On the day of the release of her debut, Such Lovely Skin, Tatiana Schlote-Bonne expressed excitement and optimism about her literary future and upcoming books. The Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program graduate’s horror novel centers on a young gamer and Twitch streamer, Viv, whose most recent game creates a demonic mimic of her which is determined to ruin her life.
In a video interview with Little Village, Schlote-Bonne said, “I’ve had ‘evil video game’ in my notes for story ideas for, like, ever. Since one of those early undergrad classes. I knew I wanted to write a high-concept, easily digestible, hook-y story and I wanted it to have more depth. I wanted the monster and Viv to be intertwined.”
Schlote-Bonne said that she read in a craft book that an antagonist has to be as developed as the protagonist, and “I wanted a really scary monster.”
For almost as long as she can remember, if she was going to pick out a movie or browse books, “Horror has always been my genre. That’s always been the case since I was small.”
Seeing movies like Evil Dead and its sequels at an early age influenced the author a lot. “I guess I was just a certified horror girlie at, like, 9 and never grew out of it.”
She devoured Goosebumps, quickly graduating into creepier books and movies, but she didn’t always intend to write or create horror herself.
“I took literary classes when I started undergrad, so we wrote very grounded-in-the-real-world things and I felt compelled to add monsters and creepy things and things that leaned more speculative,” she said. At a certain point, she found herself bored if she wasn’t reading horror. “Ultimately, I realized if I was going to write, I had to have fun writing.”
The concept of Such Lovely Skin soon came together. “I just knew a doppelganger would be really fun to write about and I just wanted to pull it off.”
To do this, she had to think about the character she was creating.
“Viv cares about her social media image and what people think of her,” so an antagonist ruining Viv’s image would matter a lot. From there, Viv’s life developed quickly. If Viv lived in a major city, her image would matter less because she would be relatively anonymous. “The small-town-ness made the doppelganger that much more dangerous.”
If Viv were older, the plot wouldn’t work as well. “I wanted Viv to have done something that was truly reprehensible, and I knew she would be more forgivable for doing what she did if she was a child.”
Viv’s youth also makes her decision-making much more believable and compelling. She has a solid Twitch following and wants to make it a career to help out her parents. Schlote-Bonne’s writing isn’t necessarily geared toward youth outside of this novel.
“I am thinking about writing an adult video game-related book,” she said, but when she started writing Such Lovely Skin, she said she was predicting issues with marketing this specific story to an adult audience. “I write pretty ‘voicey’ which is a trademark of YA, but I have seen it in adult fiction,” including her favorite authors to read.
Schlote-Bonne is a gamer and horror lover herself (and weightlifter), so she knows both topics well. She began playing video games around the same time she got into horror.
“Now I play games that my friends play. Honestly, gaming is how I spend time with my friends. We play a lot of co-op games and crafting games.”
One of her favorite cooperative games, The Forest, makes an appearance in Such Lovely Skin when the main characters are streaming together, as do several other pop-culture references that are significant to the author.
In this book, cultural touchpoints including race, poverty, bereavement and mental health show up almost incidentally, like they do in real life. They’re not necessary to the plot but they inform the characters and make the world around Viv more real.
“I think there are important things to say about the world, and if it’s in my own writing, I want it to be in small doses,” she said.
More than anything, she wants the writing to be compelling.
“As I’m asking these questions, I’m raising new ones. I’m thinking a lot about nesting tension and testing questions. I want the reader to always be waiting for an answer so they keep going.”
Schlote-Bonne’s second novel, The Mean Ones, will be released in 2025. Both of these books, she hopes, serve readers what she loves most about both gaming and horror: “the strange, the fantastical.”
