Naben Ruthnum makes his introduction onto the YA literary scene with his new horror novel, The Grimmer. He takes readers on a riveting ride through the supernatural while examining complexities such as addiction, racism and grief. 

High schooler Vish, a lover of heavy metal and literature, is uncertain about his future. With his father recently out of treatment for addiction, Vish can feel all eyes on his family — who are one of the only brown families in the neighbourhood. The Grimmer follows Vish as he is drawn into the world of the occult: full of magic, witches and undead creatures.

Working with the peculiar local bookstore owner and his mysterious teenage employee Gisela, Vish tries to stop an interdimensional invasion that could destroy their whole town. 

Ruthnum is a Toronto author, writer and journalist. He is the author of the memoir Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race and the novels Helpmeet and A Hero of Our Time. He has also written the thrillers Find You In The Dark and Your Life is Mine under the pen name Nathan Ripley. 

He spoke with The Next Chapter’s Ali Hassan about The Grimmer. 

Your last book before The Grimmer was an adult horror novella. What was your impetus to write YA horror? 

The ideas just come when they come. Helpmeet is something that I actually had conceived of as a film idea that never really manifested. So I ended up writing it in five days. It’s such a different kind of horror, like, keep your kids away from it. It’s quite intensely gory. But The Grimmer actually came from almost a fondness and nostalgia, not just for my own childhood but for the ghostly and horror books that I was reading at the age that Vish is in the book.

So it almost came from the sort of the sweet Ray Bradbury world of horror — that sense of a permanent autumn and nostalgia place where things can be confronted and then resolved. 

It actually came from almost a fondness and nostalgia, not just for my own childhood but for the ghostly and horror books that I was reading at the age that Vish isin the book.– Naben Ruthnum

So let’s talk about your protagonist a little bit. Vish is a big reader — literature and music are his two big things. He’s living in Kelowna. It’s a small, very white city. So tell us about Vish, how does he operate in that community at that time?

To him it seems to be completely lacking diversity. In his particular family — and his particular neighbourhood — all he sees is a very white world. But he’s someone who’s also had to take a two-year break from his life, where he goes to a private school on Vancouver Island because his father was struggling with an addiction problem.

His parents’ solution was to send him to a safe place, which to him felt more like a rejection. And when he steps back into his old life feeling a bit betrayed by his family, as well as his friends who we think tattled on him and his family problems. I think it’s been a couple of years in which he’s driven more into the things that he could count on, which are literature and heavy metal. 

If loneliness is a kind of personal horror before Vish even gets involved in the creepy goings-on that are happening around him, he had to endure two years at boarding school. What was that like for him? 

I think committing to that solitude was something that he was excited by and liked in a self-flagellating way, but I think it explains why he does seem a bit older than his years in some ways because he’s built up a persona that doesn’t make much sense for a teenager. He’s based it a lot on books that are about experiences that he has no actual experience of, so on the one hand, he’s really naive about what it’s like to be a functional person with functional relationships. On the other hand, he knows way more than he should thanks to books.

And certainly I borrowed a bit from my own life at that time for that.

What did you draw on from your own teenage years for when you were writing Vish? 

Definitely the reading and the guitar stuff. I was very serious about music as a player until my mid-20s or so. And definitely about heavy metal music in particular, which I actually never played that much outside of my basement, but that was something that I expected as a teenage snob that I’d outgrow. 

It was something that has never left me. And I feel that it’s a pure and honest art form. Obviously it has a lot to do with teenage rage in that context in those days. But even as you get more placid and old, there’s still so much in that music that I still respond to. 

Vish is, as we mentioned, a wide reader. He likes spooky science fiction and horror. What drew you to that kind of reading when you were young? 

It’s hard to say what sort of gets you exactly on that path. I remember just accidentally finding this anthology called The Sorceress in Stained Glass, which turned out to be the first book that Richard Dalby, a really famous British anthologist, put together at the library book sale in Kelowna when I was seven or eight. And these are all early 20th century stories from magazines for grown-ups.

I responded to them and I realized these are the gentler, ghostly tales for kids that I’ve been reading, but there’s something more here and I  like it. I think it suggests a future that is more interesting than the one you’re probably going to get. 

I realized these are the gentler, ghostly tales for kids that I’ve been reading, but there’s something more here and I like it. I think it suggests a future that is more interesting than the one you’re probably going to get.– Naben Ruthnum

I wanted to ask about horror — is it something that grows with you as a reader do you think?

I absolutely think so. There’s just so much depth and complexity to the genre. There’s a reason why a director like Stanley Kubrick eventually comes around in the later half of his career to make a horror movie. It’s something that draws in great artists who want to see if they can try to do something in this world.

And when I go back to my novella Helpmeet, two big influences on that are Henry James and Edith Wharton — who are known for the highest of high literature — but they’ve also written all these really fascinating ghost stories that are still the same authors, so they’re still just as complex.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.