Samantha Mabry meets me at Goodfriend Package in Far East Dallas on a weekday morning in early January to talk about her latest young adult novel, her fourth, Clever Creatures of the Night. Technically, I am intruding on her break. The spring semester at SMU, where she teaches composition, doesn’t start for a few more days. But Mabry never really stopped working, mostly spending the time between terms chipping away at other projects, she says, and, more recently, putting together her syllabus for the spring. And now there is a book to promote as well.
But before we get to that, almost immediately after we sit down at a corner table, she wants to know where I’m working these days. Not who I am employed by. She means if I have found a new place to write, a good place. This is the continuation of a conversation that has been ongoing for almost five years. We were both set adrift when Mudsmith closed on Lower Greenville in late 2019. Prior to that, I would regularly run into Mabry there, amid the taxidermied animal heads and old maps, briefly catching up before we went back to wrangling our words for the day. Since then, we have been trading scouting reports, trying to find a new home, somewhere that scratched the same itches for us. Neither of us is any good writing at home.
I tell her about my new spot, recently discovered, not far from the old Mudsmith location, good but a little bright. Mabry, quietly curious, with dark hair that hangs in her face when she’s considering something, tells me about hers. “A lot of good seating options, like a big table and then several little two-top things, and good drinks,” she says of the shop that is pretty much directly between her home and the SMU campus. This is where Mabry finished up work on Clever Creatures of the Night.
The novel, which will be published by Algonquin Young Readers on March 5, takes place over one day and night in a remote corner of Palo Pinto County, hard by the Brazos River, a structural idea she took from old Westerns like Bad Day at Black Rock and 3:10 to Yuma. The plot owes more to detective novels. Case, on the verge of leaving Texas behind for college in Oregon, has been invited by her best friend, Andrea, to a rural area not far from the small town in which they grew up. But Andrea has disappeared by the time Case arrives, leaving her alone (and with a mystery to solve) with Andrea’s three creepy, possibly nefarious roommates in a house that has practically been swallowed by the eerie wilderness.
“My son was just learning to walk at the time, and so I just had generalized fears about everything.”
Clever Creatures of the Night is largely free of any of the trappings or tropes of young adult fiction. The characters are in their late teens—that’s about it. All of Mabry’s work appeals to readers of any age, but this one especially feels free of restriction or category. While her previous books dealt in magical realism, with ghosts and curses, the engine that drives this one, or at least places the pieces on this particular spot on the board, is based more in reality, a scientific phenomenon that almost assuredly won’t happen but theoretically could. I don’t want to spoil it, but it is an unforeseen event that causes panic and isolation, coldblooded choices, and a rampant wariness that hangs over everything like a fog, the monster in this horror story.
The novel is reflective, certainly, of the era in which it was written. You don’t have to squint too hard to see a pod of people living apart from the outside world, extremely suspicious of interlopers, and think of the dark heart of the pandemic. It is also reflective specifically of Mabry’s experience. She splits her time between Dallas and Mineral Wells, and during the pandemic, she and her husband, Jeff, and their son would spend long weekends in Palo Pinto County, Thursday through Sunday.
“My son was just learning to walk at the time, and so I just had generalized fears about everything, about the pandemic but also about—it comes up in the book—wild hogs,” she says. “There’s hogs on the property, and so I was like, ‘I’ll have to kill one.’ ”
“Did you?” I ask.
“We have seen them one time walk across the—it was like elephants crossing the savanna. It was several. I mean, at least seven or something. And my husband was like, ‘I’ll get the shotgun.’ And I was like, ‘And do what?’ ”
She says that seeing evidence of the hogs, rather than actually seeing them in the flesh, “is almost more frightening.” But it wasn’t just the hogs. It was fire ants, too, and just the quietly supernatural experience of a deeply rural environment: the odd noises, the quiet that’s too quiet, the spaces settled but not really tamed.
Beyond those long weekends in Mineral Wells, the pandemic impacted Mabry and her work in other ways. The launch for her third book, Tigers, Not Daughters, was to begin in earnest at the 2020 AWP Conference & Book Fair a few weeks before its March 24 publication date. That year’s installment of the traveling event, one of the big annual literary get-togethers, was to be held in San Antonio, which happened to be the setting for her story about the haunted Torres sisters. Mabry was scheduled to speak on a panel, and a writer from Texas Monthly was going to pick her up from the airport and interview her over Mexican pastries.
It was all setting up perfectly. Her previous book, 2017’s romantic and doomed All the Wind in the World, had been longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Tigers, Not Daughters was poised to capitalize on that momentum. Stores had ordered more copies than either of her previous two novels. In the run-up to Tigers’ release, the book received starred reviews from the likes of Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Booklist, among others. AWP was to be the first in a month or so of planned events—appearances at festivals and conferences, bookstore readings, school visits.
And then.
AWP was one of the first large gatherings impacted by the swift spread of what we would eventually know as COVID-19, still early enough that most of the safety guidelines had to do with hand-washing, not masking or social distancing. The conference itself was not canceled, but many participants decided to pull out, including everyone else on Mabry’s panel. She ended up not attending either. In short order, the rest of her schedule was cleared, everything canceled or rescheduled or moved to Zoom or Instagram Live as the world shut down. (“You realize it’s happening to lots of people,” Mabry told me over the phone a few months after. “Everybody’s release season is just kaput.”)
Despite everything, Tigers ended up doing fine. Better than fine. “It had legs,” she says. “It won a few little regional awards. People liked it.”
But it definitely seems different this time around, as another March publication date approaches. In general, it’s a transitional period for Mabry. Clever Creatures fulfills her two-book contract with Algonquin. Her agent has found her own success as an author (her debut novel will be published by Viking in 2025) and left the business; the head of the agency took her on as a client. She would like to use the opportunity to try something different: an adult novel. A grown-up novel? It’s just a novel, I suppose, but bound for a different category, different readers. In a way, it will be like starting over.
“My agent was saying, ‘That’s great. We can build a narrative around “successful author makes big move” or whatever.’ But he was saying that in order to have a really big sale, which I haven’t actually had, that I need to have a whole book because you need to create hype, and you need competitors bidding on your book and a book auction.”
She says she doesn’t exactly know how to do that. Obviously, yes, she can write an entire book. She’s done so four times. But typically, the way she works, she’ll send her editor a chunk and ask, like the old David Letterman bit, “Is this anything?”
“I need someone to be like, ‘Yes.’ Because I don’t know.” Her hair hangs over her eyes as she thinks about it, as though she is having to choose a path now. “I mean, I don’t know. All the Wind in the World was very much like, ‘I like this book. I don’t think anyone else will.’ And that’s how I kind of always am. I’m a mom, and I’m tired. I don’t want to be wasting anyone’s time.”
This story originally appeared in the March issue of D Magazine with the headline “Her Dark Places.” Write to [email protected].
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