I'm curious as to how you came to your interpretation, especially when most theoretical studies of horror cinema tend to focus on the 'conservative' elements of the genre. You had an essay about The Texas Chainsaw Massacre arguing that the film could be read as a kind of 'inverted' fairy tale, where folkloric tropes that conventionally resolve to reinforce social and moral order are subverted to create a trapped universe without meaningful resolution-ultimately to suggest a “non-regenerative apocalypse.” I realize this may be an odd place to kick things off, but that essay- it's very persuasively argued and it really changed the way I think about movies. THE HOOVER HOG: I think I first saw your byline in the early 90s in a journal called Necronomicon. In the following interview I talk with Mikita about Thirteen Girls as well as her broader body of work, an eclectic and obsessive collation of heterodoxically honed pop-scholarship that’s guaranteed to perturb your polarities at unexpected turns. Somewhere a mother is weeping, or a sun explodes.

This is crime fiction in the mold of Dostoyevsky, where every fleeting grasp at hope and comfort is equaled by the blunt realization that bad things happen for no reason worth knowing. Although it is a work of fiction-of the “hybrid form,” as Mikita would clarify-it bears emphasizing that the events chronicled in Thirteen Girls are closely extrapolated from real headlines, real case files, and the receding biographical details that remain when real girls become victims. Rejected by major publishing houses for reasons sundry and spineless, Thirteen Girls is a starkly original literary meditation both on the afterlife of violent crime and, more obliquely, on the evolving “true crime” narrative through which meaningful resolution is sought and inevitably contrived. While it would be a pleasure to welcome Mikita-one of my favorite writers-to the Nine-Banded confederacy under any circumstances, I’m especially proud to include this uniquely compelling book in our catalog. This August Nine-Banded Books will release Thirteen Girls by Mikita Brottman.

Hyena by Mikita Brottman