebted to my love for David Lynch and how he plays with nightmares and reality. While the human predator is very real, I intentionally wrote the boogeyman-type figure of the Trapper as ambiguous—a phenomenon that was never really explained. I see him as a symbol of this specific kind of ugliness that happened on the campus.
EC: I was impressed with your vivid descriptions of the desert and its inhabitants. You also don’t shy away from satirizing the New Age-Instagram-able fascinations of the region. Yet, there’s still an ethereal quality to this region that you weave into your characters’ lives. What inspired you to center this collection in the Southwest and its unique folklore?
LV: The first story I wrote, set in the Southwest, made me want to write a collection centered in that region. I’d been on a road trip in West Texas and visited Big Bend National Park. I was captivated by the landscape. Then I spent some time in Marfa, which is where “Mystery Lights,” the title story, takes place. I found the contradictions within that town to be so fascinating. First, you have the supernatural lore of the Marfa lights which are essentially a roadside attraction, a sort of kitschy slice of Americana, and then you have the upscale art world scene in places like the Chinati Foundation. And then you go a little bit outside of town and you’ve got the US Border Patrol’s surveillance blimps. It’s just this American weirdness compressed into one place that I wanted to write more about.
Once I started thinking about the desert and how it’s portrayed in books and art and films, the ideas for these stories just sort of fell into place. The desert wilderness in the Southwest is very beautiful, but it can also be very dangerous. And, like the West and America as a whole, it has a violent history. This haunted setting worked well as a place for these haunted characters to interact with.
From a more sentimental perspective, my father is from Tucson and I spent a lot of time there as a kid with my grandparents. The collection is dedicated to my grandmother who was born in Nevada and spent most of her life in Arizona. The Southwest is a place with which I am familiar, but where I still feel very much like an outsider. That’s why I chose these mostly outsiders to populate these stories.
The more I thought about the desert and spent time there, the more these odd little contradictions kept popping up. And personally, I do think the Southwest is very beautiful and I am just as seduced by it as the Instagrammers are.
EC: What is the most compelling or unusual contradiction you’ve found in the Southwest?
LV: Oh gosh, those blimps were pretty weird!
And then of course there’s the way we use water in these arid climates. The green golf courses you see in places like Las Vegas or parts of Arizona, for example. There’s a story that didn’t make it into the collection that was set in a place inspired by the Salton Sea in California—a man-made lake that was created by an attempt to divert the Colorado River to irrigate farmland. For a while in the ’50s and ’60s, it was a resort destination—until the water started to dry up and fish began to die off. It’s an environmental hazard now, with clouds of toxic dust that blow from the drying lakebed into surrounding communities.
As you mentioned, I’m also interested in influencer culture, which is not unique to the desert of course, but definitely is something that you’ll encounter there. I’m thinking in particular of people I’ve encountered on popular hiking trails who put on makeup and an Outfit to go on a hike. It just seems like certain people are more interested in getting that perfect shot rather than appreciating the landscape. There is something contradictory in going to a place not to experience it for yourself, but to show others that you were there.
EC: That calls to mind your story, “The Reclamation.” In this story, a woman attends a wellness retreat in the desert to help cope with a business disappointment. The retreat is hosted by a wellness guru who purportedly lives in a van in the desert. The women who attend are ardent followers of hers, and they too have an interesting relationship to power. I’m curious to know how this story came about.
LV: I was thinking about how places like Sedona have historically been portrayed as places for New Age, spiritual connection, and how social media has amplified and spread certain ideas connected to that culture. I wanted to explore this in my fiction, particularly self-help and wellness culture, and what it means to blindly follow a charismatic leader, who in the case of this story was a wellness influencer. A lot of the inspiration for this piece came from self-help podcasts I was listening to during the pandemic lockdown. I became interested in the clichéd language that all these wellness gurus used. I wondered what would happen if someone took those platitudes to their extreme.
EC: Ghosts and mysterious lights notwithstanding, your stories are very character-driven. In the collection’s epigraph, you quote Stephen Crane’s famous poem “In the Desert.” There the speaker encounters a naked creature eating its own heart. The speaker asks the creature, “Is it good, friend?” and the creature replies that the heart tastes bitter. “But I like it,” he says, “Because it is bitter, / And because it is my heart.”
I’m curious to know why you chose this poem and if there are any stories you think it’s speaking to the most.
LV: I think the poem speaks to the darkness in many of these stories, and the darkness that can come with power. I’m thinking in particular of the painter in “The White Place,” Pat and Brooke in “The Reclamation,” Wendy in “Mystery Lights,” and Julia in “Bright Lights, Big Deal.” Though they might not always be aware of it, the women in Mystery Lights are very powerful. That power prevents them from being victims—a sort of flat term that defines a person simply by an act of violence committed against them—but it can also lead them astray at times. Much like the creature in the poem who gets pleasure out of eating its own bitter heart, they all have agency which allows them to make a lot of interesting mistakes. I think all of us have a naked, bestial desert creature living inside of us, whether we choose to admit it to ourselves or not.
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Emily Collins is a content editor at Adroit. She received her MFA in fiction from the University of Montana, and her writing has appeared in The LA Review of Books, Hyperallergic, The Millions, The Chicago Review of Books, and several literary magazines. She lives in Santa Fe, NM. For more, visit www.emilycollinswriter.com.