Every night, in the college’s ancient cemetery, five people cross paths as they work the late shift: a bartender, a rideshare driver, a hotel receptionist, the steward of the derelict church that looms over them, and the editor-in-chief of the college paper, always in search of a story. One dark October evening in the defunct churchyard, they find a hole that wasn’t there before. A fresh, open grave where no grave should be. But who dug it, and for whom?
Before they go their separate ways, the gravedigger returns. As they trail him through the night, they realize he may be the key to a string of strange happenings around town that have made headlines for the last few weeks—and that they may be closer to the mystery than they thought.
Atmospheric and eerie, with the ensemble cast her fans love and a delightfully familiar academic backdrop, Graveyard Shift is a modern Gothic tale in If We Were Villains author M. L. Rio’s inimitable style.
Our editor Olivia Rutigliano sat down with Rio to talk about writing habits, fungi, pivoting from academic writing, and Rio’s next novel.
This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.
Olivia Rutigliano: Congratulations very much on the publication of Graveyard Shift! It’s wonderful. I so enjoyed it.
M.L. Rio: Oh, thank you!
O.R.: Would you like to say a little bit about how this idea came to you?
M.L.R: Graveyard Shift was unusual in its inception. My publisher actually approached me because Barnes & Noble had approached them about doing a novella. So they reached out to Flatiron and said, “would M be interested? Does she have anything?” So, my publisher then called me and asked the same question. And I had never really thought about that. I was in the middle of writing another book at the time, which would go on to become Hot Wax. But I said, “sure… let me look through the story drawer and see what I’ve got.” And I had this old idea that I’d been kicking around for, oh, I don’t know, years. But I wasn’t quite sure what format would work for it. It didn’t feel big enough to be a novel. And for a while I thought, oh, maybe it’s an audio drama, like, maybe I do a podcast, but like, I really didn’t want to be that guy.
O.R.: Ha!
M.L.R.: And when Flatiron said, “hey, how about a novella,” I said, “oh, this actually, like, might be perfect for this.” That that was the, the origin story.
O.R.: So, all of these different characters meet smoking in the evening outside this church in this college town. How were you inspired to set the story that way?
M.L.R.: Yeah! When I was in college, there was this policy on my campus, the smoking policy that you couldn’t smoke within a hundred feet of any campus building. Which basically meant that you couldn’t smoke anywhere because the entire town was campus buildings. So people had found these funny little pockets on campus of places they could smoke and one was like this flagpole on the North Quad. You would always see this like sad little nod of people just like huffing desperately around this flagpole in the rain or whatever because it was the only place they could stand.
And the other place I used to see people occasionally smoking was in this cemetery behind my dorm. Where I used to hang out just because I had strange morbid interests even then. And was also , you know, always tormented by insomnia. And so I used to like an absolute lunatic just go walking through the cemetery, like in my pajamas in the middle of the night and I started seeing people in there just kinda standing around and smoking and was like, “what’s going on here?”
And it was, you know, people who were working the night shift and just needed a smoke break. And it was the best place to be. What an interesting way to develop a report with some people who otherwise really have nothing in common.
O.R.: So, this is one of the great fungus-forward novels of recent years! Can you talk a little bit about the fungus and ergotism and the fascinating mycological world that you bring us into with this novel?
M.L.R.: I’ve always had a thing for mushrooms. I don’t know why… just from a young age! We lived in a lot of really humid environments when I was a kid and every fall, we would get these fantastic jack o lantern mushrooms, which are these wild orange mushrooms that glow in the dark. And it just seems like one of those things that is too charming and weird to be real, but it is! So, I , and I also had a really weird early fixation on Lewis Caroll, and got very into the Alice in Wonderland… trippy children’s literature that’s not really for children. So I had an early interest in mycology, and it really took a turn in my PhD program, not because I was studying mycology, but because I ended up reading a lot more science writing than I had in previous years. And it turned into something a little bit more academic, and the more I started reading, the more I got into it.
I also have always had morbid literary interests. I was very fond of the Victorian Gothic when I was at that angsty adolescent high school reading stage. Um, and there is a lot of overlap between the Gothic and proto-science fiction. You know, you think about things like Frankenstein and Jekyll and Hyde and, um, even Dracula, where Ven Helsing is doing this weird field medicine.
O.R.: Yes!
M.L.R.: So, as I was thinking about Graveyard Shift in the context of horror and the neo-gothic, fungus just seemed like a really natural place to take that, no pun intended. I think the reason we are fascinated and sometimes repulsed by fungus is we associate it with death and decay because it tends to grow on rotting things. It tends to feed on dying things. And I think we just find that naturally unsettling? The other thing that’s really fascinating about fungus is mycelial networks have this really complex mode of communication that we don’t fully understand as humans. It’s interesting and unsettling because it’s not plant life, it’s a separate kingdom… it’s closer to animal life, it’s closer to human life than it is to a lot of plant species. But it has this weird alien sentience that we don’t quite understand. And I think something about that uneasy liminal space between “is it sentient? is it not?” is a little bit freaky, and a little bit fascinating, and I think that’s partly why we’re seeing a boom in… this fungal horror genre.
O.R.: Perfect for the cemetery setting.
M.L.R.: Yeah, it just seemed like a natural fit with the cemetery. It’s a place where you think about that space between life and death, and you have to confront the reality that it isn’t a binary. It isn’t just “you’re alive and then you’re dead” but that the process of death biologically is in fact a process. A process that involves organisms. It’s unsettling to think about fungus feasting on your body, your dead flesh. And there’s also this weird element with mushrooms where there is something fleshy about them. Like we so often use portobello mushrooms as a substitute for meat.
That there’s also this very strange quasi-cannibalistic quality to it, if that makes any sense. So, yeah… the wide weird world of fungus just became very interesting to me and I thought “what a fun thing to explore in fiction.”
O.R.: Thank God you did! So, the last time we talked, we chatted a little bit about your research as an Early Modernist, a Shakespearean scholar, and how that factored into your previous novel If We Were Villains, but also the way that this novella deals with the proper ensemble cast, too, and has many theatrical elements. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your research into this definitely more theatrically-forward time period of literary history, and how that has influenced you as a novel writer.
M.L.R.: Yeah, absolutely. I wrote Villains before I got my master’s degree. It was the year before I went off to King’s College to do my MA in Shakespeare Studies. But, before that, I had been an actor, and principally a Shakespearean actor, for something like ten years. And, you know, I started writing really quite young, and I wrote a bunch of novels that I knew weren’t very good and I wasn’t really sure why. And I was very frustrated. I was like “I’m writing a novel a year, but all of these novels are bad.” Then when I was a senior in college, I was doing my honors thesis on, I was taking three parts of Henry VIII and smashing them all together in one play, performed in the forest theater with 10 actors playing 77 parts, including me. It was absolute chaos, but it was a lot of fun. And I just had this lightbulb moment where I went, “wait a minute, why have you never written a book about this? About this weird culty world of Shakespearean theater?” I had never seen it represented in fiction the way I had experienced it. And I went, oh, maybe you’re the person to write this novel.
And once I sat down to do that, it just came very, very naturally. And that was my realization that, that hackneyed advice, “write what you know” is actually really good advice because there’s a certain authenticity and fiction that you really can’t fake.
O.R.: Yeah.
M.L.R.: I think it’s telling that the people who love this book the most tend to be theater people who immediately recognize that world. So yeah, it has been a big influence on my writing and, And even in Graveyard Shift, obviously it’s a little further removed from Shakespeare, but once I finished my M.A. and went to do my Ph.D., I ended up in the medical humanities camp where what I do is one part literary studies and one part history of science. I’m looking at how those things intersect. And so I fell down a lot of interesting rabbit holes of fascinating pre-modern scientific thought.
And one of them that informs Graveyard Shift has to do with Early Modern encounters with hallucinogenic plants and psychedelic experience. Because we think of that as a very modern, like, 1960s phenomenon, but it’s really not. And, so my research was into St. Elmo’s fire and how that might explain some pre-modern witchcraft phases, that thing.
And that really did inform the writing of Graveyard Shift, because I had this wonderful setting of this moldering old church and got to design this bizarre Boschian mural behind the altar that draws on all of that scientific and medical history. So, even though it’s not Shakespeare, it does still draw on my academic research.
O.R.: This is fascinating! I was wondering if we can pivot to talking about your next novel, Hot Wax?
M.L.R.: Oh, sure! I’d love to talk about Hot Wax!
O.R.: I wanna get the goods on it now! When it comes out, maybe in a year’s time, you’re gonna be so tired of talking about it, so I want to get the good stuff early!
M.L.R.: Well, you got good, you’ve got good timing because my production draft of Hot Wax is actually due tomorrow.
O.R.: Oh man.
M.L.R.: Yes, so I have been on tour for Graveyard Shift and doing the big final push for Hot Wax at the same time, which has been a real adventure! So, I actually wrote the first version of Hot Wax like seven years ago. It was the first thing that I wrote after Villains that I really wanted to be my second novel. But just because of what happened when Villains was first released (it didn’t have the warm reception that it got belatedly… you know, three or four years after publication when it really found its audience), at the time, my agent and I had like four or five books die on sub because what editors kept telling us was, “Oh, we’d like this, but the sales numbers for your first novel just aren’t there. And we can’t convince the publisher.” So that was heartbreaking because I was like 25 and thinking that Villains was going to be the start of my career… and it was looking like it was going to be the end!
And I wrote this big, crazy road trip concert tour novel that I was really in love with and my agent really loved. And we just could not find a home for it. So I said, “okay, I’ll put it aside and try the next thing and maybe I’ll come back to it someday.”
And then the tables turned in our favor and Villains did find its people! And suddenly people were interested in what I had to write. I said to my agent, “I really want to go out with the concert tour book again.” And she said, “you know what? Of all the stuff you’ve written in the last few years, that’s the one that I still think about. So yeah, let’s do it.”
O.R.: Hell yeah!
M.L.R.: So that’s another hat that I wear. I’m just still in the camp of “write what you know,” because in addition to being an actor and an academic and a writer, I’m a music writer. I don’t mean that I write songs, I write about music. I do a lot of reviews and artist interviews and that thing. So, I’ve also spent a lot of time in that world. I’ve spent a lot of time backstage and with musicians and on the road with a couple of different bands. So, that was something else that I really wanted to play with in fiction. It’s another place for a great ensemble, cast, big group story. And, at the end of the day, I’m still a performance studies scholar… I really love writing about performance. And music in particular is such a delicious challenge as a writer because how do you render that in words? How do you do that justice on the page, in black and white. So that’s been just a really, really fun, interesting, and occasionally very frustrating creative endeavor.
O.R.: Well, do you want to talk a little bit about what it’s been like, hopping back and forth between all of these different fields, all of these different industries? How does it enriches you as a writer? Do you want to talk a little bit more about the ways that this interdisciplinary background of yours has fueled you as a thinker and writer?
M.L.R.: Thank you! That’s a great question. I think just even from a really young age, I have had really wide-ranging interests. People are always surprised to hear me say things like, “yeah, my two primary interests as a young person were Shakespeare and David Bowie.” But I, I actually think it’s also part of the same thing? Music has always been a huge part of my writing process, actually point zero for my writing process.
O.R.: How so?”
M.L.R.: I’m a really thorough outliner, because, you know… academia. I can’t do anything flying by the seat of my pants. So, whenever I’m writing something, I have this long discovery phase where all I’m doing is listening to a lot of music and doing a lot of reading and a lot of research to just get comfy in the world of the story before I actually try and put a narrative down. Writing and music in particular have always been inseparable for me, because I draw a lot of inspiration from music… whether I’m riding the vibe or if there’s just an image in a song that really sticks with me for whatever reason. So I think at a certain point it was just logical to take all that practice, all that music writing, all those hours and hours and hours and years and years of listening really fanatically… and turn it into a piece of fiction. Because part of what I love to do with a novel is use it as a way to give somebody an entry point to something they might not know much about.
And with If We Were Villains, it was a way to take something I loved, like Shakespeare, and just make it more accessible. Because we have this idea that Shakespeare is like, really highbrow and hard to understand, and it really isn’t, if you present it in the right way. Um, and so I’m in some ways doing a little bit of the same thing with Hot Wax, and it’s a book about music, but it’s about a lot of music that a lot of people probably aren’t thinking much about in 2024–a lot of obscure 80s alternative songs and that thing. So I’m hoping that some people will read it and discover new old music or new genres of music that they maybe hadn’t listened to before.
O.R.: Well, I’m gonna ask you one more question, which is, what is one thing about the book that you would like me to have asked you or something you wanna tell about it?
M.L.R.: Well, I think one thing we haven’t talked about is just the form of the novella!
O.R.: Yes, absolutely.
M.L.R.: That was not something I’ve done before! I think because I’m a dyed-in-the-wool academic, I really like playing with form and thinking about form and structure and not just “what’s the story I’m telling?” but how am I telling it and why am I telling it that way. And I had never done a novella before and I am actually really a chronic overwriter. I tend to write way too much and then have to pare it way back. So that was a challenge too. When I asked my editor, “how many words do I have?” And she said, you can have like 30, 000 words. And I went, “Oh my God, that’s like two short stories stuck together.”
O.R.: Man, that’s nothing.
M.L.R.: Yeah, and it’s interesting–in a lot of our early reviews, we’ve heard people saying things like, “I’m just mad that this wasn’t longer. Why isn’t it a novel?” In some ways, that’s like the best criticism you can hear: “I wish there were more of this.” But, I think one thing that people don’t entirely appreciate is how difficult it is to write a solid, satisfying story in a really short space. Especially when you have like five main characters. (I refuse to write anything that has one main character.) So I was really thinking “how do I make these characters come through in such a short space?” And I landed on this fun format. I knew I wanted to write a story that took place in only one night, like 12 hours. And that was drawing on this idea of Aristotle’s Three Unities. He’s talking about what makes a good tragedy, but one of his ideas is that a really good story should take place in 24 hours in one place and have a totally unified plot!
And, obviously that’s a little bit limiting, but I did want to try it to see if I could do it. I landed on these interesting characters, and they almost have a relay, where at the end of a chapter somebody hands the story off to the next person. Which just worked really well… or at least I think it worked well, and it was a really fun way to do it.
And at the same time I was thinking about, okay, what is my model for this? And I ultimately had to write the first chapter of Graveyard Shift in like three weeks, just because that’s how the timing worked.
O.R.: Oh my God!
M.L.R.: And you know, some night… like really late at night, I was scrambling to get it done and I was really stressed out and my partner knocked on the door and was sticking his head in, like, “is it safe to enter?” And God bless him. He was saying to me “no, I know you’re so stressed about this now, but once you’re done with it, it’s gonna be a masterpiece.” And I think I said to him “I’m not trying to write a masterpiece, I’m trying to write like a mediocre episode of Scooby-Doo.” Then once I had said that, I was like, oh, that’s actually not a bad model for this! And I kept that in mind of thinking about like, I wanted this to feel like a grown up, fucked up episode of Scooby-Doo!
O.R.: Oh man, yes!
M.L.R.: Yeah. I think we undervalue entertainment. I think we undervalue fun in fiction. Like, we always want to be taken seriously as writers. And I think sometimes we veer away from things that are just fun. And I think that’s really sad. I think we need “more fun in the world,” to quote X, another great 80s band. I think we need more fun! I don’t think we should be afraid of fun and allergic to fun. And I think you can do fun and you can do dark at the same time. Like, there’s a reason we have this thing called black comedy and sometimes the line between comedy and horror is really, really thin. So I did want to play with that in the Graveyard Shift.
O.R.: For sure. This is all great. Well, now I just want to ask one more thing… I mean, I’m guessing we have some positive feelings about Scooby-Doo? That’s one of the secret patron saint TV shows of CrimeReads. Like, are you a Scooby-Doo gal?
M.L.R.: Oh yeah. I had a group of friends in high school who were all the Scooby-Doo gang for Halloween one year. Amazing. You know, my brother and I were kids in the 90s and our Halloween tradition was, you know, we would just gorge ourselves on candy and watch it. There was a Scooby-Doo movie that was on every year, and I can’t remember the title of it, but you can probably find it. It took place on a pepper plantation in Louisiana, and it would have these like crazy zombie cat people. It was so weird. Oh my god. It’s like The Hills Have Eyes meets, like, the cat, like, Jacques Tourner’s The Cat People or something like that.
O.R.: What is this?
M.L.R: Yeah! Exactly! It was like Cat People meets Southern Gothic, but make it ‘a Scooby-Doo movie.’ And sometimes I’m like, ‘did I hallucinate that? Was that just a fever dream, my being in a sugar coma at age eight or something?’ But, yeah, Scooby-Doo is… I don’t watch very much TV, but if I’m just flipping through the channels and it happens to be on, then I will definitely watch an episode of Scooby-Doo .
O.R.: As soon as you said the fucked up episode of Scooby-Doo, I was like, oh damn, she’s gonna get hit with one more follow up.
M.L.R.: Yeah, I will talk about Scooby-Doo all day. I spend a lot of time talking about Shakespeare, but I can also talk about weird kids cartoons.
O.R.: Excellent. This is what I and the readers of CrimeReads want to hear.
M.L.R.: Perfect!
