The Brooklyn Rail

In Mystery Lights, Lena Valencia’s debut short story collection about women facing danger in the American Southwest, the Brooklyn-based writer blends literary fiction with supernatural elements. The book is delightful—menacing, smart, cozy-creepy, both strange and familiar—and it provides a vexing reflection of modern society.

I recently spoke with Valencia over the phone about the mystery of the self, why she believes satisfying endings should leave something open, and how being involved in the literary scene in Brooklyn has influenced her as a writer.

Jessie Ren Marshall (Rail): Let’s start with the title of your collection. It feels like such an apt title for the stories in the book.

Lena Valencia: So, the “mystery lights” actually exist in Marfa. They're also known as the Marfa Lights. They’re these little orbs of light that appear on the horizon out in the open desert in West Texas. Mystery Lights is the title of a story in the book, and I chose it for the collection because it conveys an almost pulpy sci-fi sensibility, which is something that a lot of these stories are flirting with.

And I definitely had movies in my mind as I was writing these stories. For some of them, I was visualizing them as if watching them on a screen. I was thinking a lot about how light and dark work on the page.

Rail: Many of these stories are driven by a central mystery. Is that explicitly something that you set out to do with this collection, or is that just generally how you sit down to write a short story?

Valencia: Since a lot of these stories are dealing with the supernatural in some way, there is an inherent mystery in them. The question is: is this real, or is it not, and why is it happening? And a lot of the characters don’t seem to know themselves very well, so there's the mystery of the self, definitely.

Rail: Yes! I love the multiple mysteries and the way you embrace ambiguity. Some of the mysteries might not be fully solved, and I expect readers to have different interpretations of whether or not the supernatural events in the stories are “real.” Do you as the author have a definite understanding of the facts behind each story? Is there an objective truth?

Valencia: Ambiguity is something that I really love reading and writing. I do think in many of these stories, two truths can exist at the same time. But my other thought is, how much does it really matter? What matters is what the character believes. And that's why, from a craft perspective, I stayed very close to these protagonists. I really let them guide me in that way. There’s a scene in the story “You Can Never Be Too Sure” where someone is flashing between being two different predatory characters, and those two malevolent presences are both real to the woman who sees them. That’s her reality right there. That’s what I was writing towards, and I never really saw it as a metaphor. With the horror in my stories, the horror can have meaning beyond just the monster, and I think all monsters have meaning beyond themselves. But the situation is always real to the characters, and real to me.

Rail: What do you think makes a satisfying ending in a short story?

Valencia: I'm not a fan of a tidy ending where everything gets wrapped up in a neat little bow, because I don't think that's true to existence. Sometimes things are more complex than when they began. For me, satisfying endings leave something open. This is a trope in horror movies, which is sometimes leaving room for a sequel. But I also think it is satisfying when maybe the reader can imagine a world beyond the story, or can imagine the monster coming back.

Rail: You’ve mentioned horror and science fiction as genres that influenced this book. Were you thinking about genre tropes and trying to work within them or subvert them?

Valencia: I was definitely thinking about the horror genre. The story “The Reclamation” actually does follow horror beats, where we see a character turning into a monster.

Rail: A lot of the stories also offer commentary on our contemporary social world, our weirdly mediated world. Which is really interesting when you pair it with the horror genre and it creates a sense of ominous danger.

Valencia: I spend a lot of time on social media, which is not something I'm necessarily proud of. But what I see and what I'm responding to is how it can infect the way we think. You call something viral, and it’s a scary word. It sounds like a virus!

Especially with a story like “The Reclamation,” and to some extent, the title story, “Mystery Lights,” I’m looking at social media, charismatic leaders, influencers. The cliché messages of some of these wellness and self-help gurus seem benign, but there can be real harm if the messages are misinterpreted. In “The Reclamation,” which takes place at a wellness retreat, I explore what would happen if someone just completely misinterpreted things. That’s something that I'm always fascinated by. Because if you know how to talk to people, and you're telling them what they want to hear, you can get people to believe anything. Con artists are a big part of American history. It's in the fabric of our society.

Rail: “The Reclamation” is one of my favorite stories in the book, and it captures the desert so well. It contributes to the most prominent image Mystery Lights left with me—a woman, alone, in the desert, in danger. In “The Reclamation,” the desert is almost its own character. It provides the setting for the story and is the site of conflict. It’s a life-threatening danger and a place of insight and transformation. I’m curious about your own relationship with the desert.

Valencia: The desert, to me, is a place with some very happy, wholesome, wonderful memories. As a kid I spent a lot of time visiting my grandparents at their cooperative living community in Tucson. It was raw desert land on the outskirts of the city, and it was very beautiful. And it was so different from what I knew from my home in Los Angeles.

There was all this wildlife and these crazy rainstorms. And both of my grandparents loved that landscape, and I learned to love it too, and also to be a little afraid of it. I have a respect for nature, which at times veers into fear, maybe because I've spent most of my life in cities. And that’s definitely gone into my fiction.

The desert is a place I’m familiar with, but it's not a place I'm from, which is why most of the characters in the book are outsiders encountering it maybe for the first time. They’re pretty unprepared. And immediately that brings this sense of tension to the story. It makes me very anxious, watching or reading about someone facing a natural space and they're unprepared for it. I think, “Oh God, what's going to happen? Why didn't you bring water?” So in Mystery Lights, I was writing into that anxiety.

Rail: In fiction, I love to see an unprepared human facing an unforgiving element of nature. It's so very human to underestimate the natural world! Because we assume we've tamed it. And as a reader, I’m hoping for this foolish character to get their comeuppance. I'm worried for them. And yet I’m rooting for the desert to win.

Valencia: Characters that are foolish are just great. I have such a good time getting into their heads and cracking them open. Writing a character who knows everything is boring, but a character who thinks they know everything? That's where it gets interesting.

Rail: These stories are about women, and that’s significant, I think, in the way these characters choose to interact with the supernatural and natural worlds. Earlier you mentioned the story “You Can Never Be Too Sure,” in which there are two predators existing simultaneously in a woman’s mind. The source of the mystery is in her perception. As in: Am I simply perceiving this threat—am I inventing it—or is it a real threat? That’s a real experience I’ve had, and one I’m sure many women have had. It’s very familiar to see two realities co-existing in one moment, and which reality you choose to believe in can have fatal consequences.

Valencia: Many of the stories engage with the idea of doubt, especially as a woman and especially during a traumatic experience. This does tie in with the way people experience the supernatural or horror narratives. I read Dracula recently, and at first the characters are just trying to find some rational explanation for their friends being drained of blood in their beds. There’s this fear of facing something head on. It makes you spin your own story in your head. Violence is not a rational thing. It naturally creates doubt, because we don't want to ever feel we’re a victim. So you say, “Oh, well, it was, it was my fault,” or “I'm overreacting,” or “He didn't mean that in that way.”

That’s something I was thinking about with the supernatural. How that push and pull of belief affects what we choose to believe and what others perceive.

Rail: What are some of the other books and authors you feel this book is in conversation with? Who inspired you?

Valencia: Kelly Link has been a huge influence on me since I discovered her writing. In my mid-twenties, I was working for the magazine A Public Space and we were publishing one of her stories from the collection Get in Trouble. It was the story, “The New Boyfriend,” and I thought, oh, this is what I want to do and what I've been trying to do. People talked about experiencing that feeling as a writer, but I never quite experienced it until then. So discovering her work was really, really wonderful for me. And she's also a lovely person.

Shirley Jackson is another. I really love the way she captures the creepiness of a small town. And Carmen Maria Machado. I really connect with her way of writing feminist horror. And Karen Russell is another one. I was definitely thinking of her short stories and literary speculative fiction. I also read Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire as I was working on these stories. A lot of it is about his experience as a park ranger at Arches National Park in Utah. He’s super curmudgeonly and doesn’t really like people. He lambasts the Park Service for letting paved roads be built through national parks, because he thinks the land should be left alone and untouched by car traffic. I don't necessarily agree with him one hundred percent of the time, and he’s very cranky, but he writes very beautifully about the desert.

Rail: You’re very involved in the literary scene in Brooklyn. Can you talk about your day job with One Story, and co-running the Ditmas Lit reading series, and all the other literary hats you wear? How have these roles influenced you as a writer?

Valencia: For the most part, it's been very positive. All the people I work with are writers. And they understand—oh, okay, yes, you do need time off to go to the residency, and those kinds of things. They understand the writing life. And then I've had the opportunity to see all these different types of writing careers and how different people come to writing. How they live as writers. And that's been really exciting.

And then, of course, I get paid to read great stories. I don't really work with slush that much anymore, so it's mostly just reading the beautiful, pristine, published versions of the stories. And it's really wonderful. I mean, sometimes I'm putting an issue into layout and I get so moved by the story, I start crying. And I can't believe I'm doing this for a living.

And I can't understate the importance of the literary community, especially through things like Ditmas Lit. I’ve met so many incredible writers in person and been introduced to so much great work. I feel so lucky.

In terms of the not-so-rosy side of things, seeing how the sausage is made is not always pleasant. One example is when I used to work at a bookstore, we'd have to do returns, which meant grabbing all the books that didn't sell and sending them back to the publisher. I remember there was one time I was doing it and I thought, wow, someone poured their life into this. Several years of their life went into this book and then no one bought it and we're sending it back. So that was a reality check.

But I think it was also an important lesson. If you're writing literary fiction for the sole purpose of selling books, it's probably the wrong reason to be doing it. I’m not writing to make millions of dollars.

Rail: So, you're writing for a different reason. What is that reason for you?

Valencia: It changes from time to time, but I'm really just writing to process the world around me. And what better way to do that than through the eyes of a fictional character? We live in such a weird, crazy world. I've been writing since I was a kid, and I've always used fiction to understand the world around me.

Rail: You mentioned that what you're writing next is a novel set in Brooklyn. Can you talk about it at all?

Valencia: I'm working on a horror novel and set in Brownstone Brooklyn. That is what I can say right now. And there are monsters.

Rail: Yay! I mean, of course there are. It's Brownstone Brooklyn.

Valencia: Yeah, of course. That's where the monsters live.