Meet the makers: BehinD the press
First in our series of behind the scenes “stuff”, we took time to speak with The Datura Press’ founder about motivations, meaning and the story behind the stories
A Conversation with Dom, Founder of The Datura Press
The Datura Press Editor: To start, could you introduce yourself and tell our readers what led you to found The Datura Press?
Dom: Hi, my name is Dom, and I'm the curator and creator at The Datura Press. The whole project really came about when I realized I was sitting on three books that were either finished or in very advanced stages. How do you get the word out? What's the point if no one knows? Hopefully, not just the stories are interesting, but so are the stories behind them. I really enjoy exploring these worlds; it would be criminal if they just lived in my head, I think.
Editor: That's a powerful motivation—the need to share finished work. You mentioned three books. Could you introduce us to one of these foundational titles for the press?
Dom: Currently, I'm really focused on Narcisa Before Narcisa, partly because of the excitement of a 'new' thing, but really because I love her. Pretty immediately, I realised I was really rooting for her, you know? She's a bit goofy, has a temper, is clumsy and awkward, but is very funny, sarcastic, and has a great heart. I want her to win, to be okay. I'm hoping that's something people will respond to as well. Nobody's perfect, right? I certainly don't like heroes that are; they make the rest of us look bad.
Editor: Readers definitely connect with flawed, human characters. The title, Narcisa Before Narcisa, is very intriguing as it suggests a transformation. What can you tell us about this 'before' state and the kind of magical realism readers will find in her world?
Dom: I think early on, especially because her story is told by someone else who has their own reasons for telling it, she is very much buffeted around by events. Often that's a no-no in stories, having a main character that stuff just 'happens' to, but in the early stages, I thought it was key to see how small she is, even though everyone around her knows somehow, in some way, she is the key to all these huge things set to happen. How would you cope with that, especially when you are very young and have a very secure background? What if that turned out to be fake? What if you were set to do something—maybe the most important thing anyone has ever done—but had no clue about any of it? There is very much a 'before' Narcisa, and I think it was crucial to make that part of her life real. It's a multi-book series; even I don't know what the 'after' Narcisa is like.
Editor: That idea of an unreliable narrator telling her story is a compelling hook. Can you elaborate on their perspective and how it shapes the reader's understanding of Narcisa?
Dom: I very much imagined the Aunt as a story device. She has a very Arabian Nights pressure; she needs to tell a compelling story so she gets to stay at her family home, for she is very much alone in her life. She has run out of conventional stories, so in a panic, she creates her own. Not only does she use Narcisa's story to help deal with some very traumatic things in her past, but it also changes everything—not just the lives of her nephews and nieces, but the very layout of the castle itself, which has some very deep and disturbing secrets. Both the 'real' setting of the castle and Narcisa's own are really an ever-evolving reality that is created around them. I think so, anyway—I mean, I'm telling both, so it's hard to keep track! Certainly, it is not a continuous truth; we encounter dozens of narrators, and they all have their own agendas and take on events.
Editor: The story literally altering the world is a fascinating concept. You’re saying the setting is a character itself. How do the people living in the castle experience these physical changes?
Dom: It is a physical change. Corridors get longer or lead somewhere completely different; rooms swap sides of the castle. What interested me is that the characters, while thinking it's strange, aren't completely freaked out by it. Because of the Aunt's ability to describe any reality so compellingly, they somehow accept these changes as facts. A castle with centuries of history and thousands of stories—why wouldn't it change to reflect the people in it?
I don’t like perfect heroes. They make the rest of us look bad
〰️
I don’t like perfect heroes. They make the rest of us look bad 〰️
Editor: That's a great explanation for how the world's logic works. So, moving from that conceptually rich fantasy, what can you tell us about another foundational title for the press? Does it explore a different kind of world?
Dom: Well, one that has been developed quite far, and is quite different, is Walker Awake. This is again a different reality. A guy wakes up in an obscure Texas town with no memory, and it becomes quickly apparent he's an agent for a very powerful government agency. But it's not an America you truly recognize: the atomic bomb was dropped in Korea, not the Second World War; Hitler visited America and is still alive. It's familiar, but not quite 'right'. It's apparent he's there to solve a hideous murder, but nothing is revealed to him. He just knows things—for example, he can dial the number to his agency HQ even though he doesn't actually know it. Again, it's a look at creating a reality that you just have to accept. I was very much influenced by Twin Peaks, which was way ahead of its time by combining a standard format, the cop show, but, I don't know, it all takes place just a little bit to the left, you know?
Editor: The Twin Peaks influence is a great touchstone. How does the strangeness of this alternate history thriller bleed into the central murder mystery Walker is there to solve?
Dom: The crime is just so unlikely: a loving mother wiping out her whole family. No one can quite believe it; in reality, it should be impossible. In some ways, it seems mundane, but the suddenness and brutality of it, no one can comprehend it. It becomes very apparent that it is a signal to Agent Walker, that he's not the only 'outsider' operating in this world.
Editor: So the crime is a message. That raises the stakes from a simple mystery to more of a conspiracy thriller. To complete the picture, could you introduce the third book that sparked this whole venture?
Dom: This was the first one I ever undertook, and re-reading it has been a pleasure. This one starts with a very bored office clerk leafing through a huge underground archive in Victorian London. He discovers a series of fantasy novels about occult happenings—effectively, terrorism as supernatural events. After a time, he realizes that the myriad receipts and memos in the same archive prove the stories in the novel. Everything from a train ticket proving a particular journey happened, to the names on manifests or military postings being incredibly similar. So the novels are really true stories; it's a secret agency's way of keeping records. Again, I guess, like Narcisa, I've put another narrator into the equation and turned a bored bureaucrat into the real detective of the story. It's called The Annotated Cases of Professor Manton Marble and is a series. I got the idea from Dracula. Not only was that a story told in diaries and telegrams, but it also had an amazing annotated version that had notes about everything mentioned, right down to the recipes in the story. Both those devices made the whole thing seem so very real. That idea never left me.
Editor: So it’s a historical fantasy that’s also a form of secret history. It seems all three of your series, despite their different genres, are a form of metafiction that explores the line between truth and story. Is that the core mission of The Datura Press?
Dom: Hah, I don't know if it's as high-falutin' as that! I was always struck by Kate Bush. Not least because her work is so amazing, she was asked once why she wrote such amazing stories about a cast of weird and wonderful characters, and she simply replied that she was a very boring girl from a very nice middle-class family, so her own life was simply too dull to write about. I think, really, all the books I've loved the most—things like The Master and Margarita, Mason & Dixon, Titus Groan—have all arrived complete. There's no exposition about these incredible worlds. They are just told so amazingly, they simply exist. In Mason & Dixon, a clockwork duck that vibrates so fast it is invisible falls passionately in love with France's greatest duck chef. Pynchon is so 'all-in' and so brilliant in his description of it all, I never once thought, 'eh?'.
I think, in a lot of ways, I'm a very boring person, but the inside of my head isn't. Like Kate, I'm hoping people can have a lot of fun spending time there too.
That's a perfect place to leave it. Thank you again, Dom, for sharing the vision behind The Datura Press. It's clear that readers are in for an unforgettable journey through these intricate worlds.
She's a bit goofy, has a temper, is clumsy and awkward, but is very funny, sarcastic, and has a great heart.
I really want her to win, to be okay.
Dom Salmon, Founder, The Datura Press
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