Behind the Book: The Woman Who Walked Through Walls

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 land 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 did not 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.

Who is in this book?

Three women who are versions of the same woman. That is the spine, and the reader gets it early, in the second and third chapters, so it is not a twist to protect. Karen, and the two others, are incarnations of one person, shaped by circumstances that look identical but are not 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 is just me. These other two are me. And they are wrong. They are genuinely 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 would trust yourself, and they are not 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.

Does the phone corrupt them?

No, and this is the part people get wrong about the book. The phone is just a device. It does one thing: it lets you walk through walls, and it lets you move between worlds. It has no will and no influence. It is not a cursed object working on its owner.

What corrupts is what the device removes, which is 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 is no catching you, no cost, no accountability of any kind. The power does not make them worse people. It strips away the thing that was holding them in place, and then it simply shows what was underneath. It is them, not the device. That is the whole point of the book. Take every consequence away from a person and you find out who they were the entire time they were being held accountable.

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 the vain, self-absorbed voice?

Because the thing I was exploring is main character syndrome, and all three women have it. The belief that you are the protagonist of reality and everyone else is a supporting player, scenery, an extra in your production. That is why the narrator’s interior voice is all self-image and surface, worried about her makeup and whether this goes viral even while she is strapped down. It is not a quirk of characterization. It is 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 did not go right, leave and do it again in the next world. Reality becomes takes. Other people become actors who do not persist once she has moved on. Nothing carries weight because nothing is permanent.

Except one thing. If they die, they die. That is the single limit the power does not 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 cannot walk out of, the one scene she cannot reshoot. Main character syndrome, handed real power, running straight into the only thing that was always going to be permanent.

How does it fit with your other books?

It is another viewpoint that is not my own, which is the thing I keep chasing across all of my fiction. I have 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, which is its own kind of difficulty.

It also shares something with the speculative machinery I like. A single strange device, examined honestly, all the way down. Not the technology for its own sake, but the question of what it does to the people who hold it, and in this case the answer is that it does nothing to them at all. It only takes away the reasons they had to behave, and lets the rest play out.

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