Doom is so thoroughly the vibe right now that a climate novel hardly seems an appropriate place to seek hope, but Gabrielle Korn’s The Shutouts peers down the dark tunnel of our unsettling present and catches a glimmer of what may save us on the other side. Her first novel, Yours For The Taking, showcases a future within the Inside Project, a capitalist feminist girlboss utopia gone horribly wrong. In The Shutouts, her tender and urgent prose illustrates the world outside the Inside, initially grounding us in a moment not unlike our present, then rocketing into a future thrown into chaos by climate change. Politicians and billionaire elites, accepting climate catastrophe as an inevitability, or rather something too costly to be slowed or changed, have opted to seize land and build massive weatherproof structures where the rich and privileged can live safely while abandoning the bulk of humanity to the ravages of an increasingly unstable planet, subject to unpredictable weather events, fire, plague, and famine. But, thanks to the heart Korn manages to cram into this bleak future, there’s hope.
At this point, it is difficult to avoid concrete, actionable information on our warming world and what comes next if we, as a species, do nothing. Some of the most chilling sequences in The Shutouts—the fires, the pandemics, the people willfully ignorant to the situation, and the governments so unwilling to protect human life and enact change that they may actually be actively courting the end of the world—are chilling precisely because they are (almost) already mundane. Korn’s characters—a mother driving across an America increasingly hostile to unchaperoned women in search of her daughter, young lovers escaping a cult of doomsday preppers, a group of young activists desperate to draw anyone into action—are often queer people with more on their plates than they ought to have, with bigger hearts than seems wise. They are compelled over and over to stay connected to each other in what small ways they can. Their small acts of community, care, and hope in the face of insurmountable challenges are the only things that keep them whole and serve to illustrate the necessity and the bravery of kindness and love. Gabrielle and I passed this interview back and forth shortly after the 2024 election in the weeks leading up to the publication of The Shutouts.
Stephen Patrick Bell
I need to know: how the hell are you? Very early in The Shutouts there was a line I underlined several times:
I didn’t understand why everyone wasn’t walking around screaming hysterically? How could you be aware of what was happening and go about your day as though everything was fine and normal?
How are you not screaming right now?
Gabrielle Korn
What makes you think I’m not screaming?
Stephen Patrick Bell
Fair! While the bulk of the action in both of your novels takes place in the future, The Shutouts gives us a glimpse into the 2020’s. How did you approach incorporating elements of the present into a work that pushes ahead nearly 60 years?
Gabrielle Korn
When I started writing a couple of years ago, I did assume that Trump would win the election, so my vision for the rest of the 2020s was based on that. I took elements of his first presidency and made them worse for the second half of the decade. I hate being right sometimes.
Stephen Patrick Bell
I really wish we could be sitting here talking about how wrong and dumb you are but, since you’re neither of those things, your work may become something of a road map out of the mess we’re in. What do the characters in your books get right about problem-solving and what practices of theirs do you hope your readers adopt in their own lives?
Gabrielle Korn
Thank you, and also, I’m sorry. My characters have a really strong sense of community and of obligation to each other. They know that they are no good on their own. I wish we could feel more like this in the present moment; that if we don’t help each other through this, we won’t get through it at all.
Stephen Patrick Bell
Which of your characters were you most worried about as you were writing them?
Gabrielle Korn
I was worried about Kelly driving across the country; I was worried about Brook seeing the world for the first time and not knowing a single practical piece of information; I was worried about Camilla always having to take care of everyone; I was worried that Orchid’s impulsiveness would get her killed. I was worried about all of them!
Stephen Patrick Bell
Given how The Shutouts and Yours For The Taking take place in the same world, how did you decide to differentiate the stories you’re telling in each book?
Gabrielle Korn
They’re interconnected stand-alones, so, in theory, you should be able to read either one without the other, or in reverse order, though of course I think you should read both of them and in the order they come out. The Shutouts functions as both a prequel and a sequel to YFTT. If you take both books into account, time is kind of circular. What happens in the past connects to the present connects to the past again. They’re separated by themes, too.
Stephen Patrick Bell
The Shutouts starts in an epistolary format and the stakes are high off the bat with Kelly, a guilt-stricken mother, promising to cross the country and find her daughter. I found myself rooting for Kelly right away but was deeply curious and slightly afraid of what would happen if and when they finally met in person. Can you talk a little about you use this structure to build tension and release in the text?
Gabrielle Korn
There are a few reasons I did that. First, I wanted the reader to feel closest to Kelly. It’s her voice that drove the book for me. I think there’s something really emotional about the idea of her writing letters to the daughter she abandoned to try to explain herself. But we are all unreliable narrators of our own lives. By having Kelly write letters instead of narrating in first person to some invisible audience, she has a motive to spin her own story to fit her goal. I wanted to create a layer of doubt. We love her—I really wanted to make her compelling and someone you’d root for—but can we believe her? No spoilers, but if you’ve read YFTT, you already know she doesn’t get to where she’s trying to go. So, I wanted to put some subtext around that.
Stephen Patrick Bell
Kelly’s 2020s POV follows her life as an unhoused queer teenager freshly ejected from her home, centering the experience of people marginalized into invisibility in mainstream culture. Traumatized people in need of love and affection make messy choices in general. In the face of circumstances like poverty and minority stress, things get even more complicated. Kelly is accustomed to and anticipates rejection, she’s electrified by even the smallest bits of attention, and she’s only just becoming aware of her attractiveness to others. You’ve touched on this a bit in Everybody (Else) Is Perfect, but could you tell us about how your work in the beauty and fashion industry informed the way you approached Kelly’s understanding of her own body and appearance as a queer youth and later as a queer mother.
Gabrielle Korn
Oh, that’s an interesting question. If it did, it wasn’t something I was aware of, but I guess that’s how all inspiration works. You never really know what life experiences are going to show up disguised as something else on the page. I think I was thinking more about my own youth and how, once I got a handle on my own appearance, people started treating me differently. Being a pretty teen girl is a weird experience because in some ways you feel like you have a little power and in other ways you have none at all. I was interested in having Kelly go through that and in having her try to give her daughter advice based on what she learned—a daughter whose adolescence she hasn’t even witnessed.
Stephen Patrick Bell
Kelly’s safety and agency are frequently attached to or dependent on more powerful men and she doesn’t always recognize the uneven power dynamics in her interpersonal relationships until she’s deeply entrenched. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say the men in The Shutouts really mess everything up for everyone, but YFTT illustrates the dark side of a female-led utopia. How do your characters’ relationships with class and identity politics influence their perspectives on climate politics?
Gabrielle Korn
Another really good question. Yes, so, in YFTT we have a female utopia that forms in reaction to the political landscape; in The Shutouts, we go back in time to see why it was necessary in the first place.
Every single character has a unique POV on climate based on who they are and where they come from. As we know, the groups of people most impacted by climate change are generally queer people, people of color, and people from low-income communities. Which is a lot of my characters. But also, some of them have slightly skewed perspectives, like Vero, who is a Latine trans masc activist who grew up with wealth and power. Vero appreciates the gravity of climate change but also overestimates what his role in the future should be because of how he was raised. For a lot of the characters, things aren’t so black and white.
Stephen Patrick Bell
Was writing these books at all helpful for you, not as a writer, but as a citizen of a world that is on the brink of irreversible climate change?
Gabrielle Korn
Yes. It would have been easier to look away and hide in blissful ignorance, but ultimately, I’m glad that I did the research I did for these books and that I have a pretty firm grasp on what’s at stake. It’s scary—sometimes I feel like I stared into the void for too long and I wish I could unknow certain things—but being informed is always better. And these books have a lot of hope in them, which was helpful to me. It’s not really productive to just imagine a worst-case scenario; I think it’s also important to imagine what comes after that.
Stephen Patrick Bell
Let’s talk a little about your research process. What books, people, or resources were helpful to you when establishing how the world of The Shutouts would work? What have you changed in your own life because of what you’ve learned?
Gabrielle Korn
I read the most recent UN climate reports (I’m really fun at dinner parties!). I follow the news closely. I followed a bunch of climate activists on social media and listened to their takes. I found the book The Great Displacement by Jake Bittle to be very helpful in predicting what would happen to each part of the country and used it as sort of a guide for Kelly’s road trip. I revisited some old favorites like Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Basically, I just consumed a lot of different kinds of content related to climate and the world of The Shutouts was born out of the cumulative knowledge. I already knew that things were dire, but I think I hadn’t let myself fully sink into the depths of how fucked we are until I started reading actual reports written by scientists, who no one seems to be listening to? I can tell you some facts and figures, but I don’t want to ruin your day if you don’t want me to. I’ve made some big changes in my own personal life; I couldn’t not. I stopped eating meat. I got an electric stove. I refuse to drive a car. I try to limit single-use plastics. I take quick showers. I never buy fast fashion. In fact, I try to keep my clothes out of the landfill for as long as possible. Of course, what we really need is a fossil fuel agreement, but if that can’t happen, I do think we have a collective responsibility to change our own habits, because everything counts.
Stephen Patrick Bell
The Shutouts features a climate activism group, the Winter Liberation Army, that’s focused on technologies that could serve as practical climate-change solutions such as solar-radiation modification and homes built on magnetic foundations that would allow them to float above floodwaters and reduce the impact of earthquakes. How much of the tech in your books came from your research process?
Gabrielle Korn
Almost all of it! A lot of really smart people are working on brilliant solutions and safety measures. The part I imagined was the government conspiracy to stop them (though, that’s feeling less and less like fiction right now). The only thing I totally made up was the genetically modified super bean and all of its uses.
Stephen Patrick Bell
The WLA also makes a distinction between climate-change deniers and climate-change doomers. Which of these groups is more powerful or dangerous in our current situation?
Gabrielle Korn
That’s a good question, and I think you’d need a scientist to answer it. My take is that both are extremely dangerous because neither opinion leads to positive action. That being said, I do think that while doomers tend to do nothing, deniers tend to actively make things worse, so my vote would be that the deniers are still more dangerous.
Stephen Patrick Bell
When did you start sharing work with your sister, Miriam Jayaratna, and how has she influenced your work?
Gabrielle Korn
This is such a nice question! My sister is not just a brilliant humor writer, she’s a great editor. There are not very many people I trust with my raw copy—it’s really vulnerable. It helps when you can send it to someone who loves you no matter what sort of ridiculous words you put on the page. I started sending her parts of YFTT when I first started working on it, which was deep in the pandemic. When she started writing humor, she began sending it to me as well, so a few years ago I think we started a very mutually beneficial exchange of writing. I feel so lucky to have a sister who is so brilliant, trustworthy, and generous with her time.
Stephen Patrick Bell
Have you been reading from The Shutouts?
Gabrielle Korn
You know, I have only read from it once so far! But when I finished it I read the entire thing out loud to myself. I knew it was working when I started getting emotional at certain moments hearing myself read it back.
Stephen Patrick Bell
You read this out loud, beginning to end, just to yourself? I need to know everything about this part of your process. Is it cringe? Were there parts that you felt absolutely certain about that didn’t hold up once you read them aloud?
Gabrielle Korn
I did. I told you; I’m fun. I didn’t do this with either of my other books and ended up really regretting it once I started reading from them in public, so I figured I might as well get ahead of the regret and make sure every single sentence flowed smoothly! It took a week, because I had to keep taking breaks to save my voice. There were a few sentences that I realized were clunky, and I caught some word rep. It was actually much less cringe than you’d think, because I was able to fix the things that weren’t working, and I ended up realizing how happy I was with the overall book. By the end of it, I was like, okay, I really did something here, which isn’t a feeling I usually have. I’m glad I did it. I’ll be doing it with the rest of my writing forever.
FICTION
The Shutouts
By Gabrielle Korn
St. Martin’s Press
Published December 3, 2024
