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Books cover reveals

Eyes Everywhere: Revealing Beholder by Ryan La Sala

By

Published on February 9, 2023

Photo credit: Shams Ahmed
Photo credit: Shams Ahmed

From Ryan La Sala, author of the tantalizingly twisted The Honeys and riotously imaginative Reverie, comes a chilling new contemporary fable about art, aesthetic obsession, and the gaze that peers back at us from behind our reflections.

We’re thrilled to share the cover of Beholder, publishing October 3, 2023 with Scholastic Press—check out the full image below along with an interview with author Ryan La Sala!

Cover art by Mishko; Design by Maeve Norton

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Beholder

Beholder

 

What was your inspiration for this book?

Usually book ideas come to me all at once. The entire story, monsters and all, crystallizes in my head and I’ve just got to spend a month or two writing it down. Not Beholder. Just a sliver of this book snuck into me long ago. I could feel it in the back of my mind, nesting, plucking random things out of my eyes and up into its web. Things like: The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and the tale of Typhoid Mary, and other stories about pathologically wicked environments. Other, more personal things, too, like: the long-game of overcoming grief that I began in The Honeys; the way my Greek family’s superstitions around the evil eye echo through my OCD; the intrusive thoughts that flicker through my head when I see an oncoming train, or a deadly drop from atop a great height. And of course my love of interior design.

It’s fitting that what brought it all together was a sickness that locked us all inside. During the pandemic lockdown, my big, wide world became just four walls in a tiny NYC apartment. Stir-crazy took on new meaning. I began to see things that weren’t there. And, like many, I began countless projects to reshape my tiny environment. Make it more me. But I wondered, what if a designer went too far in expressing themselves on the walls around them? What if we followed our inspiration down too deep, and awoke something horrific? What if we unleashed it through art?

What I got was a book that’s like Martha Stewart meets Final Destination. And looking back, the way it surrounded me without me even noticing, until I was suddenly sat down and forced to write it in a rather dizzying 24 days last February, is very fitting.

What are your thoughts on the intersection of horror and queer narratives?

My quick answer is: queer horror is better to the point of being the definitive state of the genre.

My longer answer is: what intersection? For me, horror and queerness are not wires being crossed to create a sparking spectacle so much as they are fundamentally braided together. If I look at the genre of my childhood, even if I take in all the joy and humor and victory and love, I have to conclude that my life story would be shelved in horror. As a rather gay kid, my childhood was defined by a fight to stay alive. Every day, my goal was to outrun this faceless disdain that would bloom behind the eyes of the people around me, seemingly at random. Who was safe? Who would hurt me? Will I survive? Will I break?

Many queer people have learned to not only live, but thrive in similar—or much worse—circumstances. And! AND! While being acutely aware of our potential as victims, many of us learn that our best chances at not just surviving, but thriving, comes down to re-understanding ourselves as monsters.

Here, I’ll describe it this way: As a kid, other kids were scared to be around me. My monstrosity had a dooming proximity. So, to counter this, I had to show the world I myself wasn’t scared, that there was nothing to be scared of in the first place. I made myself loud, and eccentric, and visible, and fun. It wasn’t enough just to suppress my fears; they had to be sublimated into their opposites. Boldness. Joy bright enough to be infectious. A show, for my own sake.

That is why I’m so drawn to irreverent, campy, queer horror. Horror belongs to queer people, and anyone who knows what it’s like to be deemed monstrous in our society. We know what it’s like to have to look evil in the eye every day, and to laugh in order to live.

Why do you think horror is having such a big moment in YA right now?

I keep hearing this! Librarians and teachers tell me all the time how much their teens clamor for spooky stuff. I’m not surprised. Horror is the most ancient type of story, I feel. It will never be out of fashion to fantasize about all the things that scare us. Books are the perfect arena to do just this. Written horror, versus visual horror like movies, or the experiential horror of, say, a haunted house or perhaps someplace truly scary like the Times Square Olive Garden, relies on interiority. It builds the haunted house in our heads, and there’s something so much scarier and so much more satisfying about that. It’s like this big, universal fear has been painted in a mirror-coat. It becomes personal. We become the survivor, or the monster, or the madness. It’s an unbeatable form of entertainment.

What do you want your audience to know about this book? What are you most excited about?

I am excited about so many things in this book, but aside from a few content warnings that will be at the front, I want my audience to know very little going in. I suspect they already know what matters: this story is borne from my mission to create a new mythology around queer characters in fantasy and horror, one that finds depth, power, and complexity in queer identities.

Without spoiling anything, I will admit that I kinda already know the moments in Beholder that are going to earn me some much-cherished screams. Like The Honeys, this book has images that have long horrified me, that I’ve pried out of my mind in the hopes that they burrow into the back of yours. The hints I’ll give, for those who like a scavenger hunt are: a head peeking around a doorframe, a pair of finely tailored gloves, a sharp tongue at the base of a dizzy tour, a mirror watching a nightclub, the golden blaze of the ginkgo tree, and finally: eyes, eyes everywhere.

How do you think this cover speaks to the themes of your book?

Firstly, it’s gorgeous. It hits the eye with instant gratification.

But in the immediate impact, you might miss some of the insidious details. The mirror-coated spider. The eye stretched wide. You’ve got to look longer and let the horror of what you’re seeing come into focus, almost against your own will. And the longer you look, the more you might see. The detail that really unnerves me is the rosy irritation of the eye, hinting that it’s been open a bit, too… maybe even against its own will. Awful! Horrible! Gorgeous!

Perhaps my favorite detail, however, are the words. The title’s design looks cool and stylish, but also subtly transmits this sense of prismatic decay, like where a mirror’s edge cuts the light. Through it, we glimpse sunspots, or stars, or something cosmic and a little malevolent. It’s tempting to keep looking at all tiny details, never realizing you’re getting a bit too close to a monster that has designed itself to entrap you. To me the cover is perfect, because all of it adds up to a composition that begs you to keep looking and looking and looking, until it’s too late.

***

Ryan La Sala writes about surreal things happening to queer people. He is the author of Reverie, Be Dazzled, and The Honeys and lives in New York City. Visit him online at his website.

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