I drank ten martinis at a bar named after literature’s biggest nose not made of wood, and then I summoned a car to take me home. I slid into a stranger’s black leather backseat and watched the lights of San Francisco go sliding by as we made our way toward the bridge.
Scene missing, scene missing.
I woke up with the driver’s hand on my knee.
It was jarring to wake up with a stranger touching me. It’s normal contact, the kind of thing I’ve felt hundreds of times in cars and in beds, under the table and between the sheets. But the feeling of an unknown hand, its foreign electromagnetic fields, its scent unknown to me, jolted me out of a deep alcoholic stupor and flooded the airwaves of my brain with adrenaline and sudden clarity.
“We’re here,” the driver was saying. “You’re home.” Hand on my knee, shaking me.
I thanked him and stumbled out into the late-night lights, fumbling my key into the door.
As it swung open on a dark entryway, the thought occurred to me whole and inviolate: I could have woken up anywhere.
This was the first thought that would become NUMBER ONE FAN, my new thriller.
Th story starts with Eli Grey, a writer and a woman out on her own. She gets into what she thinks is her Uber with a strange man behind the wheel. Too late, after she’s opened a bottle of Gatorade and started to drink, she realizes she got into the wrong car.
Scene missing, scene missing.
Eli wakes up in a basement. Her clothes are gone and she’s cuffed to a bed frame. There’s a red light above that lets her know that she’s on camera. She has no idea where she is or who’s got her.
My research led me into the dark recounts of people held prisoner in basements and in sheds, and all of them told the same tale. They resisted when they could, they schemed all the time, and they waited to get lucky. Their stories helped me figure out what the basement would be like for Eli. Their worst days helped me figure out how her captor could hurt her, physically, mentally, and emotionally.
My other source was somewhat more unlikely. It’s a game show called Solitary, from the early days of reality TV. I remember watching it on Game Show Network, fascinated and horrified. People living in complete isolation in pods were deprived of sleep, shown disturbing movies, and psychologically abused by a cold robot voice that came from a speaker above their heads. The cash prize was large, but it wasn’t worth it.
What’s your sanity worth? Your freedom? What are you willing to fight for? How much torture would you withstand before giving your laptop password to a stranger?
Eli withstands a torture I read about from prisoners of war: her captor forces a slip, sharp piece of metal up under her fingernails until she acquiesces. What I learned in my research is: people break.
What I wanted to write about was what a woman will break to break herself out.
Meg Elison is a DC area author and essayist. She writes science fiction and horror, as well as feminist essays and cultural criticism. She has been published in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Fangoria, Fantasy and Science Fiction, Catapult, and many other places.
She is a member of the Science Fiction Writers Association (SFWA) and the National Writers Union (@paythewriter).
Her debut novel, “The Book of the Unnamed Midwife” won the 2014 Philip K. Dick Award. Her novelette, “The Pill” won the 2021 Locus Award. She is a Hugo, Nebula, and Sturgeon Awards finalist. She has been an Otherwise Award honoree twice. Her YA debut, “Find Layla” was published in fall 2020 by Skyscape. It was named one of Vanity Fair’s Best 15 Books of 2020. Her parasocial thriller, “Number One Fan” was published in August 2022 by Mira Books.
Elison is a high school dropout and a graduate of UC Berkeley.
