“Our Lady of the Quarry,” your story in this week’s issue, doesn’t have one protagonist—instead, we hear a plural voice of teen-age girls, almost like a chorus. What drew you to the voice of these girls speaking together? Is it important that they share the same desires?
When I wrote “Our Lady,” I was obsessed with teen-age girls and with my own teen-age years. Girls can be like bees or like locusts: there’s something toxic and delicious and exotic about them together—they can convey a certain power. They are a coven, and they are vulnerable, and this mix intrigues me. I’ve written many stories about teen-age girls that tend to have just one voice, yes, like a chorus, because to me there’s a buzz at that age, a world that functions in your own private language. You are going through a metamorphosis: it’s a very mythological time. You’re a beauty and you’re a monster and you can be damaged and you can hurt.
Something about teens swimming at the quarry seems like a classic recipe for disaster: they’re trespassing, swimming there is dangerous, and there’s also this sexual tension bubbling up. Were there any particular horror stories that inspired this one, maybe even a certain kind of slasher film or B movie?
Not really. The place exists, and I did go swimming in a quarry like that when I was a teen-ager. I wasn’t thinking at all about B movies. I can see how it has that atmosphere, certainly, but the setting was inspired by a real place. It was eerie and kind of lawless to go there: it was out of town, and of course it was forbidden to swim there, because it was dangerous. It was almost always empty, and there was the menace of the “owners,” who were a phantasmagoric presence, because we really didn’t know if someone owned these places. Of course, parents didn’t know about these escapades, and many friends didn’t know either, because they disapproved of our going there.
The story’s beginning seems relatively grounded in the everyday world, but, as we go, the story seems to move toward the supernatural. Maybe Natalia’s experiment with menstrual blood is one place where we start to feel the shift. How did you think about the movement of the story into a more “magical” or unfamiliar destination?
Yes, the menstrual blood is the magical rite that moves the story forward. Actually, it’s also based on an urban legend that some girls from my school firmly believed in. One I know for certain did it—and she got the boy, for a while anyway. It’s not exactly an autobiographical story, but it has many scenes inspired by real-life events. In terms of the story, though, that’s when it does shift.
The girls think about sex a lot. It’s interesting that Natalia ends up appealing to “the Virgin” for her revenge. What kind of Virgin is the statue, and why do you think Natalia is able to summon this curse?
She’s expecting a Virgin, but what she actually finds is Pomba Gira, an Afro-Brazilian spirit evoked by practitioners of Umbanda and Quimbanda. Pomba Gira is often depicted as a beautiful, half-naked woman with long hair, and she represents, roughly, sexuality and witchcraft. So Natalia wins in a way: that’s the spirit that represents her. It’s not that common, but it happens sometimes here that you see a street sanctuary—a spontaneous sanctuary, let’s say—and you think it’s for a Catholic saint, but sometimes it’s not. From afar, they look similar in size and texture, and also the materials, as they are all made of plaster—sometimes you have to really look, and you can be surprised.
Is this, to you, a story about revenge?
I think it’s a story about rage and the desire for revenge, and Natalia gaining the power to unleash it.
There is some foreshadowing early on in the story about the owner and his dogs. Is there something satisfying about the way that we know in a horror story that something bad is going to happen—its inevitability—even if we’re not sure exactly what?
What I like about horror is the sense of anticipation, of waiting for the inevitable to hit you. I like feeling unsafe in a story, both reading and writing it.
In the end, we get the dogs only, uncannily large, and no owner. Why dogs in particular, and is there something creepier about there being no other human presence in this strange place?
I don’t trust dogs. I’m quite alone in this, because most people really love them, but I don’t. There’s an element of childhood trauma: I saw a dog attacking its owner once, and it was really gory. The dog bit the mouth of its owner—someone I knew—and ate her lips. She agonized with plastic surgeries for years, until she died of an unrelated disease, but to me her death and that violent event will be forever linked. I never trusted a dog again. They told me many times that she tried to take away from him something that he was eating, and that this is something you can’t do, but that explanation was never enough for me. When I was writing this particular story, I remember that I was in a phase of reading and rereading Ian McEwan, and the novel “Black Dogs” struck a chord. It’s not my favorite book of his, but the image of the enormous black dogs trained to rape was such a great image of evil that I used it. The black dog as evil is a very traditional image, but it works for me. Also, there were always urban legends about the appearance of strange animals, and even aliens, in and around those quarries.
