Haunted: A Guest Post by Margie Sarsfield

Millennial malaise and engrossing eco-horror are at the heart of this Minnesota beet farm. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Margie Sarsfield on how it feels to publish her debut novel and what went into crafting Beta Vulgaris.

Somewhere in Michigan, there’s a motel that served as the birthplace of Beta Vulgaris – literally, in that it is the first scene, and figuratively in that it provided a spine for the themes I wanted to explore. Staying at a motel wasn’t a good financial decision for three very-broke 23-year-olds with no savings accounts. The next night we’d sleep in the car, at a Wal-Mart parking lot in Duluth. But in Michigan, dazzled by the promise of a sub-$30 room, we stayed at a motel.

We were on our way to a job working the beet harvest—like the protagonist in the novel, we hoped that three weeks of well-paid seasonal labor might replenish our perpetually dwindling account balances. But even before we arrived, the plan was going sideways.

My friend Carly paid. Unbeknownst to us, the motel charged a deposit that was greater than her account balance – putting her in the red for the following few days until she got the deposit back. Her bank charged overdraft fees, so by the time the money was returned, she was still skint. That one night would come back to haunt her, and because we were all dependent on each other, it came back to haunt all of us.

It’s hard, when you’re young, to know what it means to truly afford something. The price for comfort isn’t fully paid until you need more than you thought to get to the next paycheck. Windfalls are rarer than setbacks. Being broke is a banal horror, made worse by the feeling that you could have avoided it, were meant to do better and work harder and be smarter. Poverty is the result of immense systemic failures. Being broke is the result of having eyes bigger than your stomach.

That night and its consequences set the tone for my time harvesting beets and was the inspiration for the first scene I wrote. In Beta Vulgaris, indulging in the meagerest of pleasures – sleeping in a bed rather than a sedan – haunts the protagonist for the remainder of the story. My favorite type of horror is less about monsters and murderers than about internal terrors: the things we’re ashamed of, the things we desire, the things we hide from others and from ourselves. I wanted to explore the fragility of being broke, the effects of something as intangible as fiscal anxiety on the day-to-day experience of being human.

Working the beet harvest was miserable – cold, boring, dark, cold, wet, dirty, cold – but we made enough money that on the trip back, we didn’t need to sleep in any parking lots. That doesn’t mean it was a good investment.

Then again, I got a novel out of it, so perhaps it was the best investment I ever made. But I didn’t write Beta Vulgaris dreaming of dividends. It was more that I didn’t want to be haunted by a story I could have told but never did. A tendency to be haunted might be helpful if you’re going to be a writer – how else will you convince yourself to invest so much in a crop that might never make it to harvest?