You might call Ivy Pochoda the bard of bad women, an auteur of feminine fierceness.
For proof, look no further than the bestselling, LA Times Book Prize-winning “Sing Her Down,” her stunning 2023 noir thriller about two women prisoners. After you read it, you might never see a fork again without thinking of a bloody weapon.
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Pochoda has also authored the critically acclaimed novels “The Art of Disappearing,” “Wonder Valley,” “Visitation Street” and “These Women.” A professor of creative writing in the University of California, Riverside-Palm Desert MFA program, she won the 2018 Strand Critics Award for Best Novel and the Prix Page America in France, and has been a finalist for the Edgar Award, among others. And here’s an interesting bit of Pochoda trivia: She’s a former professional squash player who collaborated with the late Kobe Bryant to create the middle-grade book series, “Epoca.”
Now Pochoda is back with “Ecstasy,” her first foray into the horror genre.
“Ecstasy” is built on the chassis of “The Bacchae,” the Greek tragedy by Euripides written circa 407 BCE. In her modern spin, a wealthy widow named Lena, who is under the thumb of her controlling son Drew, is drawn to a cult-like group of partiers led by a magnetic, vengeful woman called Luz. The ancient drama now unspools at a luxury island resort in Greece with the help of rave culture, drugs and dance music.
For Pochoda, the move from crime fiction into horror is a natural extension of themes that have always defined her writing: “I feel like what has been done to women and what women have experienced over the course of the last centuries, or millennia, is horror.”
“I think crime fiction definitely can make people sit up and pay attention” to both violence against women and women’s violence, Pochoda said in a recent interview. “But sometimes you can only take them so far, and I think that if you make the story a little more fantastical, people will accept, or start to listen to, some more of the message, because they’re distracted by the story.
“I think that some of the things I’m trying to say are really serious about the way women are treated and the way we build our own prisons, because we’re so used to this sort of heteronormative construct of marriage and life and division of labor. Sometimes the only way to get that stuff across is to amplify the story.”
But don’t expect any story Pochoda writes to be as simple as victim-versus-perpetrator – she’s interested in the ways women can be complicit in their own misery, and in the ways they, too, perpetrate violence.
“I’m also guilty of playing into these cultural stereotypes, and that’s sort of what this book’s about,” Pochoda said.
She points to her main character, Lena, a once-aspiring ballerina who married a rich man and traded her personal agency for a life of vacant leisure. At one point in the story, another character pushes back when Lena contends she takes Pilates classes to stay fit, telling her, “You’re punishing yourself. You whittled away your spirit into rope and sinew, draped in overpriced exercise clothes and tasteful cocktail dresses.”
Lena’s son Drew learned from his father to treat women in a controlling way: “Mom didn’t stand up to it, so why should he think that she’s oppressed, you know?” Pochoda said.
But Lena’s suppressed rage finds a brutal outlet when she defies her son’s orders and seeks out the group of revelers on the beach below her hillside resort. Here’s where the story takes its dark turn. Will readers feel faint echoes of the Donna Tartt classic “The Secret History”? Maybe in the Dionysian carnality and bloodletting.
Pochoda started studying Greek in eighth grade and went on to get a bachelor’s degree in Ancient Greek at Harvard. So when she had a notion to write a short horror novel, she immediately thought of the Euripides play that she spent her senior year in high school translating.
“Nothing is really new, so why not go back to things that are comfortably old and stable?” she said. “I have a White person’s Hellenic view of literature and art, which I understand is probably not accurate – lots of these things in Greek literature came from Turkey and Syria, and we can’t pretend that these are the original structures. But you know, they’re archetypes. I was a classicist by training – I was the world’s worst classicist, we need to make that clear! – and I love ancient Greek drama. Anyway, this book actually follows the play to a T.”
“The Bacchae” had always stuck with her, in particular the character of Agave, the mother whose fury erupts in an act of almost unimaginable barbarity. “I thought yes, an angry mother, and then I thought about why she would do it.”
“The reason I use this play is that it feels thoroughly modern. It feels like there’s nothing in that play that doesn’t happen right now, all the time. You don’t need to update it. It’s just like, verbatim, it works,” Pochoda said.
Her previous novel, “Sing Her Down,” took a lot out of her, she confesses. She wrote it while going through a divorce and the pandemic. “I wrote it during a really hard time in my life, and I was like, ‘I need a break.’ I need to do something differently.”
Her idea of a break was to pen a novella between projects, as a relief from other work. Instead, the experience of “Ecstasy” seems to have not only reinvigorated her but launched her on a new path of reimagining old tragedies: “Now I want to do three of them, a horror cycle of Greek dramas.”
Her vehicle next time? “The Oristea,” written by Aeschylus in the 5th century BCE. Stay tuned for how she’ll find the new in everything old.