Lauren du Plessis is a British writer of speculative, folkloric, and weird fiction. Her short stories have appeared in Litro and Mslexia among others. She earned her Bachelor of Arts in Literature at Oxford Brookes University, and has worked across marketing and narrative writing, mostly for games. She lives in the bluebell-saturated chalk hills of the Chilterns with her family.

Tender is her first novel.

Lauren Du Plessis’ debut novel Tender came out earlier this year with Influx Press. A botanical body horror story that explores the breakdown of protagonist Nell as she works with a team of archaeologists digging up bog bodies in the Somerset fens and is forced to face her estranged family, Tender was an instant hit with The Fantasy Hive’s Jonathan Thornton (review). Lauren was kind enough to talk to him in Liverpool just before an event at the Dead ink Bookshop where she was interviewed by fellow master of literary folk horror Lucie McKnight Hardy.

Your debut novel Tender has just come out with Influx Press. Can you tell us a bit about it?

Yeah, absolutely. So it’s a sort of literary horror, which basically just means that it’s very character focused. It’s in the third person. We’re very much following the thoughts and feelings of Nell, the protagonist. She’s a botanist who specializes in ancient plants, and she gets called to an archaeological dig where there’s more going on beneath the ground perhaps than she first suspects. She’s returning to Somerset. She grew up there, but she’s been away for ten years at this point. So she’s coming back to her childhood home, coming back to her family, who are a little estranged from her, and we learn throughout the book how that happened. It’s about her transformation. Both the psychological changes she has to go through, and yeah, for anyone who’s read it, the very physical transformation as well that she has to undergo!

It’s very much focused on Nell, who has built up a very particular view of her life that she wants to express, but over the course of the book we see this gradually fall apart as her life gets more complicated…

Yeah, she’s unravelling. She’s spent basically most of her childhood and her adulthood masking who she is, feeling that she cannot be herself. Really denying herself any self-knowledge at all. She almost doesn’t really know who she is at the start of the book. And so, as well as everyone else learning, she’s learning. She’s been protecting herself, in a way, but it’s also detrimental to herself and to the people around her. Because she’s so closed off that she’s almost like a half character. Like a half of herself, of who she could be.

Did you have Nell as a fully realized character when you started writing the book, or was writing the process of discovering who this character was and what her issues are?

I think it was kind of a combination of the two. Because Tender started as a short story. It was only about 2,000 words long, so quite a short short story as well. And it was a childhood story. It was a girl coming of age. She’s only about 13, 14, in that story, and she begins to undergo a transformation, and it’s about her discomfort with her body, her discomfort with herself and who she feels she’s becoming. She’s very afraid of who she might become in the future. And so I found a lot of the imagery that I liked from that short story, and then I thought okay, what kind of character would really suit a novel version? I knew that I wanted to explore the ideas more, but I felt I needed a more mature character. I needed a character who was in the adult world, and there was more consequence to her actions and things like that. I then started drafting. I originally did a draft in the first person, which was way too intense. Her head is very repetitive, a very intense place to be. So pulling it back to the third person felt a lot more readable for a start. And also kind of helped me to observe her, in a way. And try and make observations about what kind of character really suited the story. So she kind of grew quite organically through the drafting process, and then I was able to go back and make sure that everything was strengthened throughout.

With the third person narration you still manage to get a lot of that intensity, she’s just such an intense character….

Yeah. But what I love about the third person present, I think it’s been getting popular, but it hasn’t been as popular in the past, and I think it’s because it’s quite voyeuristic. Quite like it feels a little bit like you’re watching a movie, at least. That’s how I felt when I was writing it. I could really picture it very vividly in my head. I was picturing her emotions like I was watching her on a screen in a film. The present tense makes it very immediate, but then you get this range, kind of pulling back a little bit where sometimes we’re looking at the characters from quite far away. And I really enjoyed those scenes where it felt like I was starting with a kind of panning shot, or like I was very far away, and I slowly pulled further and further in towards her thoughts. That was a really fun part of the process.

Nell’s family dynamics are really interesting. Her relationship to her sister and her abusive mum… she’s clearly got a lot of stuff she needs to work out!

 Yeah, for sure. And she just had no space for that, in her youth. And she’s never given herself the space to even process much about what was wrong in the family, I’d say. And I don’t think she’s even done by the end of the book. She’s not done with that process. Like, she’s really kind of only just at the beginning, because she’s been forced to the point of breaking down about it and being like, okay, the way I’m living right now is just not sustainable, I cannot be this person anymore. I can’t have this relationship with my family anymore. Something’s got to give, and it’s about her just getting to that point.

It’s a very claustrophobic novel. With many books at the moment you can read them and feel the effect of the lockdown. With Tender it’s not as explicit as it is in some other books, but it does have that sort of intensity of being trapped in a place with these people and she has to act out and push against it….

Yeah, against the confinement. I do love isolating characters in a strange place, an unfamiliar place. I feel like that brings personalities to the front quite quickly. So it suited them to be quite cut off, but then also kind of eerily close to her family, who she finds very oppressive and very uncomfortable to be around. It’s interesting that you bring up the pandemic, because obviously it’s touched on ever so slightly in the book. I didn’t want to touch on it too much, but it also felt like I needed to acknowledge it in some way. I think it’s just inevitable that it’s going to seep into my work now. But I have OCD, so my head has kind of always been a very confining place. And the pandemic was such an interesting experience for me, because it felt like a lot of my fears had suddenly been externalized, and the entire world began acting the way I’d been taught through therapy not to act anymore. It was really fascinating. I was very stable and “recovered” at the beginning of the pandemic. And it was like a really fascinating process, kind of watching my own feelings develop. That is absolutely in Nell, while she and I are very different people, I think that inevitably is in her. And, yeah, I’m sure when people read it, it probably won’t surprise them to know that I have OCD.

I really love the idea of botanical body horror. Body horror is usually quite fleshy and visceral, but using plants gives the whole thing a different feeling…

Yeah, I found it quite dream-like, and a bit more abstract than just doing more traditional body horror. Is there such a thing as traditional body horror? I don’t know. I feel like all body horror I’ve read has been very different. People use that tool in really interesting ways. Yeah, I think I liked the juxtaposition between a very delicate thing and a very brutal process. That imagery was just so satisfying to my brain. So like, every time I got to a scene where I got to write about the flowers, about the thistles, I loved it. It was so much fun. 

And it does have that surreal dream-like quality. It unfolds like a nightmare and you don’t quite know what’s really happening and what isn’t…

Yeah, and I love that. I love other books like Rachel Yoder’s Nightbitch, and Hang Kang’s The Vegetarian is one of my favourite novellas. Sayaka Murata does this a lot as well, I’m a huge fan of hers. That the character can be experiencing a very different reality from everyone around him or her, I find that fascinating. I love to read that as a reader, so yeah, as a writer, it’s been really fun and interesting exploring it myself.

Because the characters are so fully drawn and the rest of the world is so believable, it is quite shocking when you get these moments of the flowers bursting out of Nell’s skin. Or the ending, which I absolutely loved, it’s one of those what the hell did I just read? Kind of things.

Ah, I’m so glad, I love it when people react that way! Yeah, I knew the ending would be a little divisive. I don’t generally look at reviews and things. But when I have occasionally seen one, it’s really interesting to me. When a reader either responds with, what the heck did I just read? I love that, that was so unexpected. Or, oh my god, it took it too far, because everyone comes to a book with different expectations and different history of what they’ve read and everything. Or a lot of people saying, it was so unexpected. They couldn’t have seen where that was going. It’s super interesting to me, seeing how people react to it. To me, it felt very inevitable, but only really when I was about three quarters of the way through the book. I didn’t know how it was going to end. At the beginning. I didn’t plot the whole thing or anything. It was mostly discovery written, or pantsed, whatever you want to call it. But yeah, around the sort of three quarters mark, I was like, I feel like I need to be writing towards something now. I knew I need to start sowing seeds, pun intended! My partner, he’s a very good mind mapper, brainstorm kind of person, and we sat down at the kitchen table, and I was like, here’s a bunch of ideas. Here’s like, ten more ideas. Let’s think about what’s going to work, what works for the character. And I tried to settle on something that felt surprising in a way, but also like I said, just kind of inevitable in that Nell has to face up to herself at some point. She has to come to a reckoning that she’s not helping herself, she needs to find a way to push forward. 

The experience I had of reading it as well was that, you get the amazing shock of it happening, but then thinking about it later, you get to the stage of, actually that feels like the only way it could have ended for that character.

Yeah. I wonder, did it feel like it took a few days for that to turn over?

Yeah, I’m a reader who likes that kind of thing. And in particular, I think that with horror in particular, people have different ideas of how far they want it to go. But for me, I was just like, Oh, holy crap, right? We’re in for the ride! And then, like, afterwards you, you process it! 

I love that. That’s very much what the writing experience was like as well. It was like, yeah, I guess I’m doing this. Let’s just go for it!

With a lot of body horror, what makes it so visceral and powerful is that sense of transgression, and if you pull back from that, in some ways you’re pulling your punches really…

It’s definitely a balancing act. When I was in the editing stage, with my agent, who’s a really great developmental agent, she does a lot of work with me and her clients on that. We tried to be very thoughtful about, where do we make this scarier, and where do we pull back a bit. Because it’s about pacing as well. And thinking a little bit about horror tropes, but not too much, because I don’t really think of it as a horror novel, really. It feels like it’s living somewhere in between a contemporary Gothic kind of thing and folk horror. It kind of hovers around there. Whenever people ask me what genre my book is, I’m like, I don’t know, like, here’s four. I don’t know which one it is, you decide.

Tender came out with Influx Press, who put out so much amazing stuff. Were you really excited when they picked it up?

Oh my gosh. I really couldn’t believe it, honestly. We were on sub for a couple of months. I’d had a couple of projects that hadn’t sold previously. So I felt like I was being very like, kind of chill about it, as much as you can be, and trying to put it out my head as much as possible. And I also had a kid that year, so I was quite busy! And then, yeah, the email landed in my inbox one day that Influx were interested. They wanted to talk more. They potentially wanted to make an offer. For a start, all of their books are really gorgeous, so I knew from the aesthetic side of things this is gonna be amazing. But also, the editors that they work with… My editor was Dan Coxon, a fantastic editor, and, yeah, working with Gary [Budden, head of Influx]. My publisher was fantastic. The whole team, everyone involved. My designer was Luke Bird, amazing!

It has an incredible cover!

It really does! I owe him so much for that. Yeah, everyone involved was really amazing. And I felt right from the get go, they were very passionate about it. I’m so glad that it found a home with them. I felt like I had a seat at the cool kids table, I didn’t feel cool enough! I was looking through like their catalogue, I was familiar with a couple of their titles, but a lot of it was new to me, and I was looking through and I was like, I don’t feel cool enough to be here, but sure if you think I am Gary, then great!

What’s next for Lauren Du Plessis?

I am working on a whole jumble of things at the moment. So I’m genuinely not sure which is going to be next. I have a novel that I drafted last year in a bit of a haze, new mum brain kind of haze. So I feel like I’m not a very objective judge of that one. So that one’s kind of on the back burner. I’m probably going to revisit that next year, the year after. And I’m working on a novel at the moment that I think could be book two. But I’m still on the first draft, so it’s still kind of growing and still finding out who the main couple of characters really are and what they really need from each other. And then in the background, I’m always working on short stories. And I’d be very open to doing a short story collection in the future, but that obviously depends on a lot of things. It’s quite a different ballgame to novels. I really don’t know which one will appear first. 

Thank you Lauren Du Plessis for talking with us!

Tender is available now – you can order your copy on Bookshop.org