#Murdertrending author Gretchen McNeil speaks with Hypable about her upcoming book and how social media can be as dangerous as it is helpful.
After hearing what #Murdertrending was going to be about, I knew I wanted to talk to Gretchen McNeil about the parallels we’re currently facing in real life and how social media is intrinsically tied to those experiences. This is a transcription of our conversation, slightly edited for optimum clarity.
Tell us a little bit about ‘#Murdertrending.’
#Murdertrending, my horror, comedy, genre bending book… In its original conception, it was Scream Queens meets The Running Man, which was a novella that was turned into the very over-the-top and ridiculous Arnold Schwarzenegger movie from, I think it was the late ’80s early ’90s — I never remember that time period, but the idea being satire of social media of our human need to be entertained at all costs, of our shrinking attention span… And then using sort of graphic over-the-top murder in the form of execution to highlight how desensitized we’ve become to kind of anything we watch on a small screen.
We sold this book in October of 2016. And I think I got the offer on Halloween, which was sort of amazing, and then a week later the election happened. And suddenly the book changed for me. I had only written a chapter or two when we sold it. And I had to deliver a manuscript by February 1 in the face of what, for me personally, was an incredibly difficult time in our country. I had a really hard time grappling with what was happening in politics and what that would mean for everyone. And suddenly it wasn’t just about a society five years in the future where we were televising executions; it was about a society five minutes in the future where a reality television star has been elected the President of the United States and he sells the criminal justice system to a reality television producer and together they turn San Francisco’s Treasure Island into Alcatraz 2.0 where convicted criminals are sent to live in duplex apartments and work jobs on a fake Main Street, and then they get hunted down by super over-the-top thematic serial killers and their deaths are streamed live on a app for your phone or tablet.
So it took on new urgency for me when I was writing the first draft. I had a short timeline in which to write it in and I was definitely avoiding the news at all costs at this point! And there’s a lot of social media used in the book. When you set a book on a prison island, we don’t get to see what’s happening off the island because our main characters are stuck there. So I decided to use social media, the app is called The Postman, and I added a little nugget where when a murder is about to go live, the notification sound is a double doorbell. I think like five people are going to understand the reference to The Postman Only Rings Twice, but those five people are my people. So the Postman app has a twitter feed that goes along with it, and also there are kind of Reddit style forums — and also a betting website where people can place bets on which serial killer will get to the next kill and how long somebody will survive, their ordeal, whatever. And so I was able to insert these social media pages into the text so we can sort of see public opinion.
Then as things start to go horribly wrong on the island, we can see public opinion shift, which I thought was really important. Both the people who got on the bandwagon and then perhaps realized this was not justice being served, but it was something much more nefarious. And people who stayed on the bandwagon to the bloody end. And then in the sequel — which comes out in 2019, and I’m in edits but I’m mostly done with it now — we’re sort of able to expand upon that with looking at the two sides of this fandom in the fallout of what happens in the first book. So that to me was really vital to the storytelling. It’s not just a survival story about a 17-year-old girl on this island; it’s also about this satire. And I think in order to sell the satire we really had to see the fandom playing out.
What do you think it is about these kinds of stories that still interests us as a society today? Like you were saying with ‘The Running Man’ and everything, these stories have been around forever, with various different levels of different social media involvement. But thrillers, the violence of it all, what do you think it is about that that’s so captivating?
When you think about the idea of using violence as kind of an opiate for the masses, to steal from Karl Marx, it goes back to ancient times. I mean, the Romans understood this. That’s why they built the coliseum. If you look at the history of what happened there, it went from gladiator games to literally horrific murders and executions of persecuted groups and slaves. And they were always having to up the ante to keep people entertained. So there’s a long history of humanity’s morbid fascination with murder and violence. I mean, even our most popular televised sports — football, obviously — is incredibly violent. NASCAR racing — I mean, do you watch a NASCAR race because you want to see cars go around the track in formation, or do you watch a NASCAR race because you’re hoping to see a horrible crash? And these are really uncomfortable questions because nobody wants to admit that they’re watching NASCAR for the crash. But I can’t imagine staring at a screen for a three and a half hour race at Talladega without one. Can’t you just want it? Is there enough happening to keep you entertained?
Our attention spans have shrunk incredibly, and look, we can blame everything for it. When I was a kid in the ’80s, the television would rot your brain. That’s all we heard. MTV was destroying intelligence. And now it’s smaller screens. It’s phone screens and iPads and I am not going to get into a debate about that because it’s the same arguments we’ve been hearing for 30 or 40 years about what’s good for kids and what’s not good for kids. And video games and movies and violence, and superheroes and violence, and whatever.
But there is a common thread throughout humanity, which is that we desensitize ourselves to violence as, I believe, a coping mechanism. In the same way horror has been popular with teenagers. Since the dawn of movies. We go back to The Blob and The Invasion of the Body Snatchers back in the ’50s. We control the fear of violence by experiencing it in an over-the-top ridiculous way. You can go and be scared and watch a slasher film or read a horror novel and put it away. And so you experience it without having to experience it. And watching violence happen to someone else, I believe, is another way to do this. When it happens on a screen especially, it’s an easy way for humans to conflate it with just pure entertainment. We go watch a superhero movie — no spoilers, for if someone has been living under a rock and hasn’t seen Infinity War — but we can watch people die. People that we’ve grown to care about in a fictional way, we can watch them die and feel sad, but leave it there. Leave it in the theater. Leave it on the message board. We’re not actually experiencing a real loss. And I think that in #Murdertrending, a lot of what you see in the fandom is them treating it as if it’s not real. As if it’s a reality show. Where these people aren’t actually dying because it doesn’t affect everyday people. They don’t know them, they’re not their loved ones, and so it’s easy to treat it as if it’s fiction even though in this case it’s supposed to be capital punishment. And horrific capital punishment at that.
Yeah, and I think social media is a vehicle for that desensitization because just this morning I was scrolling through Twitter, and I’m reading things about what’s going on with North Korea and the summit. And then I would see a really cute dog, and then one of my friends would tweet out a picture of how somebody was being racist toward her. Then the next thing was probably something about ‘Infinity War.’ And it affects me and then I move on. I think social media in particular leads to a lot of these problems. And I guess that kind of segues into my next question, which is, what kind of role does social media play in your life in particular?
I’m older than the average people that I think social media is geared for. Although places like Facebook are definitely the realm of a slightly older generation now. It’s the way that 40-somethings keep in touch. Not the way that 20-somethings keep in touch. Social media, when it began, and I have been on Twitter since, oh God, I think 2009 — a while — it was definitely more conversational. Now it seems to be a lot of people shouting at each other? Lecturing at each each other as opposed to having a conversation. I loved it in the early days of my publishing career because I really felt that I could connect with fans. Fans could read my book and tell me on Twitter very quickly they loved it, or hated it — you know, that’s the downside — but I felt like there was a connection.
When I was a kid or a teen, authors that I read seemed like these mythical beings. Like J. D. Salinger-esque where they lived far away and no one ever saw them and they were recluses and they were kind of God-like in a way. And suddenly with Twitter you can contact your favorite author. You can see them post photos of their cute dog or their shoes that they bought, and [you can] feel this connectivity to them, which I think is fantastic if not entirely real. Because anybody who is posting on social media is posting a heightened version of themselves. I don’t post my day-to-day activities. I don’t post the bad things. I don’t post the struggles. You know it’s kind of a light peppy version of Gretchen McNeil, Author. You know, not Gretchen McNeil, Person.
I think what’s happened over time is that we’ve lost the sense of realness and connection on social media, especially as things have turned ugly in a lot of ways. And I’m not just blaming the current political climate or the election. I mean, there were turns in social media before then. In the publishing world and beyond. I find myself reticent to use Twitter on a regular basis. I use it occasionally. I probably post once a day or once every other day — something a little bit more… I try to keep it light. You know, again, I post like I got this cool new lipstick shade. Or you know something silly I see on the street or whatever. But I’m not as interested in letting people in as I was maybe 10 years ago, where it felt a little bit more intimate. Now it just feels like people are waiting for you to say something they can pounce on. And I’m not really interested in that. I don’t really care.
Facebook to me is much more private. I do have a personal feed and an author feed that I use very rarely. I keep my Facebook feed closed to friends only. I’m not someone who’s posting a lot of public stuff. And then there’s Instagram, which I love because I love the visual aspect of it. I think it’s such an easy way to show your life, your emotions, everything. Not just text. Though I do post a lot of text photos. But again, I’m very aware that a photo I post on Instagram will probably live on the internet forever. And you have to be aware of that. You know there are certain things, maybe, Gretchen in 2018 was gung-ho to put on Instagram, but maybe Gretchen at 2024 is gonna regret having done it. So, I try to think in those terms. I try to keep it, again, this kind of heightened author version of me. Not the necessarily the real Gretchen. And that may sound horrible and contrived, but I think it’s a way to protect myself from the uglier side of the internet.
You said you don’t particularly use social media as much as maybe some other people do, but did you look at social media any differently after finishing this book, or did it just sort of drive home your feelings about social media to begin with?
It really… It made me think. One of the crazy parts of writing this book was, you know, when you write a bunch of, say, Twitter feed conversations, you have to come up with all these names and the handles — which are slightly different — and the way that people choose their handles on Twitter, being a reflection of mindset, personality, and age, and it made me think about all the ways that we present ourselves. From the avatars that we used to the names that we choose to the types of things that we list or like or comment on. And what that says about us. Suddenly I became almost a little paralyzed because I realized that, like, everything I like… someone’s going to see that.
Obviously everything I post — obviously I knew that, but like — it’s all a reflection. Maybe I like a post because it makes a political statement that I’m in favor of? But without looking up the author, to see — do they have other controversial stances on things that I don’t approve of? It’s not as easy as just clicking that little heart and moving on. I feel like now I have much more responsibility to read the article but not just the article and the contents, but where does the article come from? Who’s the author of that article? What is the website that article was posted on? I feel more responsibility for that, which probably means I’m using it less because, you know, there’s a much bigger time investment in doing that.
And like I said, our attention spans are limited these days. I think I lost some of the fun of it. I think Twitter — the bloom was off the rose a little bit for me after writing this and just seeing [everything]. And, you know, I was intentionally creating [this world] and trying to make it over-the-top and heightened it in that way because this is satire. Then it just felt really real, and rereading it I thought this is what it’s become. And I don’t mean to single out Twitter; it’s just that was one of the examples I use in the book. But if you looked at my social media postings from before I wrote this book and after, you’d see a dramatic fall off. Absolutely for sure.
Obviously we are here to talk about how dangerous social media can be because that’s reflected in the book. But social media is also a very powerful tool to help people who don’t have voices to have one and come together all across the world to talk about what’s important to them. So I guess on the flip side of this for you, is there anything that has sort of reestablished for you the power of social media for good?
Yeah, you know, it’s funny. I was having this conversation with my husband. We were talking about the news and how when we were kids — he’s a few years older than me, but we basically come from a similar generation — there were three broadcast channels, and PBS, that showed news. Like, that was it. Cable wasn’t news. CNN existed, but you didn’t turn to CNN for news. You watched your Tom Brokaw, your Dan Rather, before that it was Walter Cronkite and Roger Mudd. You watched the news at night and that is how you understood what was happening in the world if you weren’t reading it in the newspaper. Which, as a kid, I wasn’t reading newspapers… So the idea now, first of all that you have — first it went to 24 hour news coverage, and then it went to multiple networks carrying 24 hours news coverage, then it went to multiple networks, each of which have its own political leaning so you could choose the one that you want to talk to you all the time… And all of that is great, but it is still not as immediate or as unbiased, necessarily, as having people who are experiencing things in the moment on social media.
For everything from wars and invasions and bombings to police shooting unarmed African Americans in their cars and streets for no reason, these things we never would have seen — and it’s not that they weren’t happening in the ’80s and ’90s — in fact they probably were happening more frequently because we didn’t see any of it. And so now we can’t close our eyes to all of these things unless we consciously make an effort to ignore it. You can ignore what’s happening in Palestine because you don’t want to deal with it, but it’s there to be seen. There are people on the ground who are filming what’s happening who are posting on social media and that is incredibly powerful. And that’s why these things need to exist.
We need to have the ability for people to share the reality of life in other places. We can’t just rely on the news media. Especially considering how much of the news media is biased. On both sides. The news that I watch is biased toward my super lefty, Bay Area-raised leanings, and the news on the other side is the same. We need to have the truth. And we need to have the immediacy of the truth whether the trappings that go along with that, which includes fake accounts and boxing, and you know, places like Cambridge Analytica using our demographic for something potentially nefarious… All of that comes along with it. Does the good outweigh the bad? In many cases I think so. And so it’s my responsibility. Like I said, if I’m going to post something or post an article or retweet something, it’s my responsibility to vet that. To vet the article, to vet the people who wrote the article, to vet the website that posted the article in the first place. And I think that’s the part where I can make a difference. It’s where I can post something that I believe in that is coming from a reliable source, that is coming from a vetted source. And I think that’s incredibly important.
You said ‘#Murdertrending’ is satire. It’s black comedy. A lot of the elements in it are heightened. But I think the big question since we’re talking about this book is, do you think we could ever get to a point where something like what happens in ‘#Murdertrending’ becomes real? Becomes normal?
Well, unfortunately, if you had asked me this question in 2015, I would have said no. If you’re asking me this question in 2018, I can’t say no. I’ve just watched so many of the things that were taboo, that were over the line, whether it’s in terms of racism or violence or behavior and attitudes toward women that would have gotten [people] fired [in the past that] have just gone out the window. And with that, a lot of the morality that certain groups preach, they seem to ignore when it comes to their political aims. And that is when what happens in #Murdertrending could be real.
When your political goals are more important than whatever morality you were raised with, then something like this can happen. And what prevents this? What prevents a government from saying this is totally legal, and the country going along with it? Again, I would never — it would have seemed utterly ridiculous if I had written and published this book in 2014 or 2015. Now when I pitch it, I do events all the time and people ask, well what do you have next, and so I pitch this book in the same way that I pitched it to you at the beginning of this phone call. And their eyes get wide and all the replies are, “Don’t give them any ideas!” Or, “That doesn’t seem that ridiculous.” And it wouldn’t have been the same reaction a few years ago. If I’d been pitching it then it would be like, “That’s ludicrous! But in a great way!” And now it doesn’t seem so ludicrous.
Right. And especially like we were talking about before, with the desensitization and everything, you just become numb. Things get shaved away so gradually that things which are completely normal for us now, which don’t seem that strange, would have been ridiculous 10 years ago and people never would have that thought that we would have been okay with everything that’s happening.
Absolutely. In the same way that, when I do high school events and I tell them when I was in high school, no one had cell phones. And there’s, like, a lack of understanding. Like you could go to high school in America without a cell phone? It’s the same idea, you know? A lot of these things — porn stars being paid off by presidents’ lawyers and yet you know Congress seems to do nothing and bury its head in the sand — I can’t imagine this happening in times gone by! And trust me, I’m not saying political scandals didn’t happen, but this is just… This is like a three-ring circus all the time, and I just can’t imagine the political machine putting up with this before 2016 elections.
And it’s so present. Because of social media. We see it everywhere. Because of social media.
And, well, our president got himself was elected from social media!
Yeah.
He spends a huge portion of every day on social media. And every day — you know, we’re on the West coast, so we wake up and the news cycle has already been three or four hours in. I turn on the news, and it started at 7:30, and I see what lunatic twitter rant the president went on at five o’clock in the morning or whatever. And it is 100% indistinguishable from politics now. Social media is a tool for politicians to post about whatever policy they’re working on or trying to promote or whatever. It is about personal vendettas and it is about a place to air your grievances and to say whatever you want regardless of truth and seemingly without consequence. Which is the part that I find the most difficult to stomach. I didn’t mean for this to get completely political. I’m terribly sorry! It’s so hard in this day and age — and to talk about this book — without becoming political. I realize that is, you know, a concern with this book. You can’t separate the politics out of the story, and there are some people who will not be interested in this book because of that. But I do try and — the book is actually very funny, if I do say so myself. I intentionally infused it with a lot of humor and a lot of ridiculousness. That salty and sweet of horror and comedy, which I think sort of [helps a lot]. But I am trying to satirize our system without being preachy. And I’m hoping that the comedy helps with that.
Well, my final question, and probably one that’s even more important than the last one I just asked you is, how do we make sure that social media doesn’t become a vehicle for distraction like it’s portrayed in your book? How do we protect ourselves from ourselves?
[Laughs] That’s like the age-old question of humanity, right?! How do we protect ourselves from ourselves? There are multiple sides to every conversation. And I think the biggest thing we can do is listen to other sides. Like I said, we can choose news organizations we watch based on our own political leanings, and that’s great. It’s feels good sometimes, too — you know I love to turn on Rachel Maddow, but we need to listen to the other side, too. We don’t have to agree with them and we don’t have to like what they say. But it’s important to listen. Because when we stop listening to other sides, that’s when all this goes terribly wrong. And I think that’s what happens in the book. It’s like everybody jumps on board with this and there are a few dissenting voices that nobody listens to. And I think there’s no side of any political conversation that is always 100% right. There’s no side of a political conversation that is always 100% righteous. And so if we ignore the other side simply because they’re the other side, we risk falling into a trap as portrayed in this book.
So the best thing we can do is to try to be open to listening to someone else’s argument. You can reject the parts of it that you feel are everything from racist to close minded, but there might be a piece of it that does make sense and that’s the first bridge between two sides who feel increasingly completely isolated from each other. Because, you know, political corruption is not confined to one party or the other. It exists across both parties and independents. Political corruption is not an ideology. It is an individual sort of thing, and we have to be open to seeing that from our own side as well as the others. And I think that’s a big problem right now. The side that’s currently in power refuses to see the corruption within its own ranks. And I think that is a huge problem. You know, I lived through the Clinton scandal. I remember all of that and this, of course, makes it look like child’s play. But there have been scandals on both sides. And we just need to keep listening to the side we don’t agree with. Because the minute we stop listening, I feel like this all falls apart.
Yup. I completely agree.
And it’s hard! Like, I don’t want to listen to Fox News!
Yeah, I know!
Right?! So much of what I hear there is distasteful. But if I stop hearing what they have to say, then what is the point? You at least need to know what their stance is if you want to make an educated argument against it.
Exactly. Otherwise you just live in your own bubble.
Yeah. Exactly. And it’s, you know — I live in California. I spent a few years in D.C. in grad school, but I’ve lived my entire life in California. Was born and raised in the Bay Area. I lived in L.A. in college, and it’s very easy to wrap ourselves in a warm comfy blanket of California. It’s a great state. I believe in so much of what the state stands for. Especially in the last eight years. It’s easy to isolate ourselves from the rest of the country. But we still are a part of this country. So we have to listen.
Yeah. Well, I just wanted to say thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me about this today. I feel like it’s a really important topic to discuss. And I for one am really looking forward to ‘#Murdertrending.’ I can’t wait to crack that open at some point.
Oh good! Well, I hope you enjoy it. I hope it’s not too preachy, but that it’s fun. Because I think if a book is preachy, you’re less likely to think about it later than if a book is just a fun adventure that has some thought provoking stuff that sort of comes out later. So, fingers crossed.
‘#Murdertrending’ by Gretchen McNeil hits store shelves on August 7, 2018
You can pre-order it on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or IndieBound, or add it to your Goodreads list!
Fan of our book coverage? Why not join our Hypable Books Facebook group!
We want to hear your thoughts on this topic!
Write a comment below or submit an article to Hypable.