This book began at its end. I started with the execution scene, a woman strapped to a chair, a viewing gallery behind glass, the whole realistic and horrifying machinery of it. I wanted that scene to hit hard, and I think I brought it off. Then I asked the only question that mattered after writing it: what leads her here?
Everything else grew backward from that. I wrote it the way I write my larger books, dropping ideas and letting them spread into each other, moving to this section and that section as they came to me, filling in the space between the chair and wherever the beginning lay. I didn’t outline a clean line from crime to punishment. I started at the punishment and followed the story back until it told me where it started.
I’m proud of how dark this one goes.
It asks an ugly question and never flinches from the answer, and I liked living with that question for the length of a book more than I expected to. A lot of fiction with a magic gadget in it pulls its punches at the end. This one doesn’t, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
What is the premise of The Woman Who Walked Through Walls?
Three women who are versions of the same woman.
That’s the spine, and the reader gets it early, in the second and third chapters, so it isn’t a twist to protect. Karen, and the two others, are incarnations of one person, shaped by circumstances that look identical but aren’t quite. Small divergences in lives that appear the same from the outside.
That near-sameness is the trap built into the book. Because they look at each other and think: that’s just me. These other two are me. And they’re wrong.
They’re other people, different in the ways that the small differences made them different, and treating them as interchangeable with yourself is a fatal error. Karen makes it. She trusts them the way you’d trust yourself, and they aren’t her. Three copies of one woman, none of whom can quite believe the other two are strangers, is a very particular kind of horror, and it drives everything that happens.
The book on this: The Woman Who Walked Through Walls is a first-person descent about three women who can walk through walls, and what happens to people who can never be caught.
Does the magic phone corrupt the women in The Woman Who Walked Through Walls?
No, and people get this wrong about the book. The phone is just a device. It does one thing: it lets you walk through walls and move between worlds. It has no will and no influence of its own, and it isn’t a cursed object working on its owner.
What corrupts is what the device removes. That’s consequences. Once you can always walk through the wall, always step into another world, always leave, you discover that nothing you do has to be answered for. Steal something and leave. Smash a car into a wall and move to another world. Kill someone and walk out, and there’s no catching you, no cost, no accountability of any kind. The power doesn’t make them worse people.
It strips away the thing that was holding them in place and then shows what was underneath.
The women did this. The device only opened the door. Take every consequence away from a person and you find out who they were the entire time they were being held accountable. I think that’s the most frightening idea in the book, because there’s nothing fantastic about it. Plenty of people behave only as well as the odds of getting caught require.
So the book is really a thought experiment.
What does a person do when they can never be caught, never be held responsible, never pay for anything? For these three, the answer is a descent, because with no floor of consequence under them, nothing stops the slide. Each step down is free. So they take every step.
Why does The Woman Who Walked Through Walls use a vain, self-absorbed narrator?
Because the thing I was exploring is main character syndrome, and all three women have it. The belief that you’re the protagonist of reality and everyone else is a supporting player, scenery, an extra in your production.
That’s why the narrator’s interior voice is all self-image and surface, worried about her makeup and whether this goes viral even while she’s strapped down. It’s the condition the book is examining.
The device takes that syndrome out of delusion and makes it literally true. Now she really can be the main character, because the world becomes something she can act on without cost and exit at will. If a scene goes wrong, she switches to another world and runs it again. She could rehearse a bank robbery by robbing banks, and if it didn’t go right, leave and do it again in the next world. Reality becomes takes. Other people become actors who don’t persist once she’s moved on. Nothing matters because nothing is permanent.
Except one thing. If they die, they die. That’s the single limit the power doesn’t remove, the one permanence in a life engineered to have none. Which is exactly why the book opens and closes where it does, in the one room she can’t walk out of, the one scene she can’t reshoot. Main character syndrome, handed real power, running straight into the only thing that was always going to be permanent.
Main character syndrome is exhausting in real life, and writing it from the inside was the only way I could make it make sense. I wanted readers to sit in her head long enough to recognize a little of that voice, and then watch what it does when nothing can stop it.
How does The Woman Who Walked Through Walls fit with Richard Lowe’s other books?
It’s another viewpoint that isn’t my own. That’s the thing I keep chasing across all of my fiction. I’ve written from inside a cat in Buttercup, a galaxy in Collision with Andromeda, an artificial mind in Peacekeeper, prehistoric people in Family on Ice. This one asks me to live inside a shallow, self-absorbed young woman as she descends, with no escape from her head for the length of the book. That’s its own kind of difficulty.
It also shares something with the speculative machinery I like: a single strange device, examined all the way down for what it does to the people who hold it.
Here it does nothing to them at all. It only takes away their reasons to behave. She was one of the hardest narrators I’ve ever lived with, and I refused to soften her into someone a reader could comfortably root for, because a kinder version would’ve been easier to write and dishonest about the question the book is asking.
