Candice Louisa Daquin wears many hats. She’s a licensed psychotherapist, a poet, an editor and a co-ordinator of several social forward projects. This November, she’s added another hat to the tree, novelist. The Cruelty (FlowerSong Press, 2025) is a survivor’s tale that refuses to look away from unadulterated Evil in its midst. We sat down to talk with Daquin about her experiences writing the novel, the intersection of feminism and horror, and the redemptive power of crafting narratives.
RV: Tell me a little about your writing journey with this book. Was it challenging moving in and out of the headspace necessary to generate that degree of intensity?
CLD: I’m pretty comfortable with the concept of intensity, maybe so far as to say, I prefer it. Editing/re-reading it was harder than writing it. I came back to it in a very different head-space. I stand behind the story, but the person has done some work on herself and is standing in a different place so editing it was the harder part.
RV: Many of the qualities of your poetry that I find compelling found a home in the novel. The intensity of imagery and the layering of symbol on symbol. How did you dial into the headspace to work with set characters over an extended narrative?
CLD: Maybe when you edit a lot and read a lot, it just makes sense to you at a primal level. I’ve moved away from the idea of workshopping; personally, I prefer to be alone and just do the work. As the MFA foothold gains traction, writers are becoming more similar, writing into a vacuum and I like the idea of writing in isolation and then bringing it to the table.
RV: In a way, I can see the value of bringing this out without a lot of prying eyes. A well-intentioned early reader might have cautioned you to take a more moderate approach to this story and diluted something critical about its intensity.
CLD: I knew the only way I’d really get this out, is if I didn’t have someone cautioning me. Perhaps it would have been a much better book if I’d had more input but this wouldn’t have been written if others were witnessing it. After I’d written it, I gave it to two close colleagues who are both writers. One hated it, because of the subject-matter – which was fair enough. The other loved it, because he writes similar things and is a survivor. I think that tells me the bottom line is – those who’ll get something from it will already have a preference for the genre and vice-versa.
RV: As a reader of Gothic and Victorian novels, I found a lot of sympathy between The Cruelty and the sometimes outlandish plot-twists of serialized novels of that period. Did you go into writing this book carrying any particular writers or novels as an inspiration?
CLD: I love Gothic and Victorian novels, and grew up on them so I shouldn’t be surprised they made their way into my writing. I was inspired heavily by several books. In terms of style; By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, (Elizabeth Smart, 1945) is probably my favorite novella. Anything by Françoise Sagan. I remember reading Un peu de soleil dans l’eau froide (Sunlight on Cold Water) and it had this profound effect on me that never went away.
In terms of subject-matter, I was more influenced by say, Girl With a Dragon Tattoo. It does depict sexual violence and the predator really well. One thing that always bothered me though, how the ‘victim/survivor’ was always so cold and became brutal (like the perpetrated act). I think I wanted a character who could get justice without losing herself and becoming cold like the predator.
RV: I was referring specifically to the resurrections and reincarnations. Or the section where it seems like Camila is free, only to be ‘awakened’ in an even more dire state than the one she believed to have fled.
CLD: There’s a three-fold reason behind my choosing this. First, my father was nearly killed in a car accident where he was run over as a boy. He survived but with pretty significant deficits. I learned from an early age what memory-loss and rerouted memories can do to a person. Second, one of my close friends had a brain-tumor and suffered crushing memory loss.
Third, I myself was drugged and attacked by a serial-killer two months after arriving in America and left for dead. The combination of drugs, trauma, and near-death, caused my memory to act weirdly. I think I’m fascinated by how memory is impacted in relation to trauma, especially after being a trauma-therapist for so long.
RV: I am so sorry that happened. It’s difficult for me to imagine the pathologies that would converge in order to make a person capable of doing that to someone else, but The Cruelty makes a run at it. Is taking control of that narrative by authoring a book like this part of the recovery process for you?
CLD: The system is stacked against the survivor. Whether a near-murder or rape, the brokenness of ‘justice’ is such, that I empathize with village-justice. Like The Accused with Jodi Foster, or her later movie where she avenges her husband’s death and Girl With A Dragon Tattoo lore. One friend was told; ‘What did you think would happen?’ Because she was drinking.
One large study showed that 99 percent of rapes are not prosecuted to imprisonment in America. They’re either under-reported, pleaded, dismissed, or fail at the court-level. Mariska Hargitay has been Olivia Benson on the TV show Law & Order SVU (Special Victims Unit) for 26 years. The fact that she evolved from actress to advocate and has gone on to actively help survivors, saves lives.
At Indie Blu(e) Publishing we put together the anthology: We Will Not Be Silenced: The Lived Experiences of Sexual Harassment and Sexual Assaault, Told Powerfully Through Poetry, Prose and Art. It might not change enough, but what good does doing nothing do? The Cruelty is the culmination of my advocacy for and belief in, survivors.
RV: The first half of the novel is conceptually a closed-environment story with just two characters interacting in a very regulated and delineated space. Did that evoke something essential about the nature of abusive relationships for you?
CLD:I think I wrote it like a film. In my mind, the characters were on stage enacting this and yes, definitely something essential about the nature of abusive-relationships. Abuse tends to happen behind closed doors, especially the perpetuated kind.
RV: Given the prominent role that sex plays in the novel, do you think it still belongs to the broader category of erotica? In some ways, it reads like horror erotica, that is taking the base elements of erotica and magnifying them in order to reach the horror register.
CLD: It wasn’t sex that played a prominent role, it was sadism utilizing sexual-violence as a form of control. I consulted some colleagues who worked like I do, with survivors, and they felt it was necessary to be graphic to illustrate the truth of what happens. If someone gets titillated by that, the writer cannot control that possibility. It’s not erotic at all – maybe the antithesis of erotica.
Having watched Last House On the Left and I Spit On Your Grave, I was very impacted by both films. I felt they were both valuable films depicting sexual-violence and revenge. However, some people claimed they were erotic. I don’t really get how a woman being gang-raped and then going after her abusers is erotic. It is at the center of the argument; what constitutes art and when does it become exploitation or potentially lead to abuse?
RV: Thinking now about the intersection between the development of horror as a genre and the emergence of feminism as a powerful voice in the Western canon, specifically in the person of Mary Shelley. What natural sympathies did you discover in mining the seam that connects those two big ideas?
CLD: I’d never read much horror but I think the genre of horror is much misunderstood and has many sub-categories. Feminism was always going to be a huge part of anything I wrote. I dislike the system that oppresses women, which is often perpetuated by other women as much as men. Mary Shelley is still a figurehead for me. Her mother also. Shelley said: “I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves.” I did merge the big ideas of horror and feminism through the idea of body horror.
RV: I felt like that was part of the subtext of the Miro storyline, that women are also susceptible to the cultural legacy of misogyny as men. In that sense, ideology trumps gender.
CLD: I heard a speech by economist Deirdre McCloskey who is Trans. She said when she was a bio-man she took certain things for granted and becoming female she was convinced women had a harder time getting through the world because nearly every woman alive is afraid every time they go out into a dark parking garage and the majority of men are not. I’ve lived with fear most of my life, been followed home, mugged, flashed-at, grabbed, and worse, and I think many women experience this.
My five-foot three-inch mother was once set-upon by three men who figured they could bundle her into their car. What would have happened if they’d succeeded? My grandmother, who was even shorter than my mother, chased a flasher away. I admire the women in my family for their fight, but why should they have to fight? I know this to men and boys as well so I’m not discounting that.
RV: Han Kang’s The Vegetarian is an example of another contemporary novel mapping the narrative sympathies between feminism and body horror. Is there something specific to this moment in time that is inviting us to a radical reexamination of what it means to be a woman socially or female biologically?
CLD: It makes me think of Suskind’s Perfume or Peter Greenaway’s 1989 film The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. There are sympathies between feminism and body-horror, not least in Angela Carter’s works. Modern writers like Charlie Jane Anders and Joanna Russ, are able to say things Ursula le Guin or Iris Murdock couldn’t. I can’t imagine people being au-fait about strong lesbian characters even 20 years ago.
RV: As I moved through the novel, I felt as if there were three distinct narratives that emerged. The first, Camila’s story begins with her attempted suicide and concludes with her final escape. The second, Camila and Julia’s story, continues with a resurrected Raphael and the pair of them bringing him to his fitting end. The final, Miro’s story is a reconstituted Raphael and the family coping with that legacy. It brought to mind the great serial horror films of the 1980s, like A Nightmare on Elm Street or Hellraiser. Did you consider them as separate narratives when composing the book or was there a broader purpose in bringing them all between two covers? Was there a purposeful shift in tone from one narrative to the next?
CLD: There was a unifying theme throughout whereby I knew how it was going to conclude and I knew what I wanted to do on the way to that ending. I’ve seen too many films, TV shows and read too many books with awful endings, so that was my greatest hope, to end the book well. In terms of narratives. I love psychological thrillers and unpredictable elements or shocks. I tried to do this without being too blunt or hackneyed.
RV: The expansion of the cast and stage out of that initial dyad of Camila and Raphael seems to reflect the path of overcoming trauma. The more people that are brought into her inner circle, the more distributed the burden of that trauma. Many hands make for lighter lifting, whether one is building a barn or escaping the clutches of incarnated evil.
CLD: I read once that Marlow and Shakespeare probably didn’t mean a tenth of the things future historian critics have ‘found’ in their work. There’s the reader’s universe and the writers. At the end of the book I talk about the importance of speaking out if we want change. I remember telling a teacher when I was a little girl that I was being abused and she taped the pages where I’d written about it together, and told me not to lie.
RV: I was also drawn to your examination in the book of ‘evil’ as a human phenomenon. Post-modernity made it fashionable to fudge on its existence as being an artifact of positionality, which is, itself, forever negotiable and therefore open to reinterpretation. Has this aspect of our ideology made us blind to real evil that persists in the world?
CLD: There is evil-skepticism versus evil-revivalism, where post-modern society decries the idea there is such a thing as evil; they see that as a vestige of religion (good v. evil) and thus, self-limiting versus logical. Therefore logic dictates ‘evil’ is in fact an umbrella term for (drug use, mental-illness, brain-damage, etc) rather than a phenomena in and of itself. My own view is that evil exists independently of influencing factors. I’m very ‘Bad Seed’ in that regard, which is gaining traction again as we attempt to understand why people do terrible things. I think we have a lot more artifacts that influence our actions than we’re likely to ever comprehend. It’s easier to believe evil doesn’t exist because what can we truly do if it does?
RV: The Cruelty draws our attention to pornography, which is almost like a character unto itself in the novel. Given the book’s frank treatment of sex as a weapon of control, is there an ironic tension in drawing from the spectacle of sex in extremis to fix the audience’s attention on questions of women’s agency in modern culture?
CLD: I’m pretty much a hater of pornography. I know it’s more trendy to be au fait about it, but I think pornography has reduced us as a society to a bunch of voyeurs and I think it deeply impacts intimacy and connection and trust.
I think a lot of dysfunction is considered art. Or made into art. We worship things that we don’t understand in ourselves. I’m not down with the idea that we can separate the pedophile(s) work from the pedophile. Those who forgive Woody Allen, Polanski and others, because they love their ‘art’ so much, are putting the predator and his art before the people he’s destroyed. I suppose The Cruelty is the antithesis of that acceptance.
RV: We see that impulse to become passive observers in so many aspects of culture. Video games, for example, have become a vehicle now for observation rather than engagement. I remember spending time in video arcades as a kid. The only time you’d stand and watch someone else play is either if you were waiting for your turn or you were out of money. Today, there are media empires being built from people watching someone else play video games.
Passive observation is the new Rome. Engagement is a fast-dying thread being replaced with increased voyeurism. Is the future creating us, or are we creating it?
RV: see that impulse arising from a culture socialized on pornography, creating an environment where nobody is adequate for person-to-person adequacy. I recall an interview with the poet Li-Young Lee where he talks about the danger of ‘imitative desire’:
CLD: desire that imitates the desires of others, desire that multiplies through imitation. Being highly imitative creatures (we absorb language, family culture, social culture, national culture all by conscious and unconscious imitation), we are dangerously susceptible to this particular form of desire, desire inspired purely by another’s desire.
The French literary critic Roland Barthes, cited his colleague René Girard’s work on mimetic desire, whereby the desire of things by humans, wasn’t because of intrinsic value, but because humans imitate the desire of others. Both theorists felt desire was a social construct, with people emulating the objects of desire others possess or want. We might not be able to avoid it but we could be at a boiling point in terms of a society that exacerbates it through social media and other mediums.
RV: What do we lose by abdicating our desire to someone else’s imagination?
CLD: Great question. With no one answer. If there’s an ideal, it is that we utilize our imagination and others, in cultivating a desire that is non-harmful but free. In reality, I suspect if we continue to abdicate our desire to others’ imagination, we’re seeing a great drop-off. Much like The Population Bomb predicted, an enlarged population leads to us crying into the void more than ever. It’s not 15 minutes of fame any more, it’s socially-sanctioned attention-deficit. How can any one concept or creation persist in that kind of echo-chamber? The same cabal of unseen leaders are pulling the strings as they always have and perhaps we should shift away from making our mark to considering each other more meaningfully. What happens in The Cruelty couldn’t have occurred if people had been watching out for Camila. The rise of individuality has been both wondrous and toxic.
Candice Louisa Daquin: Candice L. Daquin is a Psychotherapist and editor. She is Managing Editor for Lit Fox Books (Austin, TX) and Austin Poetry Review. She’s Poetry Editor with Tint Journal, Writers Resist and Parcham and Consultant Editor with Life & Legends, Raw Earth Ink and Queer Ink.
Rob Vollmar: Rob Vollmar is a writer and literary critic. He has served as the book review editor for World Literature Today since 2015 and also oversees the magazine’s digital presence as its online editor and webmaster. He holds an MA in integrative studies from the University of Oklahoma, where his interdisciplinary research, grounded in ecology, systems theory, and public policy, focused on examining and critiquing the industrial food system.
