I wrote The Population because I couldn't stop thinking about a specific kind of fear.
Not jump-scare fear. Not the fear of something coming for you in the dark. The fear of knowing something is wrong and not being able to hold the thought long enough to do anything about it. The fear of reaching for a conclusion and finding your own mind has moved it.
That is the fear the book is built on.
The Question
It started with a question I couldn't answer cleanly: what would it feel like if something was editing your perception in real time? Not your memory — something faster than that. The thought before it becomes a thought. The observation at the moment it surfaces, before it has language, before you can hand it to someone else and say: this. This is what I'm seeing.
I don't know how to write about that in the abstract. So I wrote about four people in a car, a breakdown on a back road, and a town that should have been easy to drive through.
Harlow Creek
The town is called Harlow Creek. It doesn't appear on any highway map. The people there are warm and accommodating and something is wrong with all of them, and Emmi — the character whose eyes we're behind for most of the book — keeps almost knowing what it is.
Almost.
I spent a long time on the almost. It's the hardest thing to write: a character who is observant, intelligent, paying attention, and still cannot hold what she's seeing because the thing she's seeing has a mechanism specifically designed to prevent her from holding it.
The mechanism is in the town. It's in the food and the water and the air of the valley. And it is very good at what it does because it has had a very long time to practice.
About the Book
This is a cosmic body horror novella. It is not a long book. It is not a comfortable book. It takes about ninety minutes to read and I would suggest not reading it before sleep.
The people Emmi travels with are people I cared about. Writing what happens to them cost something. I'm not going to tell you what happens to them here because the not-knowing is part of how the book works. But I will tell you that the ending is not a trick and it is not a comfort and I think it is the right ending for this particular story.
Peace.
Ben
