Colin Brush is the author of the new novel Exo. He is also a book jacket copywriter, and has written the cover copy for more than 5,000 books. He is based in the UK.
Q: What inspired you to write Exo, and how did you create your character Mae Jameson?
A: Exo came from a 2004 visit to Dungeness, a bleak windswept triangle of land that protrudes into the sea on the southeast coast of England. While this shingle shore is a protected nature reserve, there are cottages and tarred weatherboard shacks that line the single-track road that runs through it.
A small onshore fishing fleet lies on the beach, together with the rusting tractors, bulldozers, and winches that are used to launch them into and haul them back out of the sea. There are a couple of lighthouses. Some of the cottages are lived in by artists and they’ve created curious sculpture gardens out of driftwood and machinery parts.
At the end of the road is a collection of huge concrete boxes, which is a nuclear power station. Fog regularly turns this environment into a haunting landscape, while the sea pounds the shore on two sides. To visit is to feel like you are standing at the end of the world.
After my visit, I couldn’t get these elements out of my head. My imagination ran away with me.
The pounding sea became the Caul: a monstrous, deadly oceanic entity that attracted and claimed any life that got too close. The fishing boats became decaying rockets. The shacks turned into scavenged structures. A lighthouse became a temple. And the power station became a bunker for the scientists studying this entity. I had a world and now I needed a story.
This is where Mae Jameson came in. I wanted to write a character that was as different to me as I could make them. I also needed someone who was alone and isolated, someone who had been abandoned and as a result had walked away from the world. They had forgotten their humanity. Yet this person also had a curiosity and drive that once reawakened would refuse to be thwarted.
Born an orphan, Mae is an 81-year-old ex-policewoman who has lived and survived by the Caul alone for 30 years. She followed her husband here after he walked out on her, but she was unable to find any trace of him. She presumes he entered the Caul – the fate of nearly everyone on this shore. Mae, however, refuses to do so. It is a point of pride.
One day, when she is out checking her traps, she finds a little girl alone. When she returns the child to her father, a rogue scientist also living on the shore, she finds him hanging by a noose. Mae is unconvinced that he killed himself.
Two mysteries now preoccupy her: what to do with this orphaned child? And who killed the scientist and tried to make it look like suicide? Reluctantly at first, she takes the first steps to resolving these two mysteries – as well as regaining her humanity.
Q: Can you say more about how you came up with the world in which the novel is set?
A: Most of the background elements of Exo came from my visit to Dungeness. But how did this world come to be? The Caul – the cause – was weird and dangerous, and that meant figuring out what this strange oceanic entity was and how it worked.
Along the shore, I also had the Caul creating strange fog-bound structures called Clusters in which hyperdimensional shapes floated and shifted, altering between tides. These helped give the story a strong sense of the alien, the strangeness that I wanted the reader to take from it.
The multi-dimensional oceanic Caul which attracts all living things to it and then annihilates them came from my sense that the sea, from which we emerged, represents death or dissolution in many ways. We cannot survive on it without help, it is very dangerous and capricious, and there is a very real sense in coastal communities of living at the edge of things.
The idea of living things being uncontrollably attracted to it came from a very real phenomenon called High Place Syndrome. This is the feeling many of us get when looking over the edge of a cliff or tall building. We get a twitching in our legs that feels like an urge to throw ourselves over the edge.
It is highly worrying when you feel it, you feel like you’ve an urge to hurt yourself. But actually the opposite is occurring. This is part of your body’s defence system warning you that this is the thing you do not want to do. The twitches keep many of us away from the edge and thus safe.
In my story I wanted that system hijacked by the Caul. You feel the urge to enter it, even though you know you shouldn’t, and then your legs act on it.
Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: Originally, the novel was set on an alien planet far from Earth. But an editor asked why it was not set on Earth, and this got me thinking. How would the story be different if set on Earth? I ended up cutting a third of the book and rewriting about half of what was left. Setting it on Earth changed so much and I think it added considerably more heft to the story.
I write to a fairly clear plan and do a lot of rewriting along the way. During this process I usually come up with better ideas, which means going back and adding them in, which of course changes what will come later.
The novel’s end has always been largely the same, but the meaning of that end has changed repeatedly, reflecting changes in how I was telling the story.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the book?
A: I hope they are entertained and that they enjoy spending time with Mae and Magellan, my two main protagonists. There is a murder mystery at the heart of the story, which should satisfy readers of crime and suspense.
But I also have a science fiction mystery – a big dumb object, as they say in the field – the unravelling of which should be of interest to those who like their genre novels to give them that sense of awe and wonder.
I wrote the novel to understand what it is like to live with the unknown, to live beside something huge and threatening. This is what the Caul is to those who live by it, and I suppose it is a metaphor for living with what the philosopher Timothy Morton calls a hyperobject: something so vast in both time and space that we can’t appreciate all of it at an individual level.
Climate change is an example of that. We are aware of it but we can’t really grasp its full extent.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: It took a long time to sell Exo and my agent advised me that the market had changed during that time. He didn’t think he could sell the stuff I was writing. So a year ago I abandoned the new science fiction murder mystery I was writing and picked up another old idea I had sitting in a notebook.
The new work is called Castle at the moment. It is set a hundred years from now on an island off the coast of an unnamed country in the grip of winter.
On the island is an institution housing about a hundred young people, called wards, and the High Staff who run the place. The wards cannot remember the names they had before they came here and have been given designations according to their file and rank. It is unclear whether this is a school or a penitentiary. What is clear is that they cannot leave.
Every day they receive lessons that relate to the playing of a game – its history, philosophy, mathematics. They are being prepared for an annual tournament, which will decide whether they leave the island – and how.
We follow one new arrival – Aleph12 – as she discovers the sinister purpose of the game, why the wards are important and what it has to do with their world.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I have been working as a copywriter for one of the world’s largest publishers for the last 25 years. My job is to write the jacket copy on books – the blurb – and I have written over 5,000 in that time. My role requires me to condense 100,000 words into 100 or so, in the process finding the hookiest way to present this book.
This is the direct opposite of writing a novel, in my experience, where you turn a few words of notes into a long piece of prose. By now I find it very easy to write short and it took me a long time to work out how to successfully write long.
I write about copywriting (and writing) on my website and on Instagram and Bluesky as colinthecopywriter.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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