It’s been three months since Chinese-American twins, Milly and Billy Ting, had the most harrowing night of their lives. Now, they’re grappling with the discovery that they aren’t humans, but demons, meaning their struggle to keep their restaurant in business during the COVID-19 pandemic is now the least of their problems. In The Night Eaters Book 2: Her Little Reapers, written and illustrated by Monstress co-creators Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda, the twins’ parents, Ipo and Keon, are still less than forthcoming, forcing Milly and Billy to rely on each other as they navigate their new powers.
Unfortunately, when Milly connects with the spirit of a recently murdered teenager, she and her brother are reluctantly sucked into the high society of supernatural beings where something is very, very wrong. The Night Eaters Book 2: Her Little Reapers follows the Ting family as they attempt to navigate increasingly dangerous, murky waters—and hardly anyone knows the truth about what’s happening, especially the humans surrounding them.
“There’s one moment midway through that is just horrible—but no one notices because they’re on their phones, or focused on other things,” Liu tells The Mary Sue via email. “And I’ve been there—I’ve sent that email while out walking, heard someone say, ‘Oh, my God!’, and looked up in time to witness something disturbing—but if there hadn’t been that exclamation of shock, I probably wouldn’t have noticed because I was distracted. Sometimes I think our world is now in a state of permanent distraction. How much do we miss in our lives because we’re looking away?”
Liu says she didn’t enjoy horror growing up because “having a big imagination and being a sensitive kid” meant she “found the supernatural deeply unnerving. I was still in diapers and I clearly remember believing in ghosts—or rather, knowing that there was something unseen watching me.” Even ads for horror movies were too much for Liu as a child, though now she says she loves watching scary movies, especially horror comedies. There are several darkly comedic moments in the first two books of The Night Eaters trilogy, and Liu says providing levity in the face of so much terror is “a fine balance.”
“Life is horrifically absurd, and if we don’t challenge ourselves to laugh when life serves up heaping piles of bullshit, we won’t have the strength and resilience to carry on—or better yet, flourish,” Liu explains. “Life is pretty awful, ridiculously awful, if you look at it clinically, instrumentally. But it also can be stupendously wonderful. Most of us are exposed to each extreme throughout our lives, and we can either face that with fear, despair, and anxiety—or find a way to shake our heads, grieve what we gotta grieve, and then dwell in a place of acceptance and absurdity. We talk a lot about resilience these days, but for me, my resilience has always expressed itself in having a good sense of humor, even in the grimmest moments.”
For Takeda, who says her experiences feeling “‘something scary’ in any dark, silent place” as a kid “has comforted and resonated favorably with parts of my negativity” and cites horror as “a strange friend,” says she loves the comedy scenes in The Night Eaters because they show the characters’ charm. Takeda tells The Mary Sue via e-mail that for her, the most challenging aspect of Her Little Reapers was changing her art style to fit the horror and gore of this series.
“From the beginning of this series, I decided to make my art style different from our other project, Monstress. Most people prefer beautiful, gorgeous art, so I expected many people to leave me behind with my new art style,” Takeda explains. “It was very challenging, yet risky for me. But I felt Marjorie was going to make something totally new, so I needed to dig out other possibilities I hadn’t tried yet. Of course, doing something new is not easy and risky, but I believe that keeping things changing will surely bring us to a place beyond our imagination. The experience of drawing The Night Eaters gives Monstress good effects, which I hadn’t expected.”
Her Little Reapers explores multiple timelines and locations, significantly expanding the setting of its predecessor, She Eats the Night. To differentiate between timelines in Her Little Reapers, Takeda tells us she kept backgrounds and character details in mind, as well as the color palette. Although The Night Eaters is a horror story about demons, it’s also very grounded in the real world.
“Reading the script at first, I felt this is our daily life, not fantasy. You may have an experience to see people like a demon or monster in your daily life, right?” Takeda adds. “Especially during the pandemic, I saw many people become like demons themselves, so I thought I should draw just our daily life, not something special. And this is the point I really love about this series.”
Liu says the most challenging part of writing this trilogy has been deciding how much of the world-building to include. “We all live in multiple worlds—or many of us do—worlds where ancestral cultural beliefs collide with Christianity or some other organized religion, which in turn collides with our own personal folklore,” Liu says. “What holds all the strands together is the person that they inhabit. That’s a long way of saying that by grounding everything that happens in my book through characters and their inner turmoil, I create a narrative ecology that helps keep me on track and keeps all the various elements from going too wild.”
Although she says she often wants to pack in as much as she can, The Night Eaters has surprised her because “I’ve told a complete story in three books. … This is one occasion when I think less is more. I’ll miss Milly and Billy, and Ipo and Keon, but that’s a good thing, too. I’d rather miss them than be sick of having to write them.”
When it comes to the characters themselves, Takeda says, “Every character (especially a weird character) is a part of myself. I think somehow, we all share crazy, demonic, kind, and selfish parts. They can change easily depending on the situation. Marjorie and I would be happy if you enjoy finding and sympathizing with something in our books in the way you like.”
For Liu, Milly’s struggle to figure out who she is and what she wants resonates most: “Here’s someone who was living a Chinese parents’ dream: she was in medical school! But she didn’t want to be in medical school and ended up leaving. Sort of how I went through law school and decided at the end that the law wasn’t for me. But just because you know what path you don’t want, doesn’t mean you know what path you do want.
“Milly has been adrift for some time, wondering if she’s made the right decisions to leave medical school to help run a restaurant with her brother—and now she’s faced with another pivotal choice, one that she doesn’t want to deal with, and that she thinks is really unfair, because it’s been forced on her by her parents, and their secrets,” Liu continues. “She’s angry and she’d rather do anything but face the difficult challenge—and choice—that she has to make eventually, which is: Who do I want to be? And do I accept who I am? Do I embrace who I am? These are questions that follow us throughout our lives. You’re lucky if you only have to deal with them once. I suspect most people wrestle with those questions over and over—I know I did. Add to that—most of us also have families who shoot unexpected arrows into our lives that require personal paradigm shifts and emotional clean-up crews.”
For both Milly and Billy, the events in Her Little Reapers force them to make big choices that could determine the fate of everything. They have “all the best intentions,” Liu says, but every choice has consequences “that can’t be easily fixed.” Likewise, Milly and Billy’s parents, Ipo and Keon, are facing consequences for their own choices—many of which are coming into play decades after those choices were made.
“They kept secrets from their children. And those secrets have big teeth. Very big teeth. And those teeth all come out in the last book, Our Kingdom Come,” Liu says.
The Night Eaters Book 1: She Eats the Night and Book 2: Her Little Reapers are available everywhere books are sold. Book 3: Our Kingdom Come does not yet have a release date.
(featured image: Abrams ComicArts)
Published: Oct 3, 2023 05:48 pm