Newly minted bestselling author Xan Kaur hopes to set straight long-held misconceptions about South Asian Americans and the rural South in her gothic horror debut When Devils Sing. The book is about a Punjabi teen who strikes a deal with a devil to escape the poverty of her rural Georgia community, and is drawn into the investigation of a local boy’s disappearance and the town’s corruption. It’s inspired by the author’s experiences growing up in the South.
“Seeing how my family’s pursuit of the American dream did not pan out, I wanted to show financial ‘failure’ in South Asian immigrant communities,” Kaur says. “All we see in Western media is an exaggerated and upper-class perspective of and on South Asians, and I don’t see Punjabis at all. It was important to me to show the overlooked South Asian immigrant experience and its nuances.”
Kaur was drawn to the Southern gothic subgenre; she sees it as the perfect container to talk about the South and all of its nuances. “The rural South is a dark place in a lot of ways,” she says. “In writing about my experience, I very quickly realized that there was a much larger story here of commentary about rural towns in the deep South and the social dynamics at play.”
When Devils Sing is, incidentally, Kaur’s first complete manuscript. “I had never written more than 5,000 or 10,000 words into anything,” she says. But she wanted to meet the deadline for the 2020 Pitch Wars, a mentoring program that matched aspiring authors with published mentors who read manuscripts and gave advice on how to improve them. “I had a lot of agent interest from the showcase. I landed with my dream agent, Peter Knapp at Park, Fine & Brower. I got my first offer in three days.” Brian Geffen at Henry Holt acquired and edited the book. “The whole process has been seamless compared to a lot of publishing,” Kaur adds.
When Devils Sing became a bestseller on both the New York Times and ABA’s Indie Bestsellers lists, and Kaur has been overwhelmed by the attention. “It feels so surreal,” she says. “I’m shocked and grateful. There’s a massive team of people who helped get this book to this place.”
Kaur sees her book in conversation with filmmaker Ryan Coogler’s oeuvre, including current megahit Sinners, about twin brothers returning to their Mississippi hometown. She was heavily inspired after seeing Jordan Peele’s Get Out, she says. “I hadn’t seen horror used to explore social themes in such a way.” David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, which she watched as an angsty teenager, and the HBO series True Detective, which she calls groundbreaking, also served as sparks, as did “the Southern gothic greats, like Faulkner and Morrison.”
She hopes that When Devils Sing will resonate with many young readers. For those “from places like the town depicted in the book, I hope that they can see themselves and know that their stories are being told,” she says. “I’ve often heard, ‘I didn’t know there were South Asians in rural Georgia,’ and I’m like, ‘Yeah, we’re here.’ ”
The other reader she hopes to reach is one who is not really familiar with the rural South. “The South is a very nuanced and complex place. Right now, it is being thrown to the wayside as a regressive place that there’s no hope for. But it’s a place that’s worth fighting for. My goal is to show perspectives from people we just don’t see in the media much.”
