I was staring at a Bearded Dragon in its glass tank, and a thought entered my head—the seed of an idea—which eventually became my horror novel, The Family Condition.
Especially for someone like me who grew up with dogs, having a relationship with a different species isn’t an unusual thing. But I didn’t grow up with reptiles, so while staring at the Bearded Dragon, my brain couldn’t help asking intriguing questions. Does the Bearded Dragon feel affection for me, or wariness? Does it have a consciousness that in any way resembles my own, or one I would recognize? Does it have thoughts and distinct emotions, or are its actions primarily instinct?
Someone who has spent more time with reptiles, or an expert, probably knows the answers to those questions, and I’m sure the answers are quite obvious. But to me, in that moment, it was a compelling mystery.
I realized, with some amusement and genuine interest, that if I forgot to turn on the Bearded Dragon’s light, it might sleep all day, or otherwise remain largely inert. The light dictated its perception of night and day, as well as its energy levels. And, like other animals as pets, it requires feeding (some crickets or something similar dropped into its tank), or its water refilled, etc. If it was trying to scratch and climb the glass, it probably wanted some time in a wider space to wander.
While watching it and essentially tripping out about it, I had the strangest thought about the Bearded Dragon, namely its behavior:
What if that was someone’s grandmother?
Oops, I forgot to turn Grandma’s light on, so she slept all day! Don’t forget to feed Grandma and refill her water before you leave the house. Hey, Grandma’s been scratching at the glass lately, maybe we should let her out to wander for awhile.
This struck me as somehow absurdly funny and undeniably creepy. The image of it. The image of grandchildren going to spend some time in front of Grandma’s glass tank. Sometimes she’s active and moves around a lot, maybe tries to climb the glass or scratch at it. Sometimes she’s completely still for hours at a time, and you look in her eyes and can’t discern any recognizable human thoughts or emotions.
This image wouldn’t leave my head.
And then I took it further. If that was someone’s grandma, that means somebody, at some point, must’ve had children with her. But what sort of person might fall in love with a woman in an arguably inhuman condition, even have a family with them? What does that family look like? What’s the nature of that?
This train of thought gave birth to two central characters in The Family Condition, and the rest of the book and its characters sprang from that seed. The mere idea struck me as balanced between absurd and unsettling, which is exactly the balance I was aiming for with the novel: the line between the comical and the disturbing, the absurd and the horrific. I had recently seen the old noir film, Double Indemnity, for the first time, and I loved the theme of a normal person’s curiosity and desire leading them down a path toward darkness—the darkness of others and of themselves. The premise also felt like a way of exploring the ways we treat not just animals, but other people, as long as we find or invent reasons to see ourselves as separate or even superior to them.
The book became a love story. Love, after all, is in some ways a profound form of empathy, of relating to another, a recognizing yourself in another. With the story I was able to explore a strange, dark version of this. How far can empathy and love take you? How far into fear and the darkness of the unknown?
While most of the time, the origin of a novel isn’t the most interesting story compared to the novel itself, I’ve always felt this one was funny and weird enough to warrant sharing.
I am deeply grateful to everyone who has ordered a copy of The Family Condition simply because I wrote it. For anyone else, however, I hope reading this post might have gotten you even just slightly interested in the novel.
The Family Condition, as of my writing this post, releases today (September 27th). It can be ordered from Barnes & Noble, Amazon (if out of stock, will be back in stock soon), and many other sites, in physical form or as an eBook. I’ll post a link to its review in The San Francisco Book Review, which—in addition to being a review—summarizes the main plot without spoilers.
Thank you so much for your time and attention. If you read the book, I hope you enjoy it as much I loved working on it. I can’t wait for it to be more widely read, and to hear what readers think about it. To me, it has always been a strange, dark, unsettling and disturbing story of curiosity, love, and horror. It is, so far, the proudest I’ve ever been of a completed novel, and I still love it and miss writing its characters.
https://sanfranciscobookreview.com/product/the-family-condition/