Complexity, Darkness, and a Strange Sense of Fun: an Interview with Colin Winnette

APRIL 1, 2024 | Colin Winnette is the author of Transom favorites Job of the Wasp and Users (now in paperback). We chat with him about horror as a venue for personal stories, the false purity of protagonists, the plausible impossibility of speculative fiction, and the unstoppable force of creativity.

Users (Soft Skull, 2024) is a fever-dream tech satire that’s like Apple TV’s Severance in the hands of David Lynch.

Transom Bookshop: To its credit, Users is delightfully slippery to describe: a reader would be right to expect a straightforward novel about the rise and fall of a modern man, set to the backdrop of a big-tech cautionary tale. But Users is also absurdist, satirical, and philosophical—at times, it crosses the border into surrealist horror. In setting out to write it, did you know Users would take on those forms? And as those forms emerged, how did you balance them?

Colin Winnette: One of my biggest fears when we started conversations about how to market the book was that we might overemphasize the tech aspects and make it sound more like a near-future office novel than I’ve ever really thought that it was. For me, the book’s existential and familial concerns, its absurdity, and its horror — those were its beating heart. I think a lot about last year’s Anatomy of a Fall, and how well it functions as a courtroom procedural, and yet that’s not really what the film is about at all, at least to me. To me, it’s about relationships and storytelling, and the courtroom is a way of accessing and unpacking the filmmaker’s real human concerns. That’s what I hoped for this book. The novel’s circumstances are really a means of accessing the unsettling and disturbing and baffling and beautiful parts of life that make me want to write.

TBS: Given the challenges of getting a book published and marketed today, did you face any headwinds in presenting a multi-faceted novel that eludes simple description? (Or did I get it wrong: is there a simple description that captures the essence of Users?)

CW: I’ve had the very good fortune of working with Soft Skull (and Two Dollar Radio before that), both presses that I think are ultimately drawn more to the kind of novels you’re describing — the uncategorizable, the slippery and strange, the novels that shake up our expectations, and, often for that reason, that you won’t find published elsewhere. I sought these presses out because they published this kind of work. Of course, I’ve faced very strong headwinds in the past, and they may lay ahead as well, but after doing The Job of the Wasp with Soft Skull, I was excited to share Users with them. I had a good feeling about it, and I was lucky enough to have that feeling confirmed. Not that I’ve ever felt fully confident or totally safe when submitting work, but this time I at least had confidence that they would read the book all the way through, and would potentially be excited by its complexity, its darkness, and its strange sense of fun, rather than being deterred by those things.

TBS: Here in Sleepy Hollow territory, we read horror year-round—and we are really enjoying its second renaissance. As a writer of the genre, how do you see horror evolving, and what are you looking forward to for the genre?

CW: Horror might be my favorite genre. I was at Fantastic Fest last September, and there was such a beautiful and exciting range of horror on display, it was really thrilling. While at the festival, I went to a screening of Indigenous horror short films, and though I was at first, perhaps regrettably, a bit suspicious of the ghettoization, the screening was actually a profound demonstration of the worlds and worlds of differents kinds of films to be made and stories being told by Indigenous filmmakers and writers. Each film was so unique in its approach to horror, in its subject matter, and in its filmmaking, it felt like a profound refutation of the categorization, while also highlighting the value and importance of carving out that space in the first place. Grouping those films together was an act of declaring just how much was to be done, and how much was being done already, by these filmmakers, rather than attempting to manifest any particular overarching thematic concerns or aesthetic sensibilities (which had been my fear). I left feeling really excited about all the places horror has left to go, which I think was part of the point. 

For me, horror has always been about acknowledging, capturing, and sometimes delightfully exaggerating the fears and dangers inherent to the human experience, and that is an infinitely deep well, as varied as its headcount. I’m excited to see popular horror opening up and embracing that. I think horror is a great venue for personal stories, and for stories that approach the universal in their specificity. One of my absolute favorite horror films of the past year or so was Attachment (2022), a film steeped in Jewish folklore and largely set within an Orthodox community. In the past, I think the approach might have been to exploit those aspects — as in, look how terrifying this otherness is — but these filmmakers were much more interested in exploring the specificity of that setting, the strengths and weaknesses of this particular community when confronted with the reality of myth. I thought it was brilliantly acted and frightening and funny and rich. I am so excited for more horror like this. Horror that feels like it couldn’t have been made by anyone other than the person who made it.

TBS: I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but your protagonist, Miles, walks a very fine line of likability. There were moments I rooted for him, and felt he was the victim—others, I wanted to see him summarily destroyed. As a writer, do you have to pick sides when it comes to your characters? To write them well, do you have to want them to either succeed or fail?

CW: I think so much of the question of likability is tied to the decision of where to place the lens, how much of a character to expose. We demand a certain purity of person from novels these days that I’m not sure reflects reality. I think if you plucked a person out of the world and could actually somehow access all of the parts of them that one has access to in a novel — their inner thoughts, their various personalities in the face of the countless contexts in which they operate throughout the day, their true, multifaceted self — we would start to see a fairly complicated and perhaps even troubling portrait of that person. Or that’s my suspicion, anyway. That’s not to say everyone is terrible and unlikable deep down, only to say that likability and goodness feel very tied to moment-to-moment decisions to me, rather than being some kind of universal and unshakable binary of being — like either you are or you aren’t. Who we are is a much less fixed and singular thing than can sometimes be demanded of fictional characters. To me, the value in acknowledging the truth is that it makes moments of goodness all the more rare and valuable, and moments of weakness or error all the more human.

TBS: As in your previous novel Job of the Wasp, you’ve created some eerie slow-burn horror out of the children in Users. What are the concerns and considerations in writing kids into a narrative, especially where there’s violence present?

CW: I was an anxious and frightened kid, and when I discovered horror (first RL Stine, but quickly after that, Stephen King), I felt a tremendous sense of comfort and relief in the unsparing darkness I encountered there. It felt suddenly like my experience of feeling afraid, and being a little too tuned in to the potential dangers of the world, was being acknowledged and taken seriously, but also played with, oddly celebrated, like how it feels good sometimes to laugh at the things that make you sad. Something I valued, as a kid, was to read books by authors who did not feel the need to hide the world from me. It was too late to hide it. I was alive in it. It was all around me, pressing into my life and perspective in shocking and isolating ways. When I read books about impossibly powerful children who only ever contend with inept villains or palpably false peril, I felt talked down to and like I wasn’t being taken seriously. It made me feel that I was not being prepared for reality. Reading Stephen King, I felt like I was being leveled with. Like yes, there are terrible and terrifying things in the world that you might not be able to contend with, but also, life is worth loving and living regardless. That was frightening, yes, but also extremely helpful and, above all, true. All that said, I completely understand the desire to protect children from all harm and from depictions of harm. I would never fault someone for wanting that, and I do think it’s up to each family (and author) to decide how they approach the handling of that question. But, as powerful as they are, there is also a beautiful safety to books, where ideas can be explored and experienced at a critical distance. I often think of the scene in The Neverending Story where the main character has to shut the book for a moment and remind himself It’s only a story. And then, he goes back in. A book can always be closed, and it can always be remembered that, however frightening or shocking it may feel, it is only something someone alone in a room sat crafting word by word. They probably had bad posture. They probably had to look up some of the words they then deployed with great authority. They probably were scared in traffic by a horn honk earlier that day. They probably wondered if anyone would ever read or care about the thing they were pouring their life into. It’s only a story. Then again, all I can speak to is my own experience of being a kid who felt so keenly aware of the dangers all around me, who found tremendous relief in the adults who were willing to acknowledge the reality of that danger (or at least take the fear of that danger seriously). These are the writers who made me feel less alone in the world and less alone in that fear, which made the fear more agreeable to live with, and, ultimately, lessened it. 

TBS: Users has been likened to The Circle by Dave Eggers, who I (vaguely) remember saying that the challenge of speculative fiction is that technology moves too quickly for writers to keep up. Did you approach Users with this in mind? Was the technology in your novel designed to somehow beat the market, or mimic actual tech—or sidestep it altogether?

CW: I had exactly the described experience with Users. When I wrote it, the tech I was describing felt like a plausible exaggeration of the present, but while the book was being prepped for publication, that hyperbole became reality, and a handful of the world’s leading tech companies stepped up to announce their new VR platforms. Suddenly, everything I’d written mirrored reality in a much closer way than I’d intended. What saved it, I hope, (and what attracts me to surreal story-telling in general) is its sidelong engagement with verisimilitude. I’m drawn to fiction with a certain dream-like quality, somehow both plausible and impossible. Weirdly, that feels closest to the truth of my experience of the world, that feeling of course and no way at the same time.

TBS: As someone attuned to tech, what are your thoughts about AI moving into the publishing industry? There’s plenty of well-publicized fear (which I’m happy to hear about as well), but I’d like to know if you see a silver lining in AI for writers and readers?

CW: If I see a silver lining for writers and readers it’s that the rapid incorporation of AI into all of these creative fields could draw into stark relief the unique value of individual human communicative acts. On the receiving end of art, there is often a call to lump and to blend and to consolidate and to blur, and that’s where automation thrives. But art is born of a much more urgent and personal and desperate place than that. AI may change the way art looks, but it won’t change art’s fundamental nature. People will still have feelings and ideas and experiences that cannot be expressed in any way other than through a creative act, and so I think we’re going to see some really fascinating and personal work made in response to whatever the shape of our new reality may be. I don’t think AI is going to make it any easier to make art — in fact, it may make it much harder — but it certainly can’t stop it.

TBS: What are your dream comps for Users? What influences and inspires your work?

CW: This might not make a lot of sense, but one of the books I was thinking about the most while writing Users was Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, specifically that book’s humor and its slippery relationship to its own reality. I don’t pretend to have reached the heights or depths of that book, but it did have a profound impact on my thinking about the novel form and all that you can get away with once you’ve found the right voice for your work. And perhaps somewhat obviously, Lynch has had an undeniable influence on everything I’ve ever made, specifically Inland Empire and The Straight Story. Those movies feel like the two pole ends of what Lynch is capable of, one so creatively unbridled, narratively unhinged, and emotionally profound, and one so clean and simple and sincere and… straight. It’s literally a movie about a man driving slowly in a line! I watch those movies, and I feel both a tremendous sense of freedom and a simultaneous call to be more rigorous and intentional in all of my creative decisions. They’re very inspiring to me. 

I’ve been off the Wes Anderson train for a while, but I thought Asteroid City was a masterpiece, and the most vulnerable, honest, and proudly experimental thing I’ve seen from him yet. I could go on for pages, there’s so much good work being made right now, and so many exciting things to read and see and listen to.

TBS: What other authors are bending genres and breaking rules who fans of Users should seek out?

CW: In the sci-fi space, the work I’ve had the biggest response to lately is Cixin Liu’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, Hugo Lilja and Pella Kågerman’s film Aniara, and Koganada’s After Yang. Rachel Khong’s forthcoming book The Real Americans is a brilliant rule-breaker, too, and one that I think will shake things up a bit upon release. 

People looking for rule-breaking work should look to the small presses (your Transit Books, your Soft Skulls, your Two Dollar Radios, your Fern Books, your Feminist Presses, your Coffee Houses, the list goes on). They’re the ones taking the risk on work that doesn’t easily slot into a corporate marketing plan. Those are the harder to sell books because they’re harder to describe (to touch back on your earlier question), but they’re often the books and writers that set the new course by upsetting expectations and interrogating tradition.