Being admired by someone is typically flattering, unless you discover that your admirer has no intention of letting you leave. That’s precisely the setup in Josh Malerman’s latest novel. Best known for Bird Box and the more recent Incidents Around the House, Malerman takes the conventionally comforting intimacy of a bedroom and gives it a sinister new function: gallery, prison and stage for a very particular kind of obsession.
Said new novel is called Pictures of You and it sees Malerman return to horror fiction following his recent, deeply personal, and wholly fascinating exploration of Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead in Watching Evil Dead: Unearthing the Radiant Artist Within. The book centers on Emily, who wakes up after a magical night with her fiancé Jack to find herself trapped in a strange, surreal bedroom, where a looming silhouette appears to regard her as a living work of art. Held hostage by an unseen voice, Emily soon realizes that both her life and Jack’s depend on her staying exactly where she is. If she tries to escape the bed and break the frame of this unusual masterwork, neither of them will survive.
Malerman turns the bedroom into a gallery and the book’s protagonist into an unwilling exhibit, building a curious setting in which stillness becomes survival and admiration curdles into possession. The author wrings a suprising amount of claustrophobic tension from the setup and the novel’s warped take on desire and artistic obsession gives the story real staying power.
To celebrate today’s publication of the book, CinemaChords’ Howard Gorman caught up with Malerman to discuss the ideas behind Pictures of You, from its unusual premise and exploration of art to the challenge of creating tension around a seemingly simple physical constraint. We also talk about Watching Evil Dead and a similarly themed documentary that has been turning heads on the festival circuit and which we hope will get an official release date some time soon.