Talking Providence with Caroline Kepnes

 

You probably know her from her You series, but today we discussed Caroline Krepnes’ book Providence.Inspired by Frankenstein, HP Lovecraft, a book about psychic vampires she found in a therapist’s office, and a horror class, Caroline crafted a love story amidst a sci-fi horror backdrop. Really, Caroline says, Providence is about the sides of loneliness, and the impact of loneliness.

 

We follow two characters, Jon and Chloe, from Jon’s sudden disappearance when they are in middle school, to his sudden and strange return four years later, and then through Jon’s search to understand and control his tragic super power that keeps him at a distance from the love of his life, Chloe. Meanwhile, we watch the impact of Jon’s disappearance, return, and then withdrawal has on Chloe. For Jon, his loneliness drives him to connect to Chloe by following her on social media from afar, and for Chloe, her loneliness drives her to connect to Jon by painting his eyes in various ways, which elevates her career and sustains her.

 

Mishaps occur; Jon’s power kills people, so he’s got a detective following along with his body count. See, when one gets too physically close to Jon, they have a bad habit of falling over dead. After one particular death where he causes a girl, her cat, and her fish to die, he figures he might as well use his power for some kind of good and starts hunting down ‘bad guys’. Meanwhile, Chloe tries to live her life without Jon. She makes the misstep of reconnecting with her high school sweetheart Carrig, who happens to also be Jon’s childhood bully. 

 

Carrig is a tragic character all around; he wants to be the kind of guy Chloe obsesses over. He wants to be what grounds and connects her, he wants her to feel at home with him, and although she tries, he ultimately hates her for not loving him the way he wants her to. Loneliness is a theme for Carrig, too.

 

Unable to stay away from each other, they have their big show down. All of us at Shelf Indulgence thought Jon was going to die at the end. Caroline views her ending as a happy ending because Jon and Chloe still have each other, even if they aren’t quite sure how to make that work yet. Jon isn’t cured, and love hasn’t fixed everything, but he and Chloe are still there for each other. 

 

If you were wondering, Caroline also views her ending with You a happy ending too, because Joe has hope in his mind when the next girl comes along that this time will be different. Themes of love as being enabling, and the problem of the fantasy of another person being the fulfillment of the other, seems to be a common thread in Caroline’s work, and I for one am here for this take on the modern cozy rom com. (I’m still going to devour my cozy rom coms of course, but I’ll throw in a few snarky horror rom coms in now, too.) 

 

Originally titled Terrible Things, Caroline had to change her working title to avoid sounding too similar to an at-the-time breakout Netflix show. If that sounds strange, I had to ask about the Pedro the hamster. We agreed as a book club that Pedro needs his own children’s book about what happens to a hamster when the boy carrying him to school gets abducted, and the hamster is now set free in the wilds of the suburbs. We of course also had to comment on Kody Kardashian, the dog, and her struggle to not lose Kody’s death in editing. Dogs, Caroline says, we think of as being closer to humans. Animals kept coming up in her work because she wanted to show how we keep things captive and tell them how to love us, and wanted to question this.

 

If you read Providence, your main question might be what the heck happened to Jon in that basement. Caroline was inspired by a forum she had found that mentioned experimentation on people to make photosynthesis, but that’s as close of an answer as you are going to get. The how isn’t as important in this story as the what do you do now of the story. 

 

There is so much more that could be said about our talk with Caroline. She was an absolute delight. While you wait for her next book in the You series, she recommends Good Man by Ani Katz and Dark Matter presents Human Monsters: A Horror Anthology.

Posted by book lover: Jessie T.