In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
The stories in Kristina Ten’s collectionTell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine are marvelously strange and turn the commonplace into the extraordinary.
GennaRose Nethercott wrote of the book:
“Never have I ever tasted such a delicious cocktail of nostalgia and dread. Reading these stories feels like saying Bloody Mary into the mirror: in Kristina Ten’s expertly crafted world, your own reflection becomes a monster. Fans of Kelly Link and Karen Russell will adore every darn second of this book.”
In her own words, here is Kristina Ten’s Book Notes music playlist for her story collection Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine:
Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine is my first book, a collection of twelve strange, dark tales linked through their exploration of the games and rituals we used to make sense of our lives growing up, and the games we carry into adulthood, too. Though they vary in genre—weaving together horror, fabulism, folklore, and science-fiction—every story examines, in some shape or form, the eerie experience of inhabiting a body that’s up for debate, one that others feel they have a right to control.
In other words: You know happy-sad songs? Songs that sound happy but, if you pay attention to the lyrics at all, will completely devastate you? This is a happy-sad book. Sounds sparkly and upbeat at first (games, fun!). Is in fact a total downer.
But back to those youthful rituals. Making this playlist throttled me right back to the aughts, when I was still burning CDs for crushes, friends, and people I wished could be more than just crushes and friends. It really is an art, like everyone says. Here’s my mix for you, best listened to on the sticky CD player of your mom’s 1997 Honda Accord, if that’s somehow still kicking. If not, I hope you’ll join me in pretending.
“Dressed to Suppress” by Metric
“From the throat, I’m tied to you…”
The collection opens with “Keep Tabs on You,” a five-hundred-word story about a man who collects paper dolls and spends his time dressing them, posing them, using them to play out his fantasies, and generally bending them—often literally—to his will. But as tends to be the case in this book, things aren’t quite as they seem. The song’s dreamy beginning, soft and crystalline and pleasantly sonic as an angels’ chorus, takes a growling, discordant turn around the 1:07 mark that feels true to the story’s progression as well.
“High” by Sir Sly
“It feels good to be running from the devil / Another breath and I’m up another level”
For the next story, an immigrant techno-horror called “The Dizzy Room,” the soundtrack had to be hypnotic, sweaty, and electric. This song is catchy and deceptively upbeat, with a bass line that buzzes as intensely as the story’s overheating Dell computer—and, later, the spider wasps that swarm the protagonist’s senses. When I listen to “High,” I imagine preteen Uly locked in on her screen, unblinking, “feel[ing] good for the first time in a long time” as the game there promises her a better life, in which she feels true belonging. But who’s really playing here, and who’s getting played?
“Collarbone” by Fujiya & Miyagi
“Head bone connected to the neck bone…”
If I didn’t know about recording studios, I’d think this song was laid down in a middle-school study hall. There are the playful whispers of “What she gonna, what she gonna.” There’s the bouncy clap-along rhythm so reminiscent of children’s clapping games like “Miss Mary Mack” and “Pat-a-Cake.” Then the bridge hits two minutes in, and I’m fully thrown into the world of “The Curing,” the first of my book’s four novelettes. A riff on the “Dry Bones” spiritual, the bridge feels like an instruction manual for this story’s kids as they feverishly make extra versions of themselves out of Elmer’s glue: “Toe bone connected to the ankle bone, ankle bone connected to the shin bone…”
“Don’t Worry About the Government” by Talking Heads
“My building has every convenience / It’s gonna make life easy for me”
Hey, don’t worry about it! Everything’s fine! No, better than fine! Oh, that suspiciously finger-shaped debris sticking up from the rubble over there? That’s nothing! This is what the narrator of “Approved Methods of Love Divination in the First-Rate City of Dushagorod” wants you to believe, anyway. Set in a dystopian authoritarian city-state with mysterious matchmaking protocols, this story is told from the perspective of the rule makers—but you’ll meet the ones breaking them, too. When the song spools up to a high-pitched, terrified whine a minute in, that sounds to me like the truth.
“Bit by Bit” by Mother Mother
“I’m gonna build my house in the wildest thickets…”
What’s more fitting for summer-camp horror than this song’s haunting, G-minor strum and lyrics about getting lost among the poplar trees, leaving the people who don’t get it behind? “Bunny Ears” follows Hannah, an only child with defiant loner tendencies and a dark secret, as she navigates the close quarters, cliques, and spooky legends of Colden Hills Music Camp. “Bit by Bit” has an appropriately frenetic energy, and its moments of audio feedback put me in mind of “No Return,” the theme to Yellowjackets, which feels like a creepy cousin of “Bunny Ears.”
“Stranded” (Instrumental) by Dabrye
This song opens with a burst of echoing, maniacal laughter that ushers in three-plus minutes of a repetitive, tapping melody played on what sounds like a xylophone, backed by electronic warping tones. These bright, hollow notes’ relentless cycling has the exact feel I was going for in the book’s sixth story: one of irreconcilable stuckness. “Seven Days in the Kingdom of the Misplacer,” another micro, tells of a woman trapped in a territory not her own—and because she can’t leave, every paragraph starts the same way. The occasional rhythmic cut-outs in “Stranded” feel like a glitch in the matrix; tiny windows into something being off.
“I Come With Knives” by IAMX
“Kinder und sterne küssen und verlieren sich…” (“Children and stars kiss and lose themselves…”)
These fast opening lyrics, delivered breathlessly and under the breath, coupled with the driving synth fill me with anxiety from the jump. And anxiety is very much in the atmosphere of “Last Letter First,” a sci-fi story set entirely aboard a rickety airbus bound for the near-space sanctuary colony of Nova. It’s a world of designer-brand body mods, regressive lawmakers, and environmental collapse. The tale follows road-trip seatmates Duri and Margosha, who haven’t come with knives, exactly—but they haven’t come empty-handed, either.
“Stare at the Sun” by Thrice
“I won’t close my eyes / Till I understand or go blind”
It’s not a subtle choice. Then again, the protagonist of the next story starts out at a decidedly unsubtle age: sophomore year of high school. “Mel for Melissa” takes the form of a therapy journal written by Kat, a former volleyball player still living with the reverberations of a shocking event from her varsity era. Back then, before things went bad, Kat and her new friend and teammate, Mel, bonded over being the only emo kids among the preps and jocks of the Lady Panthers. They wore the CD out on “Stare at the Sun.”
“Occupy Your Mind” by Villagers
“It’s the funniest feeling / So let’s slip inside”
This song gives me full-body goosebumps: the uneasy sensation of something unwelcome crawling under my skin. So it’s a natural pairing for “The Flood, the Tumble, the Talons, the Trick,” a modern folktale in which a man holds a water dragon captive and discovers beneath her pliable scales a method for cheating at cards. It’s worth reading Villagers frontman Conor O’Brien’s own thinking behind “Occupy Your Mind” here.
“Palm Shadows” by Vtoroi Ka
“S nashej storony uzhe sovsem ne vidno litsa…” (“From the sides, you can’t even see our faces anymore…”)
As a genre hopper myself, I have to give it up for Vtoroi Ka, two friends from Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan whose musical range spans rap, alternative hip-hop, and post-punk. The flat, low, pulsing tones of “Palm Shadows” (original title: “Teny ot Palm”) have the sound of a battle anthem, precisely the kind the characters in my next story, “The Advocate,” need to hear. This fabulist allegory reimagines America’s healthcare system as a jousting field, and people as knights competing for the ultimate prize: an accurate diagnosis.
“So American” by Olivia Rodrigo
“He’s got hands that make Hell seem cold…”
This high-energy, poppy love song features a speaker identified by her boyfriend as “so American.” The penultimate story in my book, “ADJECTIVE,” follows a protagonist whose identity as an immigrant is called into question by a new coworker. He’s the devil’s advocate type—we all have them in our lives—and without knowing her at all, he’s declared she’s “so American,” too. Told in the form of Mad Libs, this story deals with self-definition and autonomy. I bet the protagonist wishes she could’ve met her coworker’s challenge with the same charming, breezy insolence I get from Rodrigo’s music.
“Land Locked Blues” by Bright Eyes
“We can trade places, play musical graves…”
Since this playlist has a lot of happy-sad songs, I thought I’d end on one that’s, well, just plain sad-sad. “Land Locked Blues” is saturated with love and violence, in both the zoomed-in and zoomed-out sense. It speaks to painful endings and the liquid cures we use to try to cope with them. The book’s closing novelette, “Another Round Again,” is a surreal, psychologically charged spin through trivia night at a Chicago bar, as, with each passing question, protagonist Zasha finds herself ever closer to a truth she’s been desperate to ignore.
Endings hurt, as Conor Oberst tells us.
Readers, if you walk away, I’ll walk away.
Kristina Ten’s stories appear in Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, We’re Here: The Best Queer Speculative Fiction, McSweeney’s, Lightspeed, Nightmare, Uncanny, and elsewhere. She has won the Stephen Dixon Award for Short Fiction, the Subjective Chaos Kind of Award, and the F(r)iction Writing Contest, and has been a finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and the Locus Award. She is a graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop and the University of Colorado Boulder’s MFA program in creative writing. Tell Me Yours, I’ll Tell You Mine is her debut collection.