Melissa Albert Recommends Six Books Centered Around Art That Doesn’t Actually Exist

Years ago I worked as an editor at an art museum, where part of the job was proofreading stacks of gallery labels, divorced from the art they were describing. I developed an odd appetite for these texts: one person’s translation of the instantaneous experience of seeing; tangible objects vivisected and ordered into words. It almost felt like a personality test. The actual art never came close to what I saw in my head.

I think it’s this appetite that draws me to books centered around invented pop culture. Short of actually producing the art within the text (see: Pale Fire, Death of the Author), a writer can only exert so much control over what their readers imagine. At some point these imaginary works pass into the realm of co-creation.

The Children centers around the writing and fandom of the Ninth City, a Narnia-esque children’s series set in a predatory magical land: a place literally built on the stolen dreams of the children who visit it. The author could herself be considered predatorial, having written her own children in as the books’ protagonists, saddling them with a strange kind of fame. The book explores fandom’s strange double edge, and the idea of books as a treasure box, where you tuck a piece of the person you were when you first read them. It’s built also on my fascination with that symbiotic bond between creator and consumer, a bond that feels doubled when it comes to art about art. Here are six books I’ve loved that have made-up art inside them.

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Paul Tremblay, Horror Movie

Tremblay combines the cursed film mini-genre, internet arcana, and low-budget guerrilla art to fantastically eerie effect, all leading up to a final gut punch I wouldn’t dare spoil. Back in the early 90s a group of young filmmakers make a movie whose notoriety among horror buffs, thirty years later, is undiminished by the fact that only three scenes (and a screenplay) were ever released. As part of a Hollywood reboot, its single surviving cast member—who played the upsettingly named Thin Kid—is called upon to return to the role. Filming goes smoothly and the movie is a hit. Just kidding.

Elizabeth Hand, Wylding Hall

A slender, riveting oral history about the disappearance of Julian Blake, lead singer of an invented 1970s acid-folk band. In order to finish their second album, the band takes up residence in a creaky old house in the British countryside. Decades after Julian’s vanishing there, the band and various hangers-on recall eerie incidents both in and out of the house—rooms full of occult literature; pub full of haunting photographs—as well as the glimmering stranger circling the Orpheus-esque Julian. As an appreciator of freak folk and tolerator of mandolins, I want to hear the album made in this pressure cooker.

Emma Brodie, Into the Blue

A swoony, page-turning love story between an aspiring comedy writer and the scion of a famed acting family, who’ve been moving in and out of each other’s electrified orbits since they were twenty-one and seventeen and got a summer crash-course in improv from his famous actress grandmother. Part of its plot hinges on the filming of a single-season TV reboot that could be described as “Star Trek but improv,” following the show from casting to cancelation to inevitable cult fandom. Brodie explores the allure of the pop-cultural underdog and writes about her characters’ chemistry and near-supernatural connection in a way that makes improv seem like literal magic.

Megan Giddings, The Women Could Fly

Giddings’ sophomore novel is set in a world where witches exist and women are closely surveilled until marriage—and if they fail to marry by thirty, robbed of their rights. Protagonist Jo’s mother disappeared when Jo was a teen, tainting her daughter with the stain of possible witchcraft. Now twenty-eight, on the verge of a choice between marriage and a life of second-class citizenship, Jo works at a museum displaying art made by witches. I love the inherent weirdness of art galleries—clean, quiet boxes made to hold all kinds of weird, loud art—and Giddings’ evocation of witch art, seething dangerously inside civilized public galleries, has an unshakable hold on my brain.

Kiersten White, Mister Magic

Anyone who’s witnessed the performing animatronics at a Showbiz Pizza can tell you the scariest pop culture of all is the kind made for children. There’s something particularly saccharine and sneakily sinister about low-rent children’s TV, a chord White plays hard in this grippingly imagined tale of a magical kids’ show that seems to exist only in its viewers’ memories…and in the memories of its former cast, drawn together thirty years later for a cursed reunion. (See also: Knock Knock, Open Wide, by Neil Sharpson, featuring a children’s show in which a goat puppet lives in a box and never comes out. Unless you misbehave…)

Marianna Baer, Wolfwood

Baer’s book centers around an unfinished series of paintings set in the invented land of Wolfwood, where a quartet of mysterious girls is locked in combat with a sentient tropical forest. The artist behind the series descended into poverty following the breakdown that left her unable to paint; years later her teen daughter, Indigo, herself a gifted artist, is barely keeping the two of them afloat. When her mother’s former gallerist reaches out with the offer of a show in exchange for the series’ completion, Indigo sees it as a financial lifeline—and in the face of her mother’s staunch refusal, decides to finish the series herself. But working on the paintings sends her reeling into the liminal world of Wolfwood, where her mother’s secrets lurk just out of reach. Baer beautifully evokes paintings inspired by the work of outsider artist Henry Darger.

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Melissa Albert’s The Children is available now from William Morrow.