Guest Post: Domestication: The Playlist By Shannon Knight

It’s my absolute pleasure to welcome Shannon Knight, indie SFF author in the Asylum. You might remember, that we recently helped host the cover reveal of her upcoming novel, Domestication. Today she will talk about the inspiration behind the book and share her playlist with us!

Domestication will be released on July 23, 2024.

Shannon Knight wrote Domestication while living on an Icelandic sheep farm in the Pacific Northwest. There are no skulls on her roof, but there are a suspicious quantity of bones kicking around the farm. Shannon graduated summa cum laude with a Bachelor’s in English. She is the author of Grave Cold, Insiders, and Wish Givers.

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In an eat or be eaten world, domestication is a death sentence.

When Janie chose the isolated sheep farm, she knew her husband would hunt her down. What she didn’t expect was Rob and Howard. Rob rules the farm with the same domination tactics she uses to train dogs, while Howard believes only human supremacists think humans should be treated any differently than other animals. Janie inadvertently jumps out of the frying pan and into the fire. She wishes to leave her old self behind. She wants to transform. Will she devolve into meat, metamorphose into a monster, or transcend beyond her domesticated limitations?

Domestication is a horror novel set in a deeply rural area of the United States, and the playlist matches the mood. While I set the book in the Pacific Northwest, where I live now, it’s built on a seed from my youth. I grew up in the backwoods of the Ozarks.

My family lived in a log house. The wind would blow through the chinks between the logs. The most common snake in the yard was a copperhead, a venomous snake protected under the endangered animal list. We called them poisonous snakes. Black snakes (black king snakes) grew to a very large size and had the distinction of eating other snakes, including the venomous ones. Cottonmouths (water moccasins), another common venomous snake, earned their name because they open their mouths wide as a warning. The inside of their mouths is white, like cotton, and that white color would catch the eye. Cottonmouths and rattlesnakes are quite friendly in that they give such a clear warning to back off before they attack. Copperheads are masters of disguise. You need a very alert eye to see them. Even today, even on city sidewalks, part of my brain watches for copperheads.

Of course, snakes came into the house. That’s inevitable with the chinks. When the ice storms came, they’d coat the whole house with a lovely insulation of ice that made it much warmer. Just about any kind of storm knocked out the electricity, and when the power was out, it stayed out for a while: three days for a short run, but two weeks was pretty standard in the winter. Tap water required the well pump, so we’d haul water from the spring and boil it till the power was back on.

Domestication contains no snakes.

I tell you about the snakes and the power outages because people seem to understand that better than the isolation. How many miles till the closest neighbor? How many hundreds of acres till another house? How many days till you see someone outside of your own family?

The sheep farm where I lived as I wrote Domestication is next to over 100,000 acres of wilderness. If I climb to the top of the next mountain ridge, through forest inhabited by deer, elk, bobcats, coyotes, black bears, and a cougar, I can turn a full circle, as far as the eye can see, and only spot one human neighbor. And if I climb a different ridge, I’ll see no one at all.

The playlist for Domestication consists mostly of American folk music meant to capture the melancholy and haunting beauty of backwoods isolation. There’s a bit of Dolly Parton in there as the songs feature in the book. I created the list while wreathed in fog and rain to the call of owls and coyotes. Listen for a spell.