In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Alma Katsu’s novel Incarnate is a chilling modern take on the Faustian bargain for fame.
Booklist wrote of the book:
“A deal with the devil is reworked for the online age, with a healthy dose of body horror joining AI. The combination makes the story uniquely terrifying.”
In her own words, here is Alma Katsu’s Book Notes music playlist for her novel Incarnate:
If you read the playlist for my last novel, Fiend, you already know that I rarely listen to music when I’m writing. I’d vowed to change that and… erm, I haven’t. But I will. I promise.
My new novel, Incarnate, is story about a Faustian bargain made by a young woman who wants to be a breakout success on social media. It’s about hiding our bad parts, only showing the good, pretending to be something we’re not—“Dorian Gray for the internet age” is the tag line. I was an early social media researcher and technology futurist and it was this experience that made me want to write Incarnate. I’ve watched the evolution of social platforms and other technologies for nearly twenty years and have come to see it as a net harm to mankind. We didn’t foresee how it would take a dark turn and become a tool for mass propaganda. How many of the emerging technologies of the past ten, fifteen years are tools for deception.
Video Killed the Radio Star by the Buggles
I’m going very old school for the first cut because, even though it was ostensibly about the then-coming video age of music, this song is just as true for the internet age we find ourselves in. This song, written in 1979, was the first video played on MTV when it launched in 1981. I was a very young music journalist at the time and hung around a big recording studio, listening to musicians fret over the growing interest in music videos, concerned that everything would change. That music would matter less than how the band looked and whether the uglier band members would find themselves out of work.
Nearly fifty years later, all of this is true for the social media age. The image, or pretty wrapper, has taken precedence over the message.
Besides, it’s also a super catchy tune.
The Internet by Jon Bellion
“Life became dangerous the day we all became famous” is the opening to Bellion’s song, and were truer words ever spoken? Did we know what the thirst for fame would bring us, though? A world where we value perception over reality, where perception has become, in most cases, as good as reality. “I don’t need to learn, just need you to think I get it” could be the motto of the millions of students who use ChatGPT as the substitute for their brain and don’t mind disabling their ability to learn.
Filter by BTS
A really pretty song about an ugly truth: technology has made it possible to get bored with the person we profess to love the most. But technology, luckily, also has the answer. It can allow us to overlay endless filters on our beloved to make them new to us every day. In Incarnate, the main character Dorothy feels inadequate—she’s not pretty enough, too fat, not special—thanks for social media, and that frustration and unhappiness propels her to reimagine herself, first virtually and then in the physical world, defying natural law, physics, the fabric of reality itself. Her physical transformation is so extreme, you might be tempted to think she’s looksmaxxing.
Such is the power of self-hatred.
Creep by Radiohead
This song has come to occupy prime real estate in my head since a friend sang it at a karaoke night (daring!) a couple years ago. A perfect portrait of self-loathing, an emotion that more and more of us are seized with as we compare ourselves to what we see on social media. That kind of longing, closely felt over a stretch of time, can warp you. Dorothy has many good attributes—she’s smart, she’s independent—but she lets herself be consumed by envy and self-pity because she can’t turn away from the black screen. She knows there’s something wrong with her, but she keeps it hidden because she knows the high social cost if she doesn’t.
I imagine every one of us has felt like the misfit on the outside looking in at some point in our lives.
Everybody Wants to Rule the World by Tears for Fears
Another oldie, but this song perfectly conveys the feeling you get when everything’s going your way. I remember when it came out in 1985, dancing to the video in clubs, never feeling so free. It’s the feeling Dorothy has, briefly, when it seems like her dreams are coming true. She’s created Isabella, the perfect virtual persona, and it seems like everyone in the world is falling in love with her. The sky’s the limit, and Dorothy, who has never gotten anything she’s ever really wanted in her entire life, is drunk on the sensation—and quickly becomes addicted to it.
Dear Society by Madison Beer
You can’t watch this video without feeling badly for every young adult who grew up on social media, now occupying a liminal space between their parents’ experience and the next generation’s… Plus, there’s the chilling opening, where a smug technocrat congratulations the unwilling victim for being part of the training of this new technology destined to usher in a new age for mankind—in his opinion, anyway—that’s exactly how we feel as AI is being shoved down our throats.
True Story by Ariana Grande
In Incarnate, there’s a character named Catrina Villeneuve. She’s a singer having her break out moment when she walks into the visual effects studio where Dorothy works, and Dorothy ends up stealing her motion capture files to use as the basis for her creation Isabella. I visualized Grande when I wrote Villeneuve because she was exactly what I saw for this character: beyond human in her appearance and talent, driven, focused—but with a secret sadness, an apartness from everyone else. And when the worst happens after Dorothy’s stolen this part of her, the internet can’t stop gossiping about what’s happening to her. The public can’t stop looking at her tragedy.
also at Largehearted Boy:
Alma Katsu’s playlist for her novel Fiend
Alma Katsu’s playlist for her novel The Fervor
Alma Katsu is the author of Fiend, The Hunger, The Deep, The Fervor, and five other novels. Her work has won or been nominated for the Bram Stoker, Locus, Western Heritage, and International Thriller Writers awards, among others. Prior to the publication of her first novel, she had a thirty-five-year-long career as a senior intelligence analyst for several U.S. agencies, including the CIA and NSA, as well as RAND. Katsu is a graduate of the master’s writing program at the Johns Hopkins University and received her bachelor’s degree from Brandeis University. She lives in West Virginia with her husband.