The Quiet Tenant

by Clémence Michallon

Alas! Who does not know that these gentle wolves Are of all such creatures the most dangerous! —CHARLES PERRAULT, LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD

I love reading epigraphs in other people's books, so I was excited to pick mine. Wolf imagery is important in The Quiet Tenant. There is a passage in which our protagonist compares herself to a wolf, which marks an important turning point in her psyche. And of course, our serial killer is a proverbial wolf in sheep's clothing. This epigraph holds additional meaning for me, because Charles Perrault was French—as am I. So much of who I am as a reader and as a writer comes from the French books I read as a child and as a teenager. And finally, I've always felt that epigraphs is where authors get to "perform" slightly, to deliberately infuse their work with the aesthetic they hope to develop in the following pages. Opening with a passage from Little Red Riding Hood felt thrilling, from that perspective.

You like to think every woman has one, and he just happens to be yours.

As I've said on a few occasions while on tour for this novel, ideas very rarely come to me fully formed. I usually have to massage them a bit, wait for them to come into focus organically. So when I do get sudden bursts of inspiration, I listen. This sentence was one such occurrence. I was walking my dog (a lot of epiphanies happen while I walk my dog) and I can still remember where I was and which portion of sidewalk I was looking at when it came through my head. At the time, I was writing the novel in the first person, so the very first version said "I like to think every woman has one, and he just happens to be mine." I later switched that sentence—and, well, many others—to the second person, when I decided it would be the best way to write this character's point of view.

He has more important things to remember than the name of the girl who pours his Cherry Coke twice a week.

Aaah, the Cherry Coke. So, Aidan Thomas was a difficult character to hold in my mind for the year it took me to write the first draft of this novel—and the many months during which I subsequently revised it. I certainly was never trying to feel any sympathy toward him, but in order to write him successfully, I needed to make him mine, at least a little. I needed to be able to get inside his head. Somewhere along the way, I realized that giving him small pockets of relatibility was helpful in that regard. Nothing pertaining to his violent nature, or to his major character traits—just small details. Cherry Coke is my favorite kind of Coke. Cherry, generally, is my favorite flavor of anything. So: Aidan became a fan, too. Similarly, Aidan has blond hair and blue eyes, like I do. Later on, he drinks virgin Old Fashioneds—the non-virgin version of that drink is my second favorite cocktail (after the vodka Martini, but I'll let another character ruin that drink for me in a future book). Those are tiny things, but they helped me develop Aidan's character, and shape him into someone I could bring to life on the page. I'm curious how that translated for readers. Did Aidan feel like someone you might have run into on the street?

You flip through the books he brought you, taken to the shed in no particular order. Stephen King’s It. A tired paperback of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Mary Higgins Clark’s Loves Music, Loves to Dance.

All the books mentioned in The Quiet Tenant are Easter eggs of sorts. With this being my debut thriller, and my debut novel in English, it felt important—and fun—to pay tribute to some of the books that have shaped my life as a reader. Loves Music, Loves to Dance is one of the first thrillers that ignited my passion for crime novels. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is one of those books I hadn't heard of before moving to the US, after which I realized it's an absolute classic over here. As for Stephen King's It, well—later in the novel, "Rachel" uses the book as a weight to regain her strength. In another King novel, Misery, the captive character uses a typewriter as a weight for the same purpose. Thus: Easter egg. Later in the book, I mention The Andromeda Strain, a pandemic novel by Michael Crichton. The first draft of The Quiet Tenant was written in large part in 2020. Postmortem by Patricia Cornwell is a serial killer novel—and was Cornwell's debut. Do we have any fans in the house?

A jingle fills the room, brass instruments, a singsongy refrain, then a booming voice. “This iiiiis Jeopardy!” Contestants flash up on the screen, names and locations, Holly from Silver Springs and Jasper from Park City and Benjamin from Buffalo. A man in a suit and tie walks onto the set. “And here is the host of Jeopardy!, Alex Trebek.”

I grew up in France. I moved to the US in 2014 with a one-year student visa. The plan was to move back home after 12 months, but I found a job and met the man who eventually became my husband... and nine years later, I am still here. I'm even a US citizen now! Jeopardy! played an important part of my education as a newly minted American. I had never watched it prior to moving here. Watching the show and yelling answers at the TV was one of the first rituals my husband and I established, early on in our relationship. (It took me a while to remember to phrase my answers as questions when shouting them at the TV.) We don't watch it every night now, but when we do, it always feels comfortable and familiar. Do you have a favorite game show, or one around which you created such a ritual?

You do not want to tell him the real reason. You want to keep your memories of the 2012 Marine Corps Marathon to yourself. An evening train from Penn Station to Union Station, one night at a hotel, and a wake-up call at four in the morning. A bus packed with nylon silhouettes, a hazy walk to the Pentagon before sunrise. Men in uniform searching your running belt, browsing through pouches of caffeinated gel, single packs of Advil, nutrition bars. The national anthem, then a gun start. Thirty thousand runners. Four hours and twenty minutes. The Virginia woods on each side of the course, an unending stretch of highway in the suffocating heat, and finally the finish line. More uniforms. Their hands presenting medals. Your tired legs, your sweaty body, a lanyard around your neck. The runner next to you uttering two words to the marine in front of him. Semper fi.

I'm a marathoner myself, and the Marine Corps Marathon was the first of the five marathons I've completed so far (though not in 2012). Most of the memories listed here are drawn from mine: the train from New York City to Washington, DC, the super early bus ride, and that god-forsaken stretch of highway. There are two reasons why I decided to make Aidan an ex-Marine. The first is that a few serial killers I'd read about had backgrounds in the military, and I wanted to borrow that. The second is a memory I have from the time I ran the Marine Corps marathon. I was standing with the rest of the runners, waiting for the start. People were still milling around. A woman near me tripped on the edge of a sidewalk; in a time so brief she might not even realized she was falling, a Marine extended his arm, stopped her fall, and pulled her upright. Obviously, there was nothing sinister at all about this particular interaction—the Marine in question was only being helpful, and he might have saved that runner's marathon. Still, the speed and acuity of his reflexes stuck out in my mind. The awareness this Marine had of his surroundings, and of someone else's movements—there was something fascinating about it. It felt powerful. When I was working on Aidan's character, I thought, "Who would I never want to be in a fight with?" The answer in my mind was clear: "A Marine."

This is my world. He’s mine to shepherd, mine to use. We shed our coats and I lead him to the kitchen, switch on the lights to reveal the clean stations, every surface dutifully scrubbed, each utensil in its place, every container labeled and put away. Every parcel of chrome shiny, every tile the purest white. He gives a little whistle. “Oh, that’s right,” I say, like it’s no big deal. “It’s been a while since you were back here.” “No one’s invited me in since.” So you were stuck, I want to say, like a vampire on a doorstep. I keep my vampire thoughts to myself.

This might be a good place to talk a little bit about restaurants, and what they mean to me. If you follow me on Instagram, you might have noticed that I'm a huge fan of the show The Bear. Some lines in the novel might resonate with the series (like the one about chefs existing in a blur of heat and chaos). But in truth, I wrote The Quiet Tenant before I had ever watched an episode of The Bear. My slight obsession with restaurant kitchens dates back much further than that. It partly comes from the fact that I grew up in France, and chefs are revered over there. Another factor is that I love visiting places where I'm not supposed to be. I'm nosy like that. The first time I was allowed to step into a restaurant kitchen, I was around ten years old. It was my friend's birthday party, and somehow, that's what we did to celebrate, eat at a restaurant and tour the kitchen afterwads. (I have no idea how her parents pulled that off, or even thought to ask. Again: France!) It was one of the most fun days of my entire life. As an adult, I've been lucky to eat at wonderful restaurants where a server offered to let us take a peek at the back, and it has always made my day. When I was a student at Columbia Journalism School, I took a food reporting class, and my beat was Staten Island. Most weeks, I took the subway all the way to the southern tip of Manhattan, then the free ferry, and walked around Staten Island, the least walkable of New York City's five borrows, looking for food stories. I ended up in the kitchen (and walk-in fridge) of a Mexican restaurant where I had one of the best meals of my life. The chef had had his mother dictate the recipe for mole sauce over the phone from Puebla. To me, operating a restaurant has got to be a little bit like performance art, and the kitchen is where it all comes together. It will never not fascinate me. In a deep twist of irony, I have never worked in a restaurant kitchen. I thought about it, briefly, back when I was trying to figure out what to do with my life, because I like high-pressure, fast-paced environments. But I thought a restaurant kitchen might fit that brief a little too well. I didn't think I could handle it. Then again, I ended up working in a newsroom, on a breaking news desk, which wasn't exactly relaxing, either. While writing The Quiet Tenant, I got to revisit my obsession. I mean, it was almost inevitable. Restaurants are ideal settings for novels—everyone has a role they're supposed to adhere to, so if they step out of it, *things* are bound to happen. They are (as my repeated viewings of The Bear have informed me) primed for conflict, which is exactly what you want on the page.

There is a section in it called “I Lived Through It.” It’s exactly what it sounds like: strangers detailing the crazy things they have lived through. “I Lived Through It: There Was No Pilot on My Plane.” “I Lived Through It: I Woke Up from a Two-Year Coma.” “I Lived Through It: I Started a Cult.”

This imaginary "I Lived Through It" column is very much inspired by the "It Happened To Me" essays that ran in the online magazine xoJane in the 2010s. People would write in and talk about the most shocking, surprising things that had ever happened to them. Much like our protagonist, I became fascinated with those essays back when I was in college. I binged the entire archive. France, where I grew up, doesn't have the same personal essay culture as the US does—or at least it didnt at the time—so this all seemed very new to me. I, however, never wrote such an essay, and while I have written opinion pieces using the first person in my career as a journalist, I still find it hard to write at length about myself. I have nothing but deep respect and admiration for people who manage to articulate their personal experiences on the page. It's much easier for me to attempt to make sense of reality through fiction. Do you remember xoJane and its "It Happened To Me" section? Have you ever written a personal essay?

I was born in the city that killed Kitty Genovese; some people heard her scream but were scared of speaking to the police, or they were confused, or they didn’t think calling would do any good. What Kitty Genovese taught me: when the world doesn’t look out for you, you can’t look out for others. I took my first steps in a park where, one morning in August of 1986, the body of an eighteen-year-old girl was found, hours after she’d left a bar with a boy she knew. Across the street from the same park was where the singer was gunned down in 1980, by a man who had in his pocket a paperback of my favorite novel when I was a teen.

These two paragraphs contain references to three real-life cases: the killing of Kitty Genovese, the killing of Jennifer Levin, and the killing of John Lennon (by Mark David Chapman, who was carrying a copy of JD Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye). When working on the first draft of The Quiet Tenant, I had just discovered the fantastic podcast You're Wrong About, which covered the first two of the three cases mentioned above. The show taught me so much. It, of course, brought me a ton of knowledge about specific parts of our modern history. It also prompted me to reflect on how the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves interact with the stories we tell ourselves about the world. This is reflected here in our protagonist's way of depicting her life story against the backdrop of the news events she remembers reading about. Do we have any You're Wrong About fans in the room?

Before you can decide, the man in the driver’s seat answers for you. “Raiford, Florida. Just north of Gainesville. Whole family’s from there originally.”

When writing a novel, I like inserting references so discreet that I know there is a chance no one will clock but me. Ideally, lots of people would get those little references, but if no one does, that still doesn't make them useless in my view. They are here, in my mind, to infuse the novel with a certain flavor, almost by osmosis. Raiford, Florida is such a detail. Raiford is a small town of around 200 people located, like Aidan says here, north of Gainesville. It was, for a time, the location of the Florida State Prison. And it happens to be where Ted Bundy was executed in 1989, aged 42. When the time came to pick a birth place for Aidan, I wanted that choice to be intentional. It made sense, to me, that Aidan would have been born where Bundy died. The fact that Aidan works with electricity, and that Bundy was executed by electrocution, strengthened that connection in my mind. If you've read The Stranger Beside Me by Ann Rule, you might recall her note that the lights would dim in Raiford when the electric chair was tested ahead of an execution. I pictured a young Aidan in his parents' house, wrestling with whatever dark thoughts happened to occupy his mind, in the dimming light of a living room lamp, while the state put to death someone very much like his future self. The image stuck. I'm curious—did anyone catch this particular reference? And if not, does it all make sense now?

He showed you a video on YouTube, on a channel called—you had to read the name three times to make sure—Essential Skills for Men. A dude demonstrated how to insert one tool vertically first, how to apply the right amount of pressure, how to insert another tool perpendicular to the first one, and how to work both tools against each other until the lock gave.

The particular YouTube channel mentioned here is made up, but this is a pretty accurate account of my own experiences watching lock-picking videos as part of the research for this book. They always start out very scientific and rational, but there is always a point at which the guy—it's usually a guy—ends up wiggling a tool around, apparently hoping things click into place. My curiosity was so piqued by this that I ended up ordering a lock-picking kit online and practicing on three locks. Out of those three, I can now pick two by basically just looking at them. The third one has remained absolutely impenetrable (but my friend's boyfriend, who has the same kit, assures me that this is normal, and the problem lies with the lock, not us). All of which is to say: I'm pretty convinced that no one truly understands how locks work. Have you ever tried lock-picking?

“If I were her,” I tell the judge, “I’d want a little party. Christmas break, you miss your friends, right?” A brief nod. “I would never admit it, of course. Teenagers…” The judge and I roll our eyes together as if we both know, as if he remembers as well as I do what it’s like to be a thirteen-year-old girl.

OK, so, the party subplot. Here's where it came from. I listen to music pretty regularly when working on a first draft. Not when revising, though. I usually prefer silence for revisions, so that I can really "hear" the sentences in my head and, well, think clearly. But during a first draft, it helps me to have some music in my headphones, setting the atmosphere. Sometimes, I'll listen to classical music. Sometimes, I'll listen to one song on repeat dozens of times, so that the lyrics fade into the background and don't interfere with the writing. And sometimes, I'll create a playlist for a specific project. I will always associate certain songs with The Quiet Tenant. One of those songs is Taylor Swift's Betty, which isn't at all about crime or serial killers (I don't think), but which has a line about a party and what it might mean for the love story in the song. I love that swelling passage in the song, and I love that song in general (I am a sucker for harmonica). I listened to Betty over and over again, and eventually, the idea of an important party, with emotional stakes at an all-time high, wormed its way into my manuscript. Are you a Swiftie? And dare I ask... did you get tickets to the Eras tour?

The cove by the Hudson, hidden from the rest of the world by rows and rows of trees. You had to know it was there. If you did, then you had the keys to heaven.

The place described in this passage is inspired by a real-life cove located in Cold Spring, New York, near some hiking trails. I love going to Cold Spring to hike. Hiking in Cold Spring was, in fact, how I spent my time on the last weekend before The Quiet Tenant was scheduled to go up for auction with publishers. On the way to the hiking trails is a big transformer at the bottom of a couple of power lines. If you listen, you can hear the hum of electricity. Considering the symbolism around electricity and power in The Quiet Tenant (and the whole power line motif), I chose to believe that was an omen of some sort. When, later on, I had to pick a spot for this particular scene, my mind wandered naturally to this little corner by the water.

But now comes the part that will ruin you forever. This is the part you can only experience from outside your body. This is when you shut down all the places in you that feel pain, sadness, anything.

All the parts that deal with "Rachel"'s abduction of Cecilia were gut-wrenching for me to write. It felt like this was an act that would go against all of her instincts, and it also went against mine, as a writer. I do not enjoy putting violence against girls and women on the page. I also felt that, depending on how this moment played out, there was a risk that "Rachel" would lose the reader. This is the part in the book when she is the most openly inflicting something—trauma, pain—on someone. And that someone happens to be one of the most vulnerable characters in the story. All of "Rachel"'s misgivings on the page, and her earlier decision not to load the gun—it was the only way I could write this passage.

The Civic obeys him until it doesn’t. He presses the gas pedal, but the car struggles to keep up. There’s a buzzing sound. The transmission. He grabs for the gearshift, tries to jerk it into fourth. It’s stuck.

Back when I first wrote the final car chase, I did not have my driver's license. I took (and passed, thank you very much) my road test the summer after The Quiet Tenant sold to my publisher. But that means that when I was working on the first draft, and for the first few times I reworked the driving scenes, I had little real-life experience to rely on. I asked my husband a lot of questions. If I recall correctly, it was his idea that Emily's car might stall because of its manual transmission. Later on, after I passed my road test, I felt that I was able to revisit those scenes with a bit more of an idea of what I was talking about.

You open your arms.

I don't remember the first time I thought of the ending for The Quiet Tenant. I mean, I always knew how it would end, generally speaking, but I don't remember when I thought of the hug scene, specifically. But I do think that once I thought of it, I never looked back. I'm pretty sure this is the first and only time in the book that May actively chooses to make physical contact with another character. (I say "pretty sure", because even though I've read the novel dozens of times by now, I'm always scared to speak in absolutes. It's a journalism thing. If you speak in absolutes, your likelihood of being wrong increases dramatically.) I did wonder whether we should hear from Cecilia one last time. I can absolutely see how that would make sense. But I tried writing one last chapter from her point of view after Aidan's arrest, and it didn't quite work to have it at the end of the novel. It was jarring to hear Cecilia's point of view—that of a young girl who, at this point in the story, has barely begun to grasp what her dad is accused of—considering everything else that is happening in the novel at that same time. I believe that where an author chooses to end a story is very symbolic of what they are trying to say with that story. It made more sense, to me, to focus on this image—of two women hurt by Aidan in different way, finding some form of solace and support in each other. Plus, a big thing for May at the end of the book, and in the chapters leading to her escape, is her having to reckon with the fact that, in order to save herself, she is going to have to sever her bond with Cecilia. Cecilia's silence at the end of the book models that severance. May doesn't hear from Cecilia directly anymore, and neither do we. Having said all of this, I haven't given up on the idea of Cecilia's chapter one day becoming available to readers. Maybe as a bonus chapter of some sort? Is that something people would like to read?