Robin Wasley’s debut novel is a darkly atmospheric and sweepingly romantic novel, and said to be everything wittingly funny to purely heartfelt. Set in a small town with long-suppressed magic manifesting as rainbowlike ghosts, a young Korean adoptee fights zombies to find her missing brother. This creates a story that explores both found family and self-acceptance, and is perfect for fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Kendare Black, author of Three Dark Crowns, has said this debut “loaded with imaginative details” and goes on to say, “If you’ve ever watched a zombie apocalypse movie and thought, well, I’d just die instantly—read this and feel some hope.” Whether it’s the charm or the humour, the ordinariness of the protagonist is a surprising, refreshing notion. And so is the reflection of adoption as well as self-worth. All this, and more, is discussed with Robin Wasley (Dead Things Are Closer Than They Appear, February 2024) below. To view more such posts by debut authors, make sure to check out this collaboration, Debut Dialogues!
A Hopeful Magical Apocalypse
Robin Wasley (Dead Things Are Closer Than They Appear) on navigating raw emotions in this debut and exploring identity and adoption.
Starting with the introductions, would you like to help our readers know more about your debut novel, Dead Things Are Closer Than They Appear, yourself, and the weather where you are?
Hello! First of all, I’m thrilled to be doing my first author interview and thanks so much for having me. I’m a Korean American writer of young adult fiction, who lives in Boston and grew up in a small town in Connecticut. Basically I’ve wanted to write a “magic in a small town” story my whole life. It’s winter here now, but it’s only snowed once, much to my disappointment.
My debut YA contemporary fantasy, which I usually describe as“a voicey love letter to genre-mashy CW shows in which a deeply average Korean girl has to navigate a magical apocalypse” is out February 13, 2024. I’m definitely terrified. When good things happen, I tend to bypass any feelings of excitement and go straight to fear. But I think it’s also because it doesn’t feel real yet.
Publication has been a long time coming. I started writing and querying books in 2003 and I got my first (and current) book deal in 2021. So…yeah, by the time my book comes out, it’ll have been over twenty years since I started this journey. I am never sure if that’s inspiring or anxiety-inducing for people to hear, but I do think it’s important to show that there isn’t one normal road-to-publication experience.
You’ve said this story is for anyone interested in “a deeply average Korean girl” finding her place in the world during a magical apocalypse. What would you say makes Sid an average teen? And how important is this magical hellscape for an ordinary heroine like her?
I’m obsessed with apocalypse and disaster stories, but I often feel like the protagonists are these strong, capable individuals who go around kicking ass and taking names, whose natural inclination is to lead and save others, never giving up even in the face of tremendous adversity. It’s always been clear to me that if I were suddenly faced with some apocalyptic magical disaster, I would just wait for someone to save me, and if no one did, I would just lay down and die. So that was my first inspiration for this story—someone who is not born a hero, but becomes one not by choice.
Thus, I started with a heroine with no special skills who just happens to be there when shit goes down. Not just because it’s funny to me, but because I think most of us feel that way. Like, most of us would not just wake up on Day One of an apocalypse and know exactly what to do, immediately gathering up our bows and arrows, and striding into danger. At some point in our lives, we’ve all been that person in the middle of the pack, not the best, not the worst, feeling like everyone else is somehow beautiful and good at everything while we, alone, are not. Sometimes we are not extraordinary in a way that is easily visible to everyone or ourselves. That doesn’t mean we don’t matter.
What I wanted to convey in my book is that everyone has a gift to give, that everyone is capable of changing someone else, and therefore the world, in some way. There are qualities about ourselves that we take for granted, downplaying their importance in the grand scheme of things. Emotion, empathy, especially for women, are traits often set up to be a flaw or a reason why we wouldn’t survive in a brutal world—I wanted to write a story where those are the very qualities that save us.
You mention Dead Things Are Closer Than They Appear is a “voicey fantasy” —what pushed you to write a dark genre-bending tale told through Sid, in particular?
First, I want to say I don’t think protagonists have to be likeable or relatable for someone to enjoy a story. I think people learn to read in different ways, though. Some readers have to personally relate because they self-insert, they read to imagine they are the character. Other readers read to be swept into a life completely different from their own, engrossed in the story while remaining separate from the character, but empathizing with them.
I do think that the way people read often depends on whether they’ve always had stories that reflect them, and that needing to always relate can create limitations on the kinds of books and characters they can read and enjoy later on, but I digress.
I do think it can be super powerful to see yourself in a story, and for this particular book, while I wanted to write the kind of story I love and would have loved to see myself in as a teenager, I also wanted to create a character lots of people might be able to see themselves in. Even if they aren’t Korean American, even if the character isn’t white and beautiful and extraordinary.
I wanted her voice to be in the reader’s head, for them to think how she thinks and feel how she feels. Because of the nature of her power in the book, I wanted her power to work not just on the other characters but on the reader themselves. For them to connect to this Korean American girl, to be her for a time. I don’t know if I was successful, but I wanted to try.
“Wickedly funny”—that is what Axie Oh, author of The Girl Who Fell Beneath the Sea has said in praise of this story. What does it take to write something with so much charm and humour while setting up a darkly atmospheric end of the world?
I grew up on CW shows, like Buffy and Supernatural, and that blend of genre and tone was formative for me as a writer. These shows so often juxtapose the supernatural with regular human existence, ultimately just stories about teens trying to survive in this world. And they’re never just comedy, or romance, or drama, or horror—they are everything all at once. To me, that’s realistic. Life is never just one thing. It is equal parts beautiful and terrible. All the beauty in the world doesn’t cancel out the worst of it—they just exist together and we have to navigate them.
I wanted Dead Things to be a rollercoaster of emotion, for readers to be laughing one minute and crying the next, to go through abrupt tone changes from the absurd to the poignantly real. Because that’s how the world feels. Achieving this balance wasn’t always easy—and that’s where readers (namely my editor) would come in to warn me that a line or a scene might be veering too far to one extreme—but despite the challenges, it felt natural to do.
However, if you’re wondering if this was a pain in the ass to market, you would be correct lmao. There were so many times I wondered if it would be solely viewed as a fun book or as a comedy or that people would see zombies and think only horror or action, but not fantasy and magic. Striking the right tone for the title and cover was definitely a challenge as well, but I’m honestly so pleased with how they both turned out (holographic foil!).
I’ve found that different aspects of the book appeal to different people. Some people get really caught up in the humor and voice, some in the action and fun of it all, while others feel very personally invested and cry multiple times. As a writer, I love the idea of creating something that hits on multiple levels.
Dead Things is certainly everything all at one, in the best way. This next question I wish to ask is about one of these many aspects it’s exploring. Sid grows up in a tourist town as a Korean adoptee with white parents—and one of four Asians in town—and the story is centred around her search for her missing brother. Would you like to share how necessary it was for this story to explore adoption, sibling bond, and self-acceptance?
Something I discuss a lot with my Asian American writing friends is how often people have a preconceived notion about the Asian American experience or Asian fantasy as a genre based on the handful of stories they’ve seen. The reality is that there are so many experiences, myths, histories, cultures that are yet to be seen.
I’m aware that my experience as a transracial adoptee differs from what someone might expect of a “typical” Asian American experience, but I think the point is that there is no typical. There is no one experience—we are not a monolith.
And as someone who has definitely grown up in that “in-between space” of not Asian enough for some people or too Asian for others, it was important to me to show that being Asian American means something different for everyone. For me, I grew up with this murky identity of “non-white.” I wasn’t sure what “Asian” or “Korean” meant to me yet, but I knew I was not white. I identified as a woman of color first. And I think for many people who grew up in really homogeneous places where assimilation was expected, or those with mixed heritage, this is a common feeling. Finding the meaning of our identities takes time.
While I didn’t set out to write a story about adoption specifically—there’s a lot of valid controversy about transracial adoption that this story wasn’t written to explore—I did want to convey that this is an Asian American experience for so many, and one that was normal to me.
I have a strong relationship to my siblings who are all adopted (white, Mexican American, and Korean American) and half my cousins are as well (Black, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Colombian, and more). For me, blood has never determined who your family is. For those of us whose family is not made up of biological members, family isn’t a physical thing, it’s a feeling.
The blurb excitedly introduces “a ragtag crew of would-be heroes” as the only thing standing between the town and the end of the world. How fun or fulfilling—or both—is it to create a found family in this story?
I’m the kind of reader who cares about character first and foremost. If you give me a messy af plot, but your characters, their relationships, and their dialogue is on point, I will five-star that. Thus, I always wanted to write a large cast. To be successful at that, however, every single person has to matter.
When side characters only exist to show that the main character doesn’t live in a vacuum or to further their arc, it’s one of my greatest pet peeves. They can’t just be there to be there. While side characters do usually forward the main character’s arc in some way, my goal was to create characters that all had Main Character Energy. Like BTS.
I wanted all the characters to have their own personalities and motivations and hardships outside of her. They had to have a reason to be there, like if I took even one person away, someone else would not have survived. This book was always supposed to be about the ensemble, the “friends they made along the way” and how they changed each other, how they could’ve survived only together. That is the main thing I hope I’ve achieved.
All that said, never again. I will never write this many characters lmao. If you’ve ever written a scene with more than four people you know it is a hell of your own making. Dialogue, battle scenes, all of it is an intricate choreography in which you always have to take into account where everyone is and what they’re doing at any given time. This includes finding reasons, sometimes death or severe bodily harm, just to get rid of someone in a scene so I wouldn’t have to deal with them. So what I’m saying is for future projects, I’m capping my important characters at, like, six.
Hope is a big takeaway from this debut that also has huge magical stakes and a resonant exploration of self-discovery. What makes Dead Things Are Closer Than They Appear so hopeful?
One of the reasons I find apocalyptic stories so fascinating is that they all grapple with how people would respond in a nightmare scenario, and how those situations bring out the best and worst of humanity. One of my purposes in creating the hero and villain I did is to show that the things that made them are not so different. Two average people chose different paths, and I wanted to explore why they each might have started in a similar place and ended on opposite sides. In this story, that key factor was the people they’d surrounded themselves with or the lack thereof. And in an apocalypse, real or imagined, I believe that our community is our only hope, not only to survive, but to survive with humanity intact.
The dedication page reveals this is your tenth book—and it took twenty years for you to get here. What have you learned ever since that first step you took towards writing stories?
When I first started writing, it was honestly an experiment to see if I could do it. I never took any courses or seriously studied craft—it was all based on reading a lot and trying and trying again. I’m sometimes hesitant to tell my story, because understandably no one wants to hear that it might take twenty years. I also don’t want to over-romanticize perseverance, because sometimes life doesn’t let you. Sometimes other things take precedence over a dream.
I’ve quit before, or thought I had, having to deal with things that were urgent and bad with no end date in sight. I didn’t know what the future held, if I’d write a book again, and I still don’t know with other projects. What I do want to say, and what I said in my dedication, is that quitting isn’t always forever.There isn’t a timeframe on a dream.You can live life and pursue other things and eventually come back. You can take a break for one year or ten.
For me, I wasn’t meant to publish a book straight out of the gate—it took years of trial and error, learning my craft and finding my voice. Writers can always get better at craft by reading books and taking classes and joining writing groups, but all that said, none of that can teach you your voice—voice comes when it comes, and sometimes that’s immediate and sometimes it isn’t. People always say to write the book only you can write, and I did that, but it turns out I could’ve only written it after a decade+ of life.
Finally, before letting you go, would you like to share what you’ve been working on nowadays; any stories in the making? Maybe something you enjoyed reading recently?
I always like to keep my WIPs close to my chest because it takes me so long to figure out my stories—characters, snippets of dialogue, and scenes reside in my head for literal years before I know the plot. But I will say my next idea does have my usual genre-mash of contemporary fantasy, romance, humor, horror, and drama, and miiiiight just also roll in my love of BTS.
I would love to shout out some recent reads I adored!
Bittersweet in the Hollow by Kate Pearsall is a YA supernatural murder mystery that is atmospheric and creepy with gorgeous prose, and Gone Wolf by Amber McBride is a beautifully written MG dystopian exploration of grief and trauma that was done with such empathy.
Some 2024 books would be The Girl With No Reflection by Keshe Chow is an imaginative blend of YA fantasy, horror, and romance about Chinese royalty and the mirror world forced to mimic them. The Eyes Are the Best Part by Monika Kim is an adult Korean American psychological horror that had me fully supporting women’s wrongs. Voyage of the Damned by Frances White is an adult voicey fantasy murder mystery on a boat that has a gigantic impeccably drawn cast. Fathomfolk by Eliza Chan is a stunning adult Asian fantasy about a semi-submerged city and the conflict between the water-folk refugees and the humans in power. Road to Ruin by Hana Lee is the Mad Max: Fury Road-inspired adult science fantasy you need in your life.
I highly recommend these! I could go on, but I’ve probably already shown that overwriting is a problem for me. Thank you so much for the thoughtful questions and the opportunity to talk about the book of my heart!
Robin Wasley is a Korean American YA fantasy writer living in Boston with a soft spot for orphans, found families, and funny girls with no special skills who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances. Her one dream in life is to become best friends with BTS. Find her online at @robinwasley on Twitter and Instagram.
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