New Book Spotlight

Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine

A mini-interview with Kristina Ten

Tell us about your new book?

Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine is my debut collection: twelve stories that blend horror, fabulism, and sci-fi to explore the darker side of games and children’s folklore (superstitions, riddles, rhymes, pranks, jokes, and other rituals and traditions of our youth). Inside, you’ll find award-winning and -nominated stories like “The Dizzy Room,” “ADJECTIVE,” and “Approved Methods of Love Divination in the First-Rate City of Dushagorod” alongside brand-new tales like “Mel for Melissa,” “The Advocate,” and “Another Round Again.” Living paper dolls, possessed CD-ROMs, and doomed space shuttles intermingle with haunted varsity athletes and the creepy legends of sleepaway camp. If dark, weird, and playful speculative fiction is your thing—if you like the work of Kelly Link, Carmen Maria Machado, and Karen Russell—I hope you’ll find something to love in this book, too.

What aspect of the book was the most fun to write?

I had a great time coming up with the otherworldly language used in “The Dizzy Room,” which is like a cross between something you’d find on r/creepypasta and that old, glitched-out TV no-signal screen. (My heartfelt thanks and apologies to every editor and layout designer who’s worked hard to preserve Dizzy’s uncanny quality on page and screen.) I should also mention the story, toward the end of the book, called “ADJECTIVE,” which is written in the form of a Mad Libs game. I’m drawn to hermit-crab fiction and borrowed forms—think Carmen Maria Machado’s “Help Me Follow My Sister Into the Land of the Dead,” which takes the shape of a GoFundMe campaign; and Avitus B. Carle’s “Vagabond Mannequin,” which takes the shape of a crossword. For “ADJECTIVE,” I wrote the narrative outside of the Mad Libs prompts first, then added the prompts, then tweaked the outside narrative accordingly, then went back and forth again. It was a fun puzzle: a bit like trying to get the sides of a seesaw balanced just right. And Mad Libs seemed fitting for a story about identity, self-determination, and who gets to define who you are.

If there is one emotion or theme that you would hope that the reader connects with, what would that be?

Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine is preoccupied with the horrors of inhabiting a politicized body. The stories deal with immigrant and first-generation experiences, gender-based violence, reproductive justice, and resistance in the face of repressive systems—and the search for community through it all. Community is the bright spot among the rest of it, the only way to survive that I know of. There’s a reason rabbits show up on the book’s cover, and a reason rabbits have long been symbols in the horror genre, from Bunnicula to Us. They’re small, cute, soft; grass nibblers, seemingly harmless. They’ve got the scared eyes, the twitchy noses, the frantically beating hearts of a species at the very bottom of the food chain. Except the other thing everyone knows about rabbits is this: they’re always multiplying. Their strength is in their numbers. And that’s our strength, too. It’s why repressive systems invest so much in making people feel isolated and alone. We’re only easy to count out until you count us.