Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya: On Transformation Stories, Mouth Horror, the Relationship Between Sex and the Grotesque and Her Novelette, "Helen House"
Burrow Press’s synopsis of Kayla Upadhyaya’s Helen House reads: “Right before meeting her girlfriend Amber’s parents for the first time, the unnamed narrator of Helen House learns that she and her partner share a similar trauma: both of their sisters are dead.” This is a story about trauma and grief, but, perhaps more so, it is a story of consumption, eroticism, and the way the lines between horror and sex don’t so much as blur as intermingle.
Through email, Kayla and I spoke about the power of transformation stories, the way this novelette ultimately acts as a comment on the relationship between sex and the grotesque and writing mouth horror.
One of the first things I picked up on in HELEN HOUSE was this theme of consuming or, I suppose, subsuming. You begin the book with a meditation on the human mouth while kissing ("From that close, everyone looks the same."). The narrator feels "swallowed up" by a dark room, or imagines water filling a room and doing the same to her and Amber. Can you talk a little about this running theme in the story? How did you come to this motif in the process of writing the book?
Ah yes, the mouths! I did a mouth motif by complete accident. It was all subconscious. But it makes sense that it was just sort of sitting there, just beneath the surface, because I was writing about sex. But I also was writing about the sort of all-consuming feeling of grief and the ways we sometimes consume others in relationships, and people love to talk about eyes as the portal to the soul or whatever, but I actually think mouths are the real portal to the soul. And I am really drawn to — this is going to sound weird — mouth horror. Think: Jennifer Check's mouth contorting and opening wide before she consumes victims in Jennifer's Body, the Chatterer's finger entering Kirsty's mouth in Hellraiser, that one tiny but very memorable moment in Netflix's The Haunting of Hill House when the dad's mouth stretches open way too big. Mouth horror! But anyway, I didn't totally consciously realize I was writing so many mouth things into the story until my editor pointed it out, and he did what I also love to do as an editor which was say: Instead of walking this back, what if we leaned into it EVEN MORE? So I got to heighten some of the mouth stuff, which was very fun.
The unnamed narrator appears to be, if not obsessed with, then at least fixated on sex and the act of it, as a way to distract herself from her grief over the death of her sister, Luci. She is even doing her dissertation on sex and queer coding in Victorian literature. Thinking on that theme of consumption, how did you approach marrying the carnal quality of that with the horror genre's underpinnings? Is sex and horror inextricably linked for you?
Oh yes, sex and horror are absolutely linked for me. A lot of my favorite horror movies have an element of the erotic to them. And I'm not just talking the sort of salacious moments associated with slashers of a certain era — although, don't get me wrong, I love that too! But movies like Stoker, Hellraiser, Knife + Heart, Black Swan, where the horror and the erotic are so closely mingling, are some of my favorite works of horror. Fear and desire are very linked to me. They're both so driven by the unknown. They're both so carnal. And I think, just being queer, when I was first figuring out my sexuality and things, there really was a blurred line between what I desired and what scared me. When writing Helen House, I knew I wanted my narrator to be obsessed with sex and for there to be all sorts of psychological underpinnings to that, but I also didn't want to make sex or her sex drive the source of horror here. It's funny, because I think she sees her high sex drive as the monster maybe, but it isn't; it's far from it.
Transformation also seems to be a large part of this story. The narrator's life is transformed by the loss of her sister, as is Amber's and her parents' lives by their loss. The narrator attempts to transform Amber into an "escape hatch" from her own grief, though that proves unsuccessful. And the narrator herself undergoes a specific and unsettling transformation at the climax of the book. How do you see this process of transformation at work in the realm of horror and in what ways are you in conversation with the great transformation narratives that have come before you? (Vampires, werewolves, etc.)
Okay this is wild but I hadn't actually completely thought about the fact that I'd written a transformation narrative, but you're so right! I do think I wanted that transformation to be a little subtle, a little ambiguous as to what's really happening and why. And I don't mean why in a mythology way but rather just in an emotional way. Why is the narrator making choices that seem potentially dangerous? She walks into what very well might be a trap but very willingly. And I wanted that to feel believable, to feel real. The thing about werewolves is that their transformation is so often portrayed as this thing that's out of their control, that isn't even really by choice. But the narrator here does choose to follow this path, and there's all sorts of reasons for that. There's this dual thing happening where perhaps both the narrator and Amber think they can alleviate their own grief by using the other in some way, and I think that's really complicated! I think the narrator would say that it's an inherently bad thing for them to be using each other in this way, but I think there's also love and care behind that impulse. We often heal from past traumas through new relationships, and I think it's too simple to say that's an entirely bad thing, and that's some of what I wanted to write into with Helen House.
You live in Florida currently, and I assume the story is set here too, given your allusions to the narrator's "city girl" assumptions about the northern part of this state, and, as someone who also lives in the deep south, I know that Northern Florida is a whole different world than Miami and Orlando. In what way did you shape the setting of this story to reflect Florida's rich landscape and complex history?
That's funny! It's actually Michigan! But having lived in both Michigan and Florida, there is this funny throughline there of "up north" being totally different than the rest of the state. The setting is definitely a little ambiguous (I could have easily put snow in there but I didn't), but it was always northern Michigan to me and then the campus where the characters go to school and work is University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where I went. I did have some clues in there about northern Michigan, but they were subtle. I actually haven't finished writing anything set in Florida yet. I recently started a story set here, but it's still in early draft stages. I'm sure the longer I live here, the more it will start to creep in. Florida has a way of creeping in.
The Stevensons are going through their own particular mourning ritual when we meet them. Did you do much research on the different mourning rituals across various cultures? In what ways are those rituals reflected in the one we are witness to in HELEN HOUSE?
I didn't do research per se, but I'm a longtime consumer of ghost stories, and all the best ones are about grief and loss and how we mourn and preserve the dead. And I also have just witnessed a lot of different mourning rituals in my life, especially coming from such a multicultural background.
Can you talk any about what you're working on now? What can we expect to see from you in the coming days?
I am working on a novel about a woman whose dead best friend comes back to haunt her. I'm also working on a short story collection that's a mix of speculative/horror stuff and more realist stuff, with a lot of ambiguity across the board. I also would really like to write another story that's like Helen House, because I'm really attracted to the novellete form.
Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya is a lesbian writer of short fiction, essays, and pop culture criticism living in Orlando. She is the managing editor of Autostraddle and the assistant managing editor of TriQuarterly. Helen House, a queer novelette, is her first book.
About the Interviewer
Sebastian Murdoch is a fiction writer living in Jackson, MS with her two cats, Kafka and Yoshimi. Sebastian is a graduate of the Lesley University Low-Residency MFA program, where she studied under experienced and talented writers such as Hester Kaplan, A.J. Verdelle, Rachel Kadish, and Michael Lowenthal. Her short story, "Georgia's Errand," can be found on the Johannesburg Review of Book's website, and she is currently an intern for WriteorDieTribe.com. You can find her on Twitter at @SEMurdoch, on Instagram at smurdoch94, and at her website sebastianwrites.com.
