The Shining Girls

by By (author) Lauren Beukes

  MJW: Did you know from the beginning that you would be designing two covers, and how did you plan for it? If not, how did that affect your work in progress?

  JH: I was only aware there was going to be a special edition after I was done designing the paperback cover. Designing two covers for the same novel was something I had never done before and it came with the added expectation of at least matching what I had done for the paperback edition. It must be said – I was quaking in my Converse sneakers. Initially I had designed and illustrated the paperback cover title typography to work on its own without any photographs, which later made designing the hardcover special edition cover much simpler.

  MJW: The photographic cover is a departure from what most people associate as being your style. Take us through some of the conceptualising that occurred. How did this cover design come about?

  JH: I tend only to use photography for book covers if I feel it suits the tone of the book or if I can commission photography specifically for the cover. Commissioning good photography is often hamstrung by budgetary and time constraints. Fortunately in this case I had access to a bank of interesting images, which I will mention later on.

  I had the basic idea for the cover in mind almost immediately after reading the novel. I thought that since events in the book cover so many different time periods, the cover should reflect this. The book also follows the attempts of the lead protagonist (Kirby) in trying to solve a mystery spanning decades. I thought the cover should also have that feel – of someone trying to put together clues in order to solve a mystery.

  Initially I had the idea of just illustrating the title of the book, with each letter in the title being from a different time period. I then expanded this concept to include some of the eerie objects mentioned in the book (their true significance of which would become clear as you read the story). I decided then that photography combined with some kind of illustration could work well.

  A portion of the book plays out in the 1990s. I thought it would be great to capture some of that 1990s design aesthetic on the cover as well in a subtle manner, so I delved into the boxes in my spare room and emerged victorious (albeit a bit dusty) with old Ray Gun magazines from the 1990s, some examples of David Carson’s deconstructed type, and a few Dave McKean relics, all of which influenced my design in small ways.

  After that I met with Lauren to discuss some ideas. Knowing that Lauren prides herself on the meticulous research for her novels, I asked whether she had taken any photos of the various objects mentioned in the book while she was doing research in the US. She had – and a whole lot more. It was then that she showed me the research photographs for the book that she took while in Chicago – photos she’d taken of buildings, interiors, and landscapes where scenes from the book took place. They were almost like location shots for a film. The photos were exactly what I had in mind. They all had that creepy, haunting and almost otherworldy glow that I felt the cover required.

  At that stage I’d also seen the covers for the UK and US editions of The Shining Girls, both of which feature a woman on the cover. I then decided that instead of using photos of the “shining girls” from the novel, I would only offer small glimpses of their appearance and personality. I preferred leaving the appearance of the various shining girls to the reader’s imagination. I also felt this would set apart the cover for the South African edition from its UK and US counterparts.

  Once we’d sorted through the photos, I selected the images that worked well together and would complement the typography. In keeping with the tone of the novel (and of course the “shining girl” aspect of the plot) – I wanted all the images on the cover to have a slight haunting and otherwordly glow to them. To achieve this I decided to superimpose some of the images over each other. On some of the images I also superimposed and added small, subtle elements, some that the viewer may not see initially.

  I wanted the title typography to reflect events in the book. Some of the letters represent different time periods and some are derived from objects and events mentioned in the book.

  For example, some of the time-period-inspired letters include:

  • The “S” (in “Shining”), which has a 1930s-era neon showgirl sign feel to it.

  • The [second] “N” is derived from a specific 1950s comic book.

  • The “H” is reminiscent of 1990s deconstructed type seen in such magazines as Ray Gun and the work of David Carson.

  • The “E” is based on an actual Chicago newspaper from the 1980s.

  Some of the letters inspired by events and objects in the book include:

  • The knife forming the shape of the “L”.

  • The Yale & Towne key making up the [second] “I” in “Shining”.

  • The charm bracelet forming the other “I” in “Shining”.

  • The chalk “R”.

  I explored using just photos of objects for the title typography but felt the typography got lost when placed alongside the other photos on the cover. It was then that I decided to use black and white for the title. It had more impact, and also added to the eerie and haunting mood of the cover.

  Once I had finalised the title typography and layout it was just a matter of finding the right mix of images to complement it. This process was a bit like solving my own little jigsaw puzzle. I tried quite a few combinations (with input from Lauren and Fourie Botha from Umuzi). Eventually (and after much debate) the right balance was struck and I think it all came together well in the end.

  MJW: How do you plan the typography and the iconography that you intend to include? Do you go through many iterations (trying different designs and icons for different letters) or is it quite a straightforward process?

  JH: I made notes of various objects while reading the book and asked Lauren for the visual reference she had collected.

  I had a basic idea of how the typography could work, based on some loose sketches I did, but it’s only when I started working with the actual objects or illustrated letters that I got to see what worked well. During this process I usually end up going through many iterations of the typography.

  I wanted to include objects from all of the time periods covered in the book, so I compiled a list of objects for each time period. From there I began matching up objects with letters and seeing how they worked as a typographic whole. It was a bit like solving my very own typographic version of the Hellraiser puzzle box.

  Eventually it all clicked nicely into place, but I did end up with quite a few versions of each letter. Some looked great on their own – but were overpowering when part of a whole. I find when designing this kind of typographic piece (type made from objects), it is always a challenge reigning myself in and not pushing the limits of legibility too far. Obviously on a book cover, legibility of a novel’s title is of a high priority.

  MJW: You mentioned working with the help of Lauren and Fourie when you were putting together the typography jigsaw puzzle. How much input did Lauren and the publishers have in your design work?

  JH: We all worked together quite closely on this cover. I always value the author’s input when working on any book cover. I take the responsibility of putting a cover on any writer’s work very seriously so the end result must be something the author is happy with. Lauren is always a great help when working on her covers and she is a constant source of insight and interesting ideas. For The Shining Girls she was most helpful in suggesting and selecting the photographs for the cover, as well as giving me some visual reference and input for the title typography. For example: in researching and writing the novel she had a specific kind of key in mind, a particular make of knife, and so on. She’d taken a massive number of photos on her research trip to Chicago, so I needed her input in the selection process. Being the author she was in the best position to tell me which were most relevant and so on. She also lent a hand sourcing alternate photos for the cover where needed. As for the publisher – the team members’ input is always important, since they have the final say on
whether the cover is approved or not. In this case they were always there to provide a positive guiding hand.

  This interview first appeared on www.brainwaves.org

  Lauren Beukes: At the Forefront of the Global Invasion

  ASHRAF JAMAL

  I meet Lauren Beukes at her home in Tamboerskloof, a steeply inclined suburb at the foot of Table Mountain. We had agreed to meet at the Woodstock Exchange but her home has the “murder wall” – a fretwork of red thread linking the headshots of beautiful dead women and clippings in fine print crisscrossing the 1930s and 1990s. Some of the press clippings are Photoshopped; others real. The murder wall is the map and trigger for Beukes’s latest novel about a time-travelling serial killer, The Shining Girls.

  We settle down to talk and Beukes is struck by the clunky Dictaphone I position between us, the cassette heaving asthmatically. “You need an iPhone,” she says; apt given the sleek technosphere I imagine she inhabits. “Vintage,” I’m tempted to say, but I’m distracted by her healthy glow.

  Beukes is a publisher’s dream: attractive, gifted, on point. She is the winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award, which has previously been awarded to Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro and China Miéville. “I write the stories I want to write and what I’d want to read,” she says. Moxyland and Zoo City are widely and deservedly celebrated reads, but what about Maverick: Extraordinary Women from South Africa’s Past? Beukes launches into a gushing account of Glenda Kemp, the snake-dancing stripper; Ruth First, the glamorous freedom fighter blown up by a letter bomb; and Dolly Rathebe, “Africa’s first black movie star who ran a shebeen and sold weed on the side”.

  Like the red fretwork of her murder wall, Beukes’s conversation keeps returning to “women burning with potential”, women snagged in the brute “reality of violence”, a far cry from the generic noir image of “a beautiful blonde splayed on a floor legs akimbo and one high heel cast aside, blonde hair in a pool of blood”.

  Beukes knows her noir porn but she also knows how to read the entrails of a grim truth and how, in this morally bankrupt world, it’s become difficult to separate the two. Which is why she fights to make the writing more real “because violence is real, we disconnect with that, we don’t see what it is”.

  “I want to be a David Mitchell; a Margaret Atwood,” she says. “Hopefully my audience will follow me wherever I want to go.” All the indicators suggest that she has no difficulty inspiring her readers. Beukes’s feral splicing of genres reflects a world unimpressed by categories.

  That said, no “talking squids from outer space” pop up in Beukes’s fiction. The remark is Atwood’s. Made on the back of The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake, it irked science fiction fans who thought it dismissive of the genre. Pitting speculative fiction against science fiction, Atwood’s point was that the former “could really happen”. Well … what actually can happen is surely up for grabs, though Atwood tried to mollify the justifiably rankled with her next morph, “social science fiction”. Like “speculative fiction”, social science fiction works for figuring out Beukes, a child of the remix and the mash-up.

  “Contemporaneity is and always has been history on the move. A history that we witness, or engender, but whose finality we cannot ponder. A history that makes us rethink ourselves, not in reference to one fixed outmoded identity but as protean beings with multiple changeable identities.” These words are art critic Simon Njami’s and they trigger a trip switch when I read Beukes.

  The monstrousness that stalks life

  Beukes’s novels are otherworldly yet cannily on point as “ghostings” of the world we live in: real yet bizarre; visceral yet sublime. As for talking squids, they do assume a telling edge in James Cameron and Katherine Bigelow’s film Strange Days, which Beukes admires, and an inspiration for Moxyland. Wired to the brain, the squid teleports the consumer to a parallel dimension – a business person becomes the blonde babe in the shower he so fervently wishes to be, which is sweet. But when the squid becomes the device through which a rape victim assumes the rapist’s experience it is anything but. Strange Days depicts one of the most frightening evocations of rape as a killing of spirit and volition: the victim is so utterly dispossessed of agency she cannot even experience her own pain or death.

  Atwood, Cameron and Bigelow are key inspirations for Beukes and it is easy to understand why: Atwood’s powerful conceits, Cameron’s rich plots, and the frisson and pace of Bigelow’s direction are vital elements in a Beukes novel. Moreover, their women are powerful, intelligent, driven and occupy the vortex of the drama. The worlds they conjure force us to reckon with the perversity at the core of the civilisation that defines us. Furiously politicised, unrelenting in the challenges they pose, damning of the monstrousness that stalks life, these artists in their populist idiom bring us back to the power of fiction to make the world a better place.

  In the 1930s, George Orwell penned an essay titled Good Bad Books, meaning “books that remain readable when more serious productions have perished”.

  “Who has worn better,” Orwell asked. “Conan Doyle or [George] Meredith?” Orwell’s answer is Doyle, an author “able to identify himself with his imagined characters, to feel with them and invite sympathy on their behalf, with a kind of abandonment that cleverer people would find it difficult to achieve”. Orwell’s point is that “intellectual refinement can be a disadvantage to a storyteller, as it would be to a music hall comedian”.

  One need not agree that Uncle Tom’s Cabin will outlive the complete works of Virginia Woolf, but there is something to be celebrated in the idea of “good bad fiction”. Dare I say it: the South African novel in its classic mode is dead, by which I mean the novel of great ideas fed through the mill of colonial taste, disaffection and distemper. Which returns me forcefully to the writing of Beukes, an artist who breaks the contemplative guilt-stricken mould while holding on to the core quest to redefine the aggrieved human condition that defines that tradition. Here Beukes reminds me that she is joined by Jamala Safari, Kgebetli Moele, Thando Mgqolozana, Zukiswa Wanner, Sifiso Mzobe, Diane Awerbuck, Henrietta Rose-Innes and crime fiction writers Deon Meyer and Margie Orford, who “all interrogate the now in exciting and cool ways”.

  Beukes, and others, are at the frontier of a new South African fiction making a global impact. Put bluntly, six-figure sums are being lavished on young South African writers wired to a global idiom, a recent case in point being Sarah Lotz. South Africa’s canon still maintains its currency, but there is another concurrent and fast-growing realm in which writers and readers speak each to each beyond the limiting frontiers of national identity. It is not of course the universalism of our suffering and triumph that our writers have tactically engineered that matters here, but the transnational commercial idiom they have finally mastered. Novelist Michael Ondaatje described this generation some time ago as “international bastards”.

  Psycho-geographies

  The Shining Girls is set in Chicago. Beukes’s other novels are set in Cape Town and Johannesburg. The one she is working on next, called Broken Monsters, is set in Detroit. Cities are her psycho-geographies, cities as visceral as they are imagined. Given the virtuality of lived existences, the global refraction of the prism that makes us up is not surprising. What binds us are imagined communities. Our tenuous substance is networked, our sense of purpose an idea as quaint as it remains urgent. What Beukes returns to us is that very precariousness, that vulnerability and that urgency. “Only connect,” EM Forster declared, knowing then, as we know now, the enormity of the call and the stricken pathos that drives it.

  In conversation with Beukes one senses not only the urgency to connect but the threat that dogs the yearned-for moment. A novel that pictures history on the move, in which time folds and events lose the ease of linearity, what forcefully emerges is concurrency: our post-postmodern time as the age of all ages. Deliberately shut off in 1993, The Shining Girls sidesteps the maw of the internet but nevertheless reminds us of a heterochronic world wi
thin worlds, of time drained of duration, which postmodern thought anticipated.

  The Shining Girls is not a book of philosophy but a thriller in which a serial killer is the jumper between different times in the evolution of Chicago. The strategy allows the writer to gather certain nodal moments that define an age, then, in folding them, forces the reader to reflect on that which changes and that which remains the same. What becomes terrifying is the monotony and unchanging nature of life when it is conceived unimaginatively and hopelessly – this is the horror embodied in the serial killer, an obsessive compulsive fetishist incapable of acknowledging the value of life beyond its reduction to a preordained and monstrous pattern.

  The killer’s victims, one of whom survives her preordained murder to become his antagonist, live lives that are spirited, open and unhampered by the sameness of time. The cruelty in the logic of the novel lies in the seeming triumphalism of sameness, but it is left to the survivor of a murder attempt to change all that. Here lies the force of Beukes’s novel. In conceiving a heroine who lives emphatically in the world, a woman who will not succumb to fate – history has “murdered” women for centuries – Beukes returns us to the driving force behind the writing, which is to reflect upon biopolitics and the historic and monstrous condemnation and damnation of women.

  To read The Shining Girls as a feminist tract is, however, absurd. Mary Wollstonecraft’s campaign for the rights and vindication of women may prove the pulse of the work, but it is Wollstonecraft’s daughter, Mary Shelley, who is its inspiration. It was Mary Shelley who embraced the monster; Mary Shelley who in examining the random piecing together of dead human matter and its monstrous consequence who returns us to the horror of serialising women, reducing them to objects and perforce to dead matter.