Interviewed by Mimi Bhalla
Sarah Langan is a horror writer from Long Island and the author of five novels: The Missing, The Keeper, Audrey’s Door, Good Neighbors, and A Better World. She is a three-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award and a founding board member of the Shirley Jackson Awards. Sarah Langan got her MFA in creative writing from Columbia University, and her Master’s in Environmental Health Science/Toxicology from New York University. Her latest novel, A Better World, was on Book Riot’s Most Anticipated Books of 2024 and was described as “wildly entertaining” by acclaimed author Gillian Flynn. Pick up your copy today!
TSM: Your latest novel A Better World is your fifth novel, right?
SL: Yes.
TSM: I just read it a couple days ago because I wanted to see what it was all about. It’s very interesting because it focuses on a lot of social commentary like climate crisis, resource hoarding, inheritance of trauma… So tell us more about the novel.
SL: What happens is it’s the near future, and things are a bit worse—maybe dystopian, but I think kind of a logical progression of where they seem to be headed now, where corporations have more power and jobs are being replaced, and there’s a lot of inherent corruption. We’re set in Brooklyn—or this novel’s version of Brooklyn—and the mother (the main character of the family), Linda Farmer, is a pediatrician at a free clinic. Her husband works at EPA, and he’s fired. It opens with them looking for new work and getting a job interview with Plymouth Valley. Plymouth Valley is a corporate town. These towns are all over the world, and they’re owned by the companies, and they’re for the top employees. These top employees have everything provided for them; they work all the time, but the education’s free, the food’s free, [and] the housing’s free. If you work there long enough, you get tenure and you can live there forever, and your children’s futures are assured. The air’s cleaner and everything’s taken care of for you.
While the family, particularly Linda, thinks it’s a devil’s bargain to move to this place, they are out of options. Where they’re living is falling apart and they don’t see any other options or possibilities. So, they get to Plymouth Valley and as soon as they get there, they realize it’s a mess. It’s practically a cult. But the people are cool, and they figure, “You know what? We’ll make this work.” It seems to be going okay; it’s an adjustment, the people are afraid to accept newcomers because it’s possible that if this family gets tenure, then some other family will be out [because] there’s a limited number of spots.
…Linda is out one night with the leaders of the town, the women, and meets this tragic story, which is a woman who is about to get kicked out. This woman is not right in the head, and this woman doing all the things that you’re not supposed to do in this town, which is that she’s loud, she says exactly what’s on her mind, and she’s hitting on everybody like it doesn’t matter who they are. She does something that’s so awful that Linda can’t get over it. It’s violent and terrible. That’s the real start of the story, where Linda has to figure out why she did this, what is going on, and what it is concealing about Plymouth Valley.
TSM: Wow. I thought that the whole concept of the corporate town was creepy and very unsettling. Is A Better World different from your other novels, in the sense that it’s set in the future?
SL: Good Neighbors is set in the future and Audrey’s Door is also set in the future.
TSM: What made you want to switch from traditional horror novels to this dystopian theme?
SL: I would actually say that that’s the theme of all of my books—they’re all dystopian. It’s always been something I’m interested in. I have a degree in Environmental Health Science Toxicology, and when I was first publishing, people were still debating whether global warming was real, and I felt like we were in a dystopia back then.
TSM: Yeah, I mean it’s already kicking off the process.
SL: Yeah, it was bizarre to me. I’ve always been fascinated by those issues because it was always apparent to me [that] the people [who] believed that [global warming wasn’t real] had either been reading articles and wanted to sound smart, these articles had been paid for by fossil fuel companies, or they were people working for fossil fuel companies.
TSM: You got your MS in Environmental Toxicology from NYU… How did getting that degree impact the writing process of A Better World?
SL: I think it was helpful in drawing conclusions about how things might go. I took a class called “The Thermodynamics of Global Warming” where we proved global warming. It’s always been apparent. Scientists knew about it a hundred years ago; it’s just been repeatedly covered and uncovered, so every few decades, people are like, “Oh, it’s happening!” And then they go and worry about [some] more exigent problem instead. So the degree was helpful in that way, and it was helpful to understand how scientists work. I have a lot of respect for the scientific method, more respect than I had before.
TSM: I’m really curious as to how you came up with the concept of Plymouth Valley’s religion, Hollow. Was there any real-life inspiration behind that?
SL: I was just thinking about the ways that—I don’t know if you’ve read The Hunger Games?
TSM: Oh yes, I’ve read The Hunger Games.
SL: Oh it’s so good! But at some point, as a reader in America, from a certain demographic, you say to yourself, “Oh we’re the Capitol. We’re the Capitol, we’re not the protagonists here.” And I think that’s a very upsetting feeling, and so I was kind of writing to that. That notion of, how do we in this country and as citizens of the world look on these structures that we’re upholding? And people in Plymouth Valley are very much upholding a system that causes damage. So while it’s beautiful within—it looks amazing—you pull up the rocks and you see the appalling violence underneath that the system has caused by the hoarding of resources. Because once you’re hoarding resources, you’re definitely murdering people. So it’s that and then I thought, “Well, people like that would want a justification for their actions.” And I thought [that] there’s no better justification for morally depraved actions than religion.
TSM: Yeah, historically yeah.
SL: So they have this religion that supports everything they do. It even lays guilt on them for what they’ve done, and they’re able to expiate their guilt with these small actions within the rituals of Hollow.
TSM: Yeah, A Better World is full of a sort of this existentialistic doom; it doesn’t paint a very optimistic picture of our future. But I liked how in the novel you [stated that], yes we take blame for how we’ve impacted the system while acknowledging the corporations played a big part in this, but I also liked how Linda had to take accountability for her actions within her marriage and her family, and how she was upholding this. How do you think the town of Plymouth Valley mirrored the tensions within the Farmer-Bowen family?
SL: The marriage was a mirror to the town, where they were complicit in things that, as individuals, they didn’t agree with, but together they felt that the survival of the corporation, or their marriage, was more important than what they wanted or their own morality. And as they go deeper and deeper, Linda starts to think, “Maybe none of this is worth it.” I think she starts to see things she didn’t see before, because there’s a real imbalance in the marriage and she’s willing to just put up with it, thinking it’ll just blow over at some point. But it’s been fifteen years and it hasn’t, and she starts to become a person in her own right in ways that are very threatening to the other individuals in the family.
TSM: It creates a loss of identity in her. That’s one of the most disturbing parts of the novel, I think. It’s what I love most about psychological thrillers and psychological suspense: instead of just the gore of traditional horror novels, it is thinking about the most disturbing things the human mind can come up with and how it can warp your sense of self.
SL: Yeah. For Linda, it’s very hard to be the helpmate in a marriage, and that’s her role because she’s got to give up her career; they move to Plymouth Valley [because] Russell’s got the job. Russell is working very hard but lacks social skills, so someone has to figure out how to get along with everyone—how to make nice, how to make friends [with] everyone, how to make sure Russell gets tenure. Suddenly, that’s on her shoulders. I think that’s a very typical situation; I’ve heard from a lot of women since this book came up who have just written to me being like, “How did you know?” Because you’re not alone, this is common.
So suddenly, she has to sublimate her identity to make nice with people she doesn’t particularly like. And when you do that, as an empathetic human being, you kind of like them anyway. You kind of force yourself into being someone you’re not. And she keeps doing that, and it keeps alienating her from her daughter, who doesn’t make those concessions, and keeps picking fights with her over it. She begins to realize that the woman in the mirror is not who she is on the inside. In fact, it’s been like that for a very long time. It’s not just her—it’s anyone who makes this pact, you know? Any time that you lie about who you are, especially if it’s in a self-aggrandizing way, I think you become less. Any time you tell that lie, it becomes a problem, and for her, she’s tired of the lie.
TSM: Were any of these unlikable characters modeled after people you knew?
SL: You know, I think there were composites. I don’t know if you ever saw that Whit Stillman movie, where they keep saying, “It’s a composite”—the movie Metropolitan. I think there are pieces of different people I’ve known in my life, certainly that corporate-speak. I live in Los Angeles; it’s a one-company town. People here don’t say negative things in the open. If you didn’t get the job, no one will ever say it. You just don’t hear back. And it’s because you might work with them someday again, or you might be in a position to hire them, or you might be bigger up, and they don’t want you resenting them, so they’re never just gonna tell you the truth. There was a lot of that feeling—that alienated feeling that’s just so not New York, which is where I grew up, where you just say things. And I was probably more on the blunt end than you were, so becoming accustomed to Los Angeles, the double-speak that exists here was surprising.
…Because of the income disparity, I find that often, in upper-middle-class and upper-class environments, the men always make more money, right? So often women just quit their jobs. And so more than in middle-class situations, the women have less power in their marriages. I wanted to explore that a little bit with Plymouth Valley, and I was thinking a lot of Ira Levin, [The Stepford Wives], and Rosemary’s Baby, where they’re endlessly trying to wield soft power.
TSM: What do you define as soft power?
SL: Well soft power is the woman behind the man. It’s Daniella, and it’s Anouk, and it’s in some ways, Linda. It’s not Rachel—Rachel has hard power, which is actual power. I think this idea that you can change things from within with soft power—I’ve never seen it work.
TSM: I think the whole book was a counterexample. I thought it was interesting how the women you just mentioned, other than Anouk, all came from the outside themselves. When they were first introduced, I was excited for Linda; I thought she had met her crowd and these people would be the people who understood her. But it over time became clear that they were, in fact, some of the most evil of the group. How do you think that works?
SL: How did they come to be? Well, my idea was [that] this has been a multigenerational town. A lot of people—the second and third generations—just don’t work very hard. They just come in and they’re not great at their jobs, but they’re not gonna get fired or replaced, probably. But they do have imposter syndrome because if it were really a meritocracy, they wouldn’t be there. So the town keeps having to bring in fresh blood for a couple of reasons, but the one that’s the open reason is that they need people who can actually do the job.
When Daniella, Rachel, Linda, and Russell are in there, it’s because they actually are hard workers and they have some confidence. Daniella’s been able to get her husband to a very high position in the company just by doing a lot of favors. And Rachel’s just a killer, you know; she would be considered this corporate hotshot now. She got in there for really specific reasons, because she wanted to escape a bad place where she’d been raised. So you have these people who need to survive and have the skills and use them to support something that shouldn’t be supported. And then you have these legacies who are there just hoping they don’t get kicked out and following and doing what anybody tells them to do.
TSM: A Better World shares some similarities with your previous novel, Good Neighbors, in that they’re both dystopian, suburban settings with complicated family dynamics. What draws you to the “secrets of suburbia” theme?
SL: Well, I grew up in the suburbs, and I think those early experiences imprint. I love the suburbs; I think they have a lot to offer. I don’t think they’re evil just because I’m portraying these different stories. But I do think that they make a nice background for a nice microcosm. They could’ve been an apartment building and all the people in the building—any place where you have different kinds of people who have the same goals.
TSM: It’s sort of like one of those Agatha Christie novels where she puts them all in a train or a hotel, and there’s a storm, and they can’t leave.
SL: Yeah, that’s the device that makes sense to me.
TSM: I think it’s also interesting because suburbs are promoted as this image of safety and it twists our minds to see the reversal of our expectations.
SL: Yes. That’s the other thing in my stories about fear and the decisions we make out of fear—how shortsighted they are, how likely they are to cause more damage than if we made the braver decisions. You could make that argument about a lot of suburbia, the way they often want to keep people out, and they had a history of trying to keep people out because they were different. They (the middle class, upper-middle-class ones) had a history of hoarding their resources, taking all the good public school money and putting it in their schools, and it’s because they’re so afraid that their kids aren’t going to have good futures. I think it’s a false fear; I mean, there are bigger fears to have.
TSM: Of your two recent books, A Better World and Good Neighbors, which was your favorite to write?
SL: Oh gosh. That’s a hard one. Good Neighbors was much easier to write [because] it had a lot less world-building. They were just such different experiences.
TSM: It’s like picking between your children I guess.
SL: Yeah, yeah. A Better World was a much harder process.
TSM: What was the biggest challenge?
SL: Yeah, it was the world-building I couldn’t figure out. As an author, you have to make these decisions, and it’s a coin toss. Was I supposed to make it a parallel universe? Was I supposed to put it in the future? How realistic am I supposed to make this bomb shelter? How much research should I be doing? I had a ton, but I didn’t want to exhaust the reader, so I’m endlessly cutting things out so that it’s a fun roller to read where the facts are reliable. That was a lot of work.
TSM: I think you nailed the balance between the background and the plot. It was definitely a page-turner for me.
SL: Thank you, I’m glad to hear that, I wasn’t sure. I know Good Neighbors, you can’t put it down, but A Better World is a little headier.
TSM: [It’s] more that it creeps up on you. Do you have any more dystopian thrillers that you would recommend to fans?
SL: Oh! Gosh, I wasn’t expecting this question. Let me look at my bookshelf.
TSM: I know—any time someone asks me this question, “What have you been reading lately?”, my mind goes blank.
SL: No, I’m a blank! I might have to write you with dystopian thrillers because I love dystopian.
TSM: That’s fine too.
SL: I know! Where Late the Sweetbird Sang by Kate Willhelm, and Mockingbird by Walter Tevis. He wrote The Queen’s Gambit too.
TSM: Ah, that’s why that sounded familiar. That was a wonderful series, but I never read the book.
SL: He’s spectacular, he’s great. He also wrote The Hustler. Three completely different genres.
TSM: So what’s next, what do we have to look forward to from you?
SL: I’m working on something about a rivalry between two friends that gets very dark, but it’s kind of funny.
TSM: I like that, I like that. I love a rivalry.
SL: Yeah, it’s pure envy.
TSM: Oh, that’s fun. Is it set in the future, set right now?
SL: Set right now, yeah. It’s nice to have a very discrete, clear plot.
TSM: Yeah, I love novels that show a relationship between two women [that] turns sour. I don’t know if you’ve ever read this Margaret Atwood book, The Robber Bride?
SL: I haven’t read that one, but is that—
TSM: It’s this group of four friends who met in college, but one of them just ruins the rest of their lives in different ways. She steals each of their husbands in a different way, and it causes their ruin. But then she comes back, and they plan to kill her, but she faked her death… It was really funny, and I didn’t expect it to be that funny.
SL: I gotta read that then, I gotta read that.
TSM: Well thank you so much for talking with The Strand Magazine.
SL: Thank you very much for reading, I appreciate it.
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