M.L. Rio’s novel Graveyard Shift is a fast-paced and atmospheric work of dark academia.
Publishers Weekly wrote of the book:
“[A] satisfying follow-up to If We Were Villains. . . Rio stuffs a plethora of surprises into her concise narrative without skimping on character development. This packs a punch.”
In her own words, here is M.L. Rio’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Graveyard Shift:
Music is always Point Zero for my writing process. I spend weeks just collecting and cataloging and obsessively listening to songs that evoke whatever it is I’m trying to capture with the book. Doubly true for Graveyard Shift, a book about sleep and sleeplessness. I’ve been an insomniac as long as I’ve been a writer—not a coincidence, though I couldn’t tell you exactly what the correlation is—and music is part of that, too. I listen to my comfort albums when I can’t sleep and when I haven’t slept for long enough to start hallucinating, my brain fills the midnight silence with imaginary music. These ten tracks have stuck with me since I started working on the Graveyard Shift manuscript. A longer (though by no means comprehensive) list can be found in the back of the book.
Tom Waits, “Whistlin’ Past the Graveyard”
Call this the opening credits, as we follow the five main characters to the cemetery. It sets the mood for something spooky and superstitious but in a wall-eyed kind of a way. I always thought of this book as a black comedy, straddling the line between humor and horror—the contrast makes both more effective, and that’s the contradiction keeping these characters up at night. Everybody’s shit outta luck in one way or another and turning to gallows humor to get through ’til morning.
The Specials, “Ghost Town”
The Specials’ crowning achievement—it was unanimously declared “Song of the Year” by the British music press in 1981—captures the uncanny peculiarity of their sound and their social commentary. Like “Whistlin’ Past the Graveyard” and Graveyard Shift, it defies easy genre categorization. Is it reggae? Is it punk? Is it new wave? Yes and yes and also yes. The Specials were writing about the urban decay and unrest gripping the United Kingdom in the 1980s, but they’re observing a lot of the same things happening around town in the novella. The reasons are different, but they’re both stories about privilege, and what happens when the people who aren’t invited to the banquet get fed up and flip the tables over.
Modest Mouse, “Bury Me With It”
The nihilistic “fuck it” energy of this tune is something all five of the main characters in Graveyard Shift feel at one moment or another—it became sort of a leitmotif in the text, everyone reaching a breaking point where they say, “Fuck the consequences” and start breaking rules, taking risks. When you’re chronically overworked and underpaid and burning the candle at both ends, everything feels futile and caring takes energy you don’t have to spare. It sounds like a relief to just like down and die.
Misfits, “Horror Business”
I won’t say too much to keep from spoiling the book, but this is what the Hostile Incidents sound like.
Bauhaus, “In the Night”
The Sky’s Gone Out was in constant rotation while I was writing Graveyard Shift. I could have chosen half a dozen tracks from this record, the third album by seminal goth rockers Bauhaus, but kept circling back to “In the Night” because the lyrics capture the uneasy uncertainty of the book and the dark hours it occupies. As a species we dislike being literally in the dark because we dislike being figuratively in the dark. The dangling, unfinished lines and the screeching reminder that “you never know” is what drives the song and the characters—Edie in particular, because she’s got that journalistic instinct—to try to get to the bottom of things.
Echo & the Bunnymen, “Nocturnal Me”
Does it seem contrarian to pick a song from this album that isn’t “Killing Moon?” That might have worked here, too, but it’s the martyr complex at the heart of “Nocturnal Me” that really caught my ear. A lot of Graveyard Shift takes place in and around the Church of Saint Anthony the Anchorite, which has this crazy moldering mural behind the altar that I always imagined looking a bit like a Bosch painting. This feels like the musical equivalent of that: a demented hagiographic fantasia.
Siouxsie and the Banshees, “Trust In Me”
Through the Looking Glass is an album of cover songs which draws from artists as diverse as Iggy Pop and Billie Holiday. This little ditty is from, of all things, Disney’s Jungle Book—the song Kaa the snake sings while putting his victims to sleep via ocular hypnosis. Which is pretty on point for Graveyard Shift. 1967 was a psychedelic year even by Disney standards, but Siouxsie Sioux puts her singular spin on this one and the results are deliciously insidious.
Concrete Blonde, “Bloodletting (The Vampire Song)”
This is the only song on this list actually alluded to in the text. Hannah spends all night every night driving around town, scrolling for background music to drown out her drunken rideshare passengers. She puts the Bloodletting album on before she goes to pick up the gravedigger at the bar—I thought of it instantly when I stopped to ask what she would choose in that moment. We all have the songs we think of as “ours”—our theme songs, our walkout music, the soundtrack to the midpoint montage in the movie version of our life—and there’s a lot about this that would appeal to Hannah, thematically and aesthetically.
Beat Happening, “Pine Box Derby”
Like the first two tracks on this list, “Pine Box Derby” is darkly funny and unapologetically weird. There are no witches in Graveyard Shift—at least, not of the broomstick persuasion—but there is a lot of biomedical hocus-pocus which was informed by my academic work on witchcraft panics and their possible psycho-pharmacological origins. Might sound far-fetched, but it’s all based on real science, and I wouldn’t put much past Big Pharma.
Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds, “Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!”
Don’t ask me what this song is about. Everything Nick Cave writes refuses precise interpretation, but I like the core idea here about reluctant resurrections. Sometimes it’s better to let things die.
M. L. Rio holds an MA in Shakespeare studies from King’s College London and Shakespeare’s Globe and a PhD in English from the University of Maryland, College Park. Her bestselling first novel If We Were Villains has been published in twenty countries and eighteen languages. Graveyard Shift is her first novella.