Author and poet Kelsey Day makes their traditional publishing debut with the YA technological thriller The Spiral Key. As the daughter of virtual reality world Ametrine’s designers, Madison Pembroke hosts her birthday parties on its servers. Social outcast Bree Benson, Madison’s former best friend, has never been invited to the ultra-exclusive event. When Bree receives a coveted invitation, though, she intends on using it as an opportunity to rekindle their friendship. But when the surreal glitz and glamour of Ametrine’s digital landscape turn deadly, she must reckon with the bad blood between her and Madison if she hopes to survive. PW spoke with Day about friendship fallouts and the advice that shaped their writing career.
What compelled you to write a thriller about a virtual reality world?
Something I think about a lot is the way that our connection to other humans is increasingly mediated through technological spaces. There’s a deep longing for community and for connection, which has always been present in humans, but because of the addictive quality of social media and virtual spaces and algorithms, there’s this temptation to try to connect with others and find a sense of community through these technological spaces. And a lot of times this actually increases our sense of loneliness and disconnection.
Algorithms are built to target young people who are craving community, people who are lonely, people who are particularly vulnerable. It’s profitable for those people to be using social media as much as possible, because their experiences and their advertising data are valuable to these companies. I just find that horrifying. I wanted to write a book that captured that terror and how high those stakes are, and the ways in which the internet is an incredible connective force, but it’s also pushing us farther apart.
What did you want to convey through Bree and Madison’s relationship?
I love their relationship because it’s frankly disturbing. I refer to it as a queer friendship breakup because it’s more than a casual interpersonal fallout. Many queer people have this shared experience of a very intense friendship that can only really be understood as an adult—being able to look back as a queer adult and think, “We had a very big fallout. It was supposedly platonic, but there was something running underneath it. Maybe neither of us understood at the time, but there was an intensity to it.” It’s such a psyche-altering experience to have that sort of falling out as a young person. I wanted to write about that tension of giving yourself over completely to a friend and trusting them with things that you wouldn’t tell anybody else, and when you fall out, that opens different layers of horror than you might have with an enemy. Somebody who loves you or loved you at one point knows how to hurt you like other people never will, and that’s a very specific type of horror that I think is especially common for young people.
Your first two publications were books of poetry. What inspired you to write a prose novel?
I actually didn’t really start writing poetry until I was a little older, in late middle school and high school. But I’ve always loved writing prose. Technically, the first book I ever published was a prose novel when I was around 11. It was this ridiculous story about a prince who saves his kingdom that I self-published, and I remember my community meeting it with such sweetness; they were all just so overwhelmingly supportive. There’s an old video of me on our local television station talking about the book because the school board was taking notice. Teachers at my elementary school sometimes even read the book to their students.
How has your writing style and authorial persona evolved since then?
I feel like I have a better sense of the world now. When you’re a teenager, you feel the stakes of the world in a very immediate and personal way, especially in a culture that’s so individualized, like the United States. But part of growing up is learning about all the ways in which you’re connected to these broader forces around you.
The Spiral Key is a book that’s not only about intense interpersonal stakes, but it’s also about the ways that larger societal forces act on us. That’s something that I’ve been thinking about more and more as I get older. I think that sometimes we have this tendency, once we’re out of a certain stage of our life, to no longer take the younger versions of ourselves seriously. I want to always take young people seriously because I remember being a kid and feeling like I was treated as this sort of half-baked human. Yes, young people are our future, but they’re also our present, and I think that’s something that can get lost sometimes, especially as an adult writing about young people. It’s a piece of my process that feels really important to keep intact, even as my craft and as my understanding of the world evolves.
Why did you seek out a traditional publishing route for The Spiral Key?
It felt less important to me that my poetry was published traditionally, especially because I wrote so much of it as a high schooler. At the time, it was important to me to have complete creative control. Rootlines was actually published through my university, Emerson College. It was really exciting to me to get to make that in collaboration with my classmates and with the wonderful people I was surrounded with at the time. But with my prose, it was always part of my dream to work with a bigger house. You get a different level of distribution and resources when you’re working with the big boys. It was just a matter of how and when.
When I was working on that ridiculous book when I was 11, I Googled, “How do you publish a book?” And the internet said that I should find myself an agent. So little 11-year-old me made an email account, and I queried a bunch of agents. Most of them responded very wisely, “Hello. You are 11 years old.” But there was one person who was really kind to me. I wish I could remember who it was, because it changed the shape of my life: “Hello. You are 11. I cannot work with you, but you seem like you have potential.” And they gave me advice on books to read and literary festivals to go to. In that moment, any doubt that I had around wanting to do this and wanting to do it professionally disappeared.
What’s next for you?
I’m on submission right now with a young adult project and with a poetry project. I have no idea what’s going to happen with either of them, but I’m really excited. I’m doing what I’ve always wanted to do, so I’m just soaking it in.
The Spiral Key by Kelsey Day. Viking, $19.99 Feb. ISBN 979-8-217-03894-7
