What was the genesis of this story? Did these kind of fantastic creatures interest you as a child?
I think my interest in squid started in South Korea, where I lived on Jeju Island for two years. At night, the lights from the squidding boats that surround the island look like strange constellations against the black sea.
From there I started to become more and more interested in squid, and giant squid in particular, which is among the more elusive creatures we humans know are out there in the deep, and kind of straddles the line between myth and science.
When I thought about how to turn my emerging squid obsession into a book, I looked to a few touchstones: the sci-fi of Jules Verne, The Kraken Wakes by John Wyndham, Moby Dick, Frankenstein, and the body horror of David Cronenberg. Then I found the Moses Harvey story, which I knew I had to draw from. The novel became a sort of eco-horror noir when the protagonist, Eddie, came into being.
I should also note that I have definitely been interested in monsters since I was a kid. One of my favourite books early on was the pop-up book Goblins by Brian Froud.

Where would you put the boundary between speculative fiction and science fiction – or would you separate them at all?
To be honest, I’m not much for reinforcing those boundaries. I think everything is becoming more permeable: literary and genre, horror and sci-fi, weird fiction and speculative, and so on. Traditionally, I would say science fiction started out being more rooted in hard science and a kind of technically inclined writing. But that’s so not true anymore, as science fiction comes to encompass the climate crisis, genres bend and blend, and what was speculative becomes real by the day. My general inclination is to use genres as useful scaffolding if necessary. But the structure underneath should stand on its own, even if it’s a hybrid.

How do you research a story like this? Also with the bulk of it set in and around St John’s, did you yourself spend much time here?
A colleague and I went to St. John’s for a few days of intensive research at Memorial University and The Rooms, where we raided their rich trove of resources on the real Moses Harvey, who inspired Moses Kane. We visited Portugal Cove and tracked down an ancestor of one of the book’s reimagined characters. I’ve been to The Rooms a couple times to visit the preserved squid. So while I haven’t spent much time in St John’s physically, it has stamped itself firmly on my imagination.
Beyond that, I acquired a few books Moses Harvey wrote and referred to them often. And there are a few other people who have unearthed the tale of Moses and his tentacle. The US writer Matthew Gavin Frank wrote a fantastic book called Preparing the Ghost, which mixes essay, myth, and history. Another great resource is Richard Ellis’ The Search for the Giant Squid.

Can you describe your protagonist? When we first meet him, he seems to deliberately present himself as unlikeable – would that be a fair comment? And there’s a palpable level of obsession, not just in his life’s work, but in his own emotional impulses and needs. That’s more of a comment than a question I guess, but it seemed to hold up a dark mirror to the forces driving the narrative.
I think the thing about Eddie is that he doesn’t especially like himself, because he assumes everyone is afraid of him. Part of it is circumstantial, but it’s also why he’s so big. Eddie is at least partly uncomfortable in his body, which I think is something a lot of people feel some of the time, in varying ways and for different reasons. For him, that translates into how he presents himself and interacts with the world (and offers a convenient metaphor for how our bodies betray us).
In channeling Frankenstein’s Creature, Eddie is also a kind of archetypal sad monster. Something people forget about monsters is that a lot of them are fundamentally sad. They’re alone, outcast, shunned, misunderstood—which just amplifies their alienation and weirdness. Eddie is obsessed partly because he’s a desperate romantic who can’t let go of the one person he believes truly accepted him for who he is, and partly because he is a sad monster, a flawed product of his (and our) time: guilty and suspicious, fixated and paranoid, swinging at the shadows where truly monstrous things hide, the ones that eat the world.

False Bodies is published by Breakwater Books.