Interviews

April 2020 - Jyvur Entropy

Welcome, welcome! ESHurricane here, chatting with the talented Jyvur_Entropy, author of Combustion and other works here on Wattpad and beyond.

Emily: Hi, Jyvur! Tell us a bit about yourself and your writing journey.

Jyvur: Sure, so I always loved writing. I majored in Creative Writing for my undergrad and then went on to an M.A in English lit. I started out writing horror exclusively, then I branched out into fantasy, romance, and contemporary.

Emily: That's awesome! :) Combustion definitely falls into the horror category. It's an interesting blend because it's from the point of view of a young girl but the story definitely hits adult beats. Where did you get the idea to embark on such a tale?

Jyvur: It's way too autobiographical and I'll never write anything that autobiographical again. A big part of the book came from me wanting to encapsulate in a book the feelings of dread and terror that dominated my childhood.

I grew up in an incredibly abusive home and was eventually removed from my mother's home in my teenage years. The original version of Combustion had a great deal of the physical abuse that happened in my house, but I ended up chopping all of that out. It was too hard to write about it and I actually think it made the book worse. It was this very whiny standard misery lit.

By focusing instead on the emotional gap between the mother and daughter characters and the presence of Wicca and ghost-hunting activities (all stuff that happened in my house) it makes the book a lot more unique and less whiny...I hope.

I didn't live with my mom until I was six. When I did move in with her, we never really connected like I think we should have, and all of her Wiccan stuff and carrying on about ghosts scared the crap out of me. I became this very nervous kid fixated on death and insects and other weird shit. It sounds so lame talking it out, but Combustion really was a way for me to try and work through my own issues with my mother.

It's highly fictionalized, but at the heart, I feel like it captures so much of how I felt back then. And my family just ignores all of the serious issues, even stuff like physical and sexual abuse nobody ever talks about. That's why the book has the big twist at the end, and I feel like for anybody from a normal house, they might be like, "How could that happen? How could that have happened between Helene and Papa and everybody carries on like usual?" to which I'd say, that part is...way too close to real life. Nobody related to me has ever seen the book because of how close to the truth that twist is and nobody ever talks about it. So much messed up stuff happened in my family and nobody acknowledges any of it. We're a truly Irish-Catholic family.

To be honest, I actually feel guilty sometimes when people like Rachel as a character, because it is so autobiographical. When people are like, "Rachel is a creepy, whiny brat," I'm actually a lot more comfortable hearing that lol. I don't like feeling like I'm getting second-hand compliments because I wrote a book based so much on my real life.

And then I also just really love gothic lit. I wanted to set a gothic story in an unusual location and I really liked the idea of a gothic horror set in the suburbs in the 90s.

Emily: It must be really strange getting feedback on Rachel from people because she's so close to you. It's definitely not lame though to work through issues through fiction. I think a lot of writers do that, even in subliminal ways. It's brave to touch on difficult themes like this but even more so when it's coming from inside of the writer.

In any case, you've definitely captured an intense story and bending gothic lit into 90s suburbia is fresh! We're there any particular authors that inspired the feel of Combustion?