Toronto Apocalypse? Andrew Sullivan on his new horror book ‘The Marigold,’ an oozing life form, and the terror of alienation and isolation

Author Andrew Sullivan has the bona fides to write the ultimate Toronto Apocalypse novel. Growing up in Oshawa — the unofficial border of the city’s great eastern sprawl — Sullivan used the visible-on-a-clear-day CN Tower as an external and internal navigation point for his youthful wanderings. And like many a dreamy Ontario kid, once he was old enough to move to Toronto, he made the city his home. His new novel, “The Marigold,” reckons with a lifetime of imagining the city’s potential and reckoning with its inevitably disappointing realities.

“The Marigold” takes place in a Toronto of the near-future, a city plagued by crumbling infrastructure, inequality, near-apocalyptic rainfall levels and floods, and the emergence of a monstrous life form nicknamed “the Wet” by health officials. Part mushroom, part mold, pure monster — the Wet is a sentient life form that seeps into foundations and walls of houses and apartment blocks before literally absorbing the inhabitants. If the Wet sounds like a rich metaphor for Toronto’s well-documented decline in recent years, you’re not far off. What you probably won’t see coming is the novel’s droll humour and humane regard for its sprawling cast of richly drawn characters — “The Marigold” is body horror with a heart.

The dystopian version of Toronto depicted in “The Marigold” is both fantastic and familiar. Things are getting pretty bad, aren’t they?

Yes, the real-life breakdown of Toronto is a painful thing. Public services have gone downhill under Tory’s reign, though a lot of that began with Rob Ford. The fact that you can’t take your kid to a public bathroom for ten months of the year, and the poor garbage pickup and roads — those things are the result of ten years of neglect. So when I was writing “The Marigold,” I wasn’t thinking, Oh, this would be a fun setting.” For me, this is a near-future setting, Toronto ten or fifteen years away, after one big flood. The decline began with ceding public authority to corporate authority, privatizing things that should be public and cutting funding to things that everyone in the city can enjoy and benefit from — that’s the seed of everything.

The erosion of the city’s physical infrastructure is a cultural thing, too, isn’t it?

Sure. There was a time when you could walk down Queen West for instance and the layout was: book store; cool bar; vintage shop; cool bar; book store; weird bead store! That’s gone now, and so are the little magazines and cheap hangout places and reading series and most of the artists who lived there. Where is the culture gone? You snuffed it out with money.

Where did the idea for the Wet come from? Do you have a deep fear of floods, or fungi?

To be obvious about it, the Wet is a manifestation of the alienation and isolation of urban living. It is the voice telling you that you are totally alone and should just give up. The Wet is also neglect, because that’s where black mold, for instance, comes from. So with the Wet, I asked myself: what if there is this thing that, like death, is always coming for you, is relentless, has no patience, but also it’s patient because it will find you eventually. If you’ve been in a Toronto basement apartment, you know the Wet. If you’ve slept there, you’ve felt the Wet at the edge of your senses. It doesn’t need a face. I call it the Wet because it moves to fill space — that’s what a liquid does.

You’ve traced the novel’s influences on an amazing Twitter thread (@AFSulli). Two that stood out for me are David Cronenberg and the late, great JG Ballard. Can you talk a bit about those two artists?

I could talk all day about them! Ballard is very good at analyzing how larger systems work and how they affect the behaviour of people and groups. That’s one of the reasons why there’s so many characters and perspectives in the book. They characters see themselves as the protagonists and they think that they’re going to solve the crisis, but they realize that it’s so much bigger than them and it (the Wet) doesn’t care about them or even think like them. In his films, Cronenberg laid the groundwork for Toronto as a horror landscape, so as a writer you’re always reflecting on that. He sees how Toronto is very good at standing in for other places, but it rarely tries to define itself as itself. Toronto doesn’t care much about it’s history, it’s always remaking and replacing itself, so a lot of the locations Cronenberg used in his films don’t even exist anymore. That’s in the book, too, Toronto’s eternal chase of becoming a World Class City — whatever that means.

Like a lot of artists, you’ve moved out of the city in the last few years.

Yes, my wife and I bought a house in Hamilton. The fact is, if you didn’t buy twenty or thirty years ago or have some secret money or a great day job, you can’t own a house in Toronto. The downtown itself is so expensive that there’s nowhere for artists to ply their trade, and there aren’t a lot of neighbourhoods outside of downtown that have the density or transit, so you have to be able to afford a car. I would rather live in Hamilton, which is a city and is walkable, than on the edges of Toronto, on a side street, with no transit. I can do my day job work in Hamilton, and we still go into Toronto once or twice a week.

You’re married to a novelist (Amy Jones). Two novelists in one house: how does that work?

It’s great! It helps that we each have our own spaces to work. We got together after we’d had two books, so we didn’t have that competitiveness that you might have if one of you had no success. We’d also read each other’s work and really respected it. It’s great to be with someone who knows that sometimes you have to sit there silently for five hours just to write two pages, and other days you write ten pages in two hours, or that I want to stay in on the long weekend and write for eight hours instead of going out. So I feel really lucky.

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