Features Booktrib Spotlight: Ruby Todd

A Comet Brings Secrets, Love, Obsession, Death

A Spotlight on Author Ruby Todd

By Neil Nyren

“The woman I was back then could never have foreseen what was coming, and I can’t reach back into the past to warn her.”

Sylvia Knight, 32, the narrator of Ruby Todd’s BRIGHT OBJECTS, finally thinks she knows what to do. The funeral home she works for in a small town in Australia is the same one that recently buried her own husband, killed in a hit-and-run accident, the driver never caught, “absorbed into the night like a stone in a lake.” But she thinks—no, she’s sure—it was the town’s police sergeant, Angus Blair, protected, untouchable. He’s even suborned a witness. When they told her the investigation was closed, she thought, for a while, that there was no reason to keep living herself, but, now, she’s realized she was wrong. She has to be patient, to play the long game. Angus would slip, and then he would pay.

Meanwhile, the job has its own headaches. The local New Age mystic can’t—or won’t—finalize any decisions about his mother’s burial, though they keep telling him there’s only so long she can be kept in refrigeration. An enigmatic stranger won’t tell her why he’s at the funeral home, or stop staring at her.

And, oh yes, there’s Comet St. John. It hasn’t been seen on earth for over four thousand years. For many months, it will get larger and larger, and at its closest moment, it will fill the sky, both day and night, before moving on. It has made people a little nutty. There are watch parties, meetings, runs on the stores, heated debates about what the comet means. A cult has even sprung up, led by the same New Age mystic, and getting larger by the day.

And the enigmatic stranger? It turns out his name is Theo St. John. He’s the man who discovered the comet. And there are many discoveries to be made about him as well.

Secrets are everywhere. The night becomes day, as the comet becomes a receptacle for everyone’s hopes and dread. And for some, there will indeed be a reckoning.

Ruby Todd

BRIGHT OBJECTS is a powerful book, a literary thriller about the dangerous lengths people go to in pursuit of obsession. It is also something more, however: a meditation on grief, mortality, faith and science; on those who leave and those who remain behind; on the menace and beauty all around us.

You might become a little obsessed yourself.

“The idea emerged during a period when I was in between projects,” says the author now, “and for various reasons, feeling a little lost. As a result, I was spending quite a bit of time searching and seeking escape in historic country towns close to me in Victoria, in astrology and the celestial lens it imparts to everyday life, in researching the tensions between astrology and astronomy, and in gothic fiction. At the same time, following my grandmother’s passing, I’d been researching the ways we ritualize death through funerals, and (with a strict moral code) had conducted an experiment in which I’d visited several publicly advertized funerals of strangers, which became an essay for Crazyhorse (now swamp pink) magazine. Finally, after coming upon an article about an upcoming comet predicted to be bright, all these threads converged. I imagined a young woman, working as a funeral attendant in a country town while grieving the loss of her husband, whose view of life becomes transformed by the arrival of a bright comet which remains visible in the skies for months, like an all-seeing eye or a celestial ghost that exposes the fears and frailties of everyone below.

“Also, a part of it was Heaven’s Gate, and the tragic events that occurred in the midst of the unusually long naked-eye apparition of Comet Hale-Bopp in the northern hemisphere. They influenced my decision to set the novel in 1997. Although what unfolds in fictional Jericho is distinct in many ways from these real events, the story absolutely bears the mark of how haunted I’ve been by the atmosphere of that particular phenomenon.

This was the most notable modern-day response to a comet, on the part of vulnerable people who longed for a dimension of existence beyond this one, and who apparently saw, in the otherworldly beauty of a comet, a way out. There was something, too, about the way that this took place at such a unique point in history, near the end of one millennium and the dawn of the next, amid anxiety about the digital revolution and Y2K, excitement about space missions, and uncertainty over what was to come, after all the destruction, advances and upheavals of the 20th century.”

Such meditations were not new to her: “I think I had a mournful streak even as a child and was always deeply affected by various forms of loss—by death, which came first in the passing of beloved grandparents and animal companions—but also by the specter of mortality, of knowing the time of everyone I loved was limited, so I often saw the world through a lens of anticipatory grief. This all sounds humorless, which I hope BRIGHT OBJECTS is not! I’ve certainly often been struck by the ways life so often delivers tragedy and comedy at close intervals.”

Needless to say, not being an astronomer herself, she felt she needed assistance with some of the science: “Like Sylvia, my relationship to outer space is more reverent and romantic than scientific, and so while I conducted various text-based forms of research for inspiration, I knew I’d need help with the details. The main thing was ensuring that my references to the course of the comet through the constellations over time, in relation to the times of year, its size and brightness, and its observability at various points from both hemispheres, were hypothetically plausible.

Dr. DavideFarnocchia, a comet expert from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was kind enough to consult with me (in a private non-official capacity) about this. He took the fictional comet’s parameters and computed its orbit, one image of which is visible on my website homepage. It was such a fun moment, to actually see the orbital chart for Comet St John. I’m also indebted to Dr. Brad Tucker, an astrophysicist and cosmologist from the Australian National University, with whom I consulted about various astronomical references in the book. Dr. Donna Burton, who is an astronomer and excellent scientific educator, also consulted with me about comets, telescopes, and the history of the Siding Spring Survey at Siding Spring Observatory and also at Milroy Observatory in New South Wales. I’m deeply grateful to them all.”

Grateful, too, to some of her predecessors: “I was escaping in certain novels with gothic or ghostly elements shortly before conceiving the idea for BRIGHT OBJECTS—some by Shirley Jackson and Daphne du Maurier, and I’d also been really affected by Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, and the way depression is rendered as a kind of celestial atmosphere. Speaking of atmospheres, I’ve always loved Picnic at Hanging Rock, both Joan Lindsay’s book and Peter Weir’s film (and the real place, which is not far from my parents’ house). I adore the way that in both the film and book, a geological phenomenon is invested with a mysterious, mystical, animate presence that permeates the human elements of the story and ultimately poses more questions than it answers.

“I was really lucky to grow up surrounded by books and readers—my parents are retired librarians, and I had godparent-like figures in my life who ran a gorgeous bookshop. I’m sure this influenced my choice of vocation—my childhood carries with it the smell of old and new books. I also had a gifted primary school teacher, Malcom Dow, who encouraged my grade five class to view itself as a publishing company and we’d create, launch and borrow each other’s books. I took this process very seriously, and created my own illustrations!”

Did that experience help when it came time to publish her first book since grade five? “The story of how BRIGHT OBJECTS came to be published actually began, in a way, in the aftermath of a previous, very ambitious fiction manuscript that I’d worked on for years and set aside. While that earlier manuscript remains alive for me and might be something I return to, on both a technical and stylistic level, it did reveal to me how I needed to attend more to narrative structure, and also to free myself to write more immediately in my own voice.

Abandoning that work was quite emotional, so for a while I turned to short stories. In the process, I was fortunate enough to be awarded by the Ploughshares Emerging Writers Contest for fiction, and through this, was connected with my agent. At the point of being signed, I’d only written about three chapters of BRIGHT OBJECTS, so she was taking a leap of faith on me which I’ll never forget (my husband and I were on a road trip in Atlantic Canada at the time—I still remember my rapture during our celebratory dinner at a pub in New Brunswick!).

After the manuscript was completed, it ended up being shortlisted in Australia for the Victorian Premier’s Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript, which led to its acquisition by my Australian publisher, Allen & Unwin, shortly before being picked up by Simon & Schuster US. I was extremely lucky in both cases for the book to have been taken on by inspired and supportive editors, and working together to further refine the book has been one of the most absorbing experiences of my life. So, while BRIGHT OBJECTS is by no means the first manuscript I’ve written, it bears the marks of the lessons I’ve learned along the way—although of course I know the learning never stops!”

Next on the learning curve: “A novel set between Australia and Europe, which explores themes of obsession in relation to the international art world, tells the story of an unusual female friendship, and (quite deliciously for me) requires both historical and museum-related research. I know that sounds vague, but like many, I’m a little superstitious about discussing work that’s nascent or in-progress—it seems so amorphous and delicate, like some kind of mushroom in the gloom, that doesn’t yet want to be drawn into daylight! I’m so looking forward to it, though.”

After reading BRIGHT OBJECTS, you will be, too.

Neil Nyren

Neil Nyren is the former EVP, associate publisher, and editor in chief of G.P. Putnam’s Sons and the winner of the 2017 Ellery Queen Award from the Mystery Writers of America. Among the writers of crime and suspense he has edited are Tom Clancy, Clive Cussler, John Sandford, C. J. Box, Robert Crais, Carl Hiaasen, Daniel Silva, Jack Higgins, Frederick Forsyth, Ken Follett, Jonathan Kellerman, Ed McBain, and Ace Atkins. He now writes about crime fiction and publishing for CrimeReads, BookTrib, The Big Thrill, and The Third Degree, among others, and is a contributing writer to the Anthony/Agatha/Macavity-winning How to Write a Mystery.

He is currently writing a monthly publishing column for the MWA newsletter The Third Degree, as well as a regular ITW-sponsored series on debut thriller authors for BookTrib.com and is an editor at large for CrimeReads.

This column originally ran on Booktrib, where writers and readers meet.

Booktrib Spotlight: Ruby Todd