‘Tis The Season: Authors Talk Holidays is a special seasonal feature on Pop! Goes The Reader in which some of my favourite authors help me to celebrate the spirit of the season and spread a little holiday cheer. So, pour yourself a cup of hot chocolate and snuggle in by the fireside as they answer the question: “What does the holiday season mean to you?”
About Ryan La Sala
Ryan La Sala has always lived on the partition between the real and unreal. He writes about surreal things happening to real people, and his stories are almost always queer. His first book, Reverie, focuses on the worlds we build within ourselves — our dreams and our delusions — and how they warp our reality.
Ryan grew up in a quaint suburb of Connecticut with his three siblings and three parents. He studied Anthropology and Neuroscience at Northeastern University in Boston and now works atop an antique movie theater at a digital design agency in Somerville, MA. He lives in a house festooned in decorations from past theme parties, where the TV alternates between Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Kingdom Hearts, and Sailor Moon. If not writing, Ryan is doing arts and crafts with his roommate, lounging around on gym equipment while listening to publishing podcasts, or listening to NPR while cooking. He loves CATS the musical unironically.
And, for those wondering, Ryan writes about drag queens but is not regularly in drag himself. He just doesn’t have the nose for it, and that’s okay.
I don’t care what anyone says. Christmas is creepy.
And I love it. Every year, this realization takes me by surprise. But it’s always the same ingredients in the epiphany. It’s after the tackiness of the seasonal decor and sales signs leaves me feeling listless, and I wonder where all my cheer has gone. And then I hear a choir.
This year’s choir moment was when i attended a friend’s chorus concert, in an ancient church with many anguished Jesuses looking down upon the audience in our pews. The kind of place that feels strange to clap in, yet we did, with gusto, and I’ve been glancing skyward since.
As the choir sang, I remembered what i live for every holiday season. It’s not the upbeat carols that get me going, but the strangely gothy genre of Christmas music that feels explicitly meant to unsettle. Like Silent Night, which was probably not written with a murder sequence in mind, yet nevertheless always makes me lock my doors. And Carol of the Bells! What the heck. Are the bells owed something horrible from the townspeople? Because when i hear their carol, I don’t feel joy. I feel like hiding my children away from implacable forest gods freed by the new moon of winter, hungry for cold blood and gingersnap and…I don’t know. This is getting away from me. But my point is that it’s a scary song.
Which for the record, is great. I truly only feel in the spirit of the holiday when I feel that weird, ironic eeriness that hides in the seams of the holiday season’s compulsory merriment. Like the eternal yawn of singing porcelain angels in window displays. And nativity scenes behind bullet proof glass. And angels pressed into fresh snow, with no footprints in sight and the moon above smiling innocently.
Give me the dark, old magic, please. The sort that glides out of the black, cold sky and sounds like distant and ominous sleigh bells. Give me ancient rituals and a gargantuan man in a stinking cloak who can invade any home, at any time, and can only be appeased by confections.
Quick aside: I think this is why my favorite Christmas movie is The Santa Clause. It addresses the compulsory cheer of The Holiday Season, and honestly….the plot is horror. I mean what’s more horrifying than being tricked into murdering Santa Claus so that his life-force can invade your body, transforming your flesh and ruining your life? That’s a HORROR PLOT. I loved it then, and I love it now.
(In the sequel I’m pretty sure he needs to find a wife or he dies. Or the idea of Santa dies? I forget. Either way, it’s all body horror and high stakes beneath the tinsel and holy.)
Anyhow, whenever I express this to my friends, they wonder about me and ask if I’m alright. It’s hard to explain that, once I get this festive and existential dread, I’m doing better than I have in months. Holiday Cheer doesn’t have to be cheerful, I’ve decided. It can be spooky and unsettling, and certainly someone has to take on the swelling grimness pent beneath all this forced cheer, right? Well I’ve decided that person is me. And I want to do so while listening to a mournful choir, in a spooky church, singing about bells.
Scary Christmas, everybody 🙂
Title Reverie
Author Ryan La Sala
Intended Target Audience Young Adult
Genre Fantasy
Publication Date December 3rd 2019 by Sourcebooks Fire
Find It On Goodreads ● Amazon.com ● Chapters ● The Book Depository ● Barnes & Noble ● IndieBound
Inception meets The Magicians in this wildly imaginative story about what happens when the secret worlds people hide within themselves come to light.
All Kane Montgomery knows for certain is that the police found him half-dead in the river. He can’t remember anything since an accident robbed him of his memories a few weeks ago. And the world feels different ― reality itself seems different.
So when three of his classmates claim to be his friends and the only people who can tell him what’s truly going on, he doesn’t know what to believe or who he can trust. But as he and the others are dragged into unimaginable worlds that materialize out of nowhere―the gym warps into a subterranean temple, a historical home nearby blooms into a Victorian romance rife with scandal and sorcery ― Kane realizes that nothing in his life is an accident, and only he can stop their world from unraveling.
