M. L. Rio holds an MA in Shakespeare studies from King’s College London and Shakespeare’s Globe and a PhD in English from the University of Maryland, College Park. Her bestselling first novel If We Were Villains has been published in twenty countries and eighteen languages. Graveyard Shift is her first novella and she recently talked about it with Daryl Maxwell for the LAPL Blog.
What was your inspiration for Graveyard Shift?
It was an idea I’d been kicking around for a long time. I wanted to write a story that took place in just one night, but it didn’t feel like a whole novel. When my publisher asked if I had anything in the story drawer that might work for a novella, I thought of it immediately. The story grew from there, drawing on a lot of things in my academic past—including the graveyard behind my dorm where I hung out as an undergrad and my own experience of chronic insomnia and the desperation that it causes. Because I also work in the medical humanities, I was eager to try putting a sci-fi spin on something. With the length in mind, I wanted something fast-paced and fun, so I did kind of take Scooby Doo as a model. I’d like to think it’s a grown-up version of that—same wacky energy but with a little more intellectual substance.
Are Edie, Hannah, Tamar, Theo, Tuck, or any of the other characters in the novel inspired by or based on specific individuals?
No, I never base a fictional character on one real person. In this instance, they grew out of their jobs; why would these five people be up all night and meeting for a cig in the cemetery? As I got to know them they each became essential to unraveling the mystery in their own way. I like an ensemble cast—it’s much more fun to play characters off one other when you have a few different personalities in the room.
How did the novella evolve and change as you wrote and revised it? Are there any characters or scenes that were lost in the process that you wish had made it to the published version?
I wrote this so fast that we only did about three drafts before copy/edit. I was working on another book when we pitched Graveyard and had to prioritize that, so our timeline was terrifyingly short. I think I did the first draft in three weeks. Fortunately, my agent and my editor both loved it and besides adding a couple of chapters to round out some of the narrative arcs, we didn’t change much. Some of the early reviewers are disappointed the book is so short, but I’m not! I wrote a story to fit that container—I like playing with form—and wouldn’t want it to overstay its welcome. Better to leave a reader wanting more than feeling like it’s overdone.
Are the church and cemetery of the Church of Saint Anthony the Anchorite based on or inspired by an actual location?
Yes and no. The graveyard was loosely inspired by the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery on my college campus, but the church is my own invention. The mural, in particular, is key to the narrative, and that’s based on both the life of Saint Anthony and the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch. He and I both had a pretty tortured relationship with Catholicism, and I think that comes through in his work—which is uncanny in the extreme but not without a sense of humor. That’s what I wanted for Graveyard Shift: something that could sit comfortably between Bosch and Scooby Doo.
In your Author’s Note, you mention that insomnia has been a "constant companion since childhood." Do you continue to suffer from insomnia? Have you ever discovered a reason for your wakefulness or a treatment of some sort that helps you to sleep?
Oh, constantly. I’ve just accepted it’ll be with me all my life. Like Hannah, I’ve tried all the remedies, and none of them really work. As for the reasons, well, they’re legion. I have a lot of health problems that keep me up at night, between the physical discomfort and the psychic unease. Feeling like your body might betray you at any moment makes it hard to relax. To be fair, I have such an overactive mind that it never wants to shut down anyway. When I can’t sleep, I can’t have silence, or my brain just devours itself like a rat in a trap, so I’m a connoisseur of audiobooks and podcasts and ambient music (Brian Eno is obviously at the top of that list). Lying awake at night is also how I get a lot of creative work done, though. Without my insomnia, it would probably take me a lot longer to write anything.
In your Author’s Note, you also mention that, like your characters, you have been a "lurker" in old churchyards and cemeteries. Do you have any favorites?
So many! It’s hard to even know where to start, but when I was an exchange student in Edinburgh, I wandered through Greryfriars Kirkyard almost every day. It’s a gorgeous walk, no matter the weather—rain just enhances the effect.
Have you ever had a job working the “graveyard” shift? If so, what was it?
The year after undergrad, I had four jobs—two theatres, a bookstore, and a wine bar. The wine bar always went late; sometimes, we weren’t cleaned up and locked down until two in the morning, and then I had an hour's drive home. If I had an opening shift at the bookstore, that was doors at seven and another hour away, so some nights, I just didn’t sleep. I’d get home, take a shower, change clothes, get right back in the car, and drive off to the next job. When you’re working like that, it helps to work somewhere quiet and slow-paced, which happens to have a café. I never would have made it through that year uncaffeinated.
And, of course, I did eight years in graduate school. There were a lot of ugly all-nighters just trying to keep up with teaching and grading and my dissertation. Towards the end I had such intense tunnel vision that once or twice I sat in front of my laptop for like eleven hours and didn’t even realize I’d been there all night until the sun came up outside. Would not recommend.
Graveyard Shift would make a marvelous and truly unsettling film. If it was being adapted, who would your dream cast be?
I agree! It could be a cool miniseries with the way the characters pass the story around like a relay. Everybody gets an episode or two. Honestly, I hadn’t thought about casting—because the author never gets any say in casting, which is a common misconception. We control so much less than readers think. And maybe it’s strange for someone who has such bad insomnia, but I watch very little TV. I have no idea who the big-name actors are these days. I’d probably rather see some fresh faces, though. Let’s stop putting the same ten people in everything.
Both your debut novel, If We Were Villains and Graveyard Shift, focus on a group of people who are students and/or live/work at or near a university. You also participated in In These Hallowed Halls, a "dark academia" anthology. What do you think it is about academic settings that draw you, as an author and/or reader, to these types of stories?
For me, it’s just a world I know. I spent twelve years in higher education. I sold my soul to the academy, but then the academy kind of collapsed halfway through my PhD. Nobody was getting tenure-track jobs, so we were all left with this terrible decision of whether to drop out or see it through with no job prospects on the other side and in the meantime, our teaching stipends weren’t nearly enough to get by. Everyone was working side gigs and burning the candle at both ends. I think a lot of people—even if they didn’t go all the way through a doctoral program—had an education like this, which promised so much but turned to dust and debt by the time they graduated. So "dark academia"—which didn’t exist when I was writing Villains back in 2014—is a natural byproduct of that disillusionment, I think.
What’s currently on your nightstand?
I’m reading Chuck Wendig’s Black River Orchard, which is a horror novel tailor-made for me. Cliché, I know, for someone with an academic background, but I love the fall, and I love the taste of a tart, crisp apple. This book is checking all my boxes.
Can you name your top five favorite or most influential authors?
Oh, definitely not. I read so widely that I have way too many favorites to list, and they change all the time. I also think it’s a mistake to lionize any one writer too much. Do that, and you end up sounding like a second-rate version of them instead of sounding like a first-rate version of yourself.
What was your favorite book when you were a child?
Again, there were so many it would be impossible to pick just one. But I did latch onto the Complete Works of Shakespeare at a very young age, and that’s been a throughline my whole literary life.
Was there a book you felt you needed to hide from your parents?
Funnily enough, it didn’t occur to my parents that books could be just as objectionable as movies and TV, which they monitored religiously because they were religious. Books escaped the parental content filter, which is probably why I became a reader instead of a watcher. I was always above the normal reading level for my age, and nobody thought much of it when I was walking around with books I was too young to be reading. I could read them, so I did.
Is there a book you've faked reading?
Only once. It was The Grapes of Wrath when I was in high school. I got to a paragraph in the early pages that compared farm equipment to mechanical penises raping the soil and just went, "Nope, I’m done," and bullshitted my way through the book report. I never went back, and I don’t regret that at all. Why keep reading books you can’t stand? There are so many good books in the world and so little time to read them, and you don’t owe the author anything.
Can you name a book you've bought for the cover?
Lily King’s Euphoria. Just gorgeous. It’s also a great book. I hand-sold it constantly when I worked at Barnes & Noble.
Is there a book that changed your life?
John Knowles’s A Separate Peace was the first book that really upset me. I was eleven when I read it and kept coming back to it even though I hated the way it ended—a glutton for punishment, even then. It was my first experience with a book that was really emotionally gripping, not just entertaining. It did change the way I thought about literature.
Can you name a book for which you are an evangelist (and you think everyone should read)?
Kurt Vonnegut’s Hocus Pocus. It’s not the first Vonnegut anybody thinks of, but it’s criminally underrated. It’s a masterpiece disguised as a mess.
Is there a book you would most want to read again for the first time?
I’d love to go back and read the Complete Works again. Getting a PhD in something completely changes your relationship with it, and I’d like to experience those texts again afresh. I was so young when I first read them. I wonder how my reactions would have been different had I encountered it all twenty years later.
What is the last piece of art (music, movies, TV, more traditional art forms) that you've experienced or that has impacted you?
I recently read and loved Melissa Broder’s Death Valley. Normally I hate books about writers, ironically, but it’s a weird, wonderful fever dream of a novel. I flew through it.
What is your idea of THE perfect day (where you could go anywhere/meet with anyone)?
I’d like to have a slow morning—I don’t sleep late, usually, but I’m a night owl, so I like to take my time with at least two cups of coffee and something on the turntable to get the day off the ground. Then I’d probably take a long walk to more coffee, then maybe a bookstore, maybe a thrift store, or a record store. More than anything, I love the quiet of a dive bar in the middle of the afternoon before the beer drinkers and hell-raisers arrive. I like to sit at the rail and read with a glass of whiskey and a game on in the background. If the night still felt young after that, I’d probably try to find some live music. The small local acts you stumble on by accident are often the best ones. Depending on where I am in the world, I might take a meandering drive to the middle of nowhere, stop at a farm stand, or get my telescope out if there’s no light pollution. I like exploring with no precise destination in mind and plenty of time to follow my whims.
What is the question that you’re always hoping you’ll be asked but never have been?
Maybe because I’m a researcher at heart, I kind of wish people asked more about what I learned in the process of writing a book. You always get questions about what inspired it, but not "What new and surprising information did you gather along the way?" And that’s one of the richest parts of the writing process for me.
What is your answer?
I learned so much about fungi, how they operate, and how essential they are to basically every biosphere on Earth. The fact that trees use mycelial networks to talk to each other underground is fascinating; it suggests a completely different kind of intelligence than we’re used to measuring in animals. Maybe intelligence is the wrong word, but it feels right. The more you learn about fungi, the more they start to feel like alien life forms. Like they have access to this whole other dimension that’s just invisible to us—when we’re not paying attention.
What are you working on now?
This has been a whirlwind year for me. I’m gearing up to launch Graveyard Shift at the same time I’m writing the last drafts of my next novel, Hot Wax, which should be going into production soon, with a fall 2025 release date. That book is really different from both Graveyard and Villains. I’m excited to be striking out in a new direction, but also anxious about deviating from readers’ expectations. But you have to let artists evolve. If I wrote the same book over and over again, that would be boring for everyone. So Hot Wax is fresh and new and weird and wild. It’s a road trip/concert tour novel I pitched to my agent as Almost Famous meets Thelma & Louise. It’s grown into a lot more than that in the last few years, though. I’ve had a hell of a lot of fun working on it, and I hope readers enjoy it just as much.
