A Better World (Atria Books, 2024) by Sarah Langan follows Linda Farmer, her husband, and teenage twins as they leave a decaying New York to live in an exclusive “company town,” Plymouth Valley, where the air is clean, the community is safe, and everyone works for Better World, creator of the miraculous plastic substitute Omnium. But Plymouth Valley is also home to a new company culture—or, perhaps, religion—called Hollow, which includes altars, seasonal festivals, and veneration of the genetically engineered, nasty caladrius bird, both pet and food source.
No matter what the family does, they can’t seem to fit in, and they’re terrified of being exiled, which means losing their deposit—the last of their savings—and hope for a safe and stable life. When Linda finally makes inroads and is welcomed into the ruling clique, she discovers Plymouth Valley’s greatest secrets. Linda must figure out how to save her family, if she even should.
A Better World is a page-turning dystopian thriller set apart by its complex portrait of marriage, questions about the responsibilities and limits of parenting, and the ethics of living in a time of disaster. Langan and I talked over email about corporations and families, scientific advancement and ancient mythology, and the strengths we can find in human nature.
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The Rumpus: A Better World is set during the Great Unwinding, a kind of slow apocalypse that feels eerily believable. How did you build this crisis? Were there any disasters that felt particularly important to explore?
Sarah Langan: Fictional stories of soft collapse aren’t new, but in the post-COVID world, they’re starting to feel more likely.
There are bright spots. America is less polluted than it was in the 1970s. Quality of life is better, and health care is both improved and more accessible. My kids are getting a better public education than I did, despite the lockdowns and annoying laptops. And we know more now about difference—racial and gender. People without voices back then have voices now.
Still, there are problems. I have a master’s in environmental health science and in 2006 took a class literally called “The Thermodynamics of Global Warming,” where we proved what was happening mathematically. Anyone with a degree in thermodynamics knew the world was getting hotter. It was going to cost a lot of lives and a lot of money. But the world didn’t know, because corporations and investment banks eager to keep their oil profits paid off random scientists without applicable degrees to lie for them. We see this again and again: those in power lie about the harm they’re committing in order to keep power. Lead, Teflon, DDT, Facebook, TikTok. . . . Power is flowing in one direction right now, and more and more it appears that our voices are impotent screams on social media, in which we attack one another instead of our common enemy.
I was less interested in exploring this than in acknowledging it. This era feels to me like an unsustainable phase, a chrysalis.
What I really wanted to explore are the moral dilemmas inherent to this kind of world. It’s a prisoner’s dilemma: to make the world better, we have to sacrifice. We have to trust others to do the same. But how can we trust anyone, given the evidence? I wanted to follow a realistic, loving family through that quagmire.
Rumpus: So much sets this apart from other dystopias, but one thing that stands out to me is the protagonist, Linda Farmer, herself. She’s not the usual post-apocalyptic or mid-apocalyptic hero. She’s a middle-aged, married mother. How did you decide to make her your point-of-view character, and what insights about this world—inside and outside the company town—is she well-suited to provide?
Langan: I’m a middle-aged woman, so . . . but also, Mad Max is an unlikely scenario. Apocalypse porn is harmful. The more we broadcast these visions of our own decimation, the more we internalize them. You’ll notice most of these bleak visions of our future kill off the civilizing women, particularly the mothers. We’re replaced by children and hotties. For some crazy reason, this seems like unrealistic wish fulfillment.
By definition, humans are inherently humane. If things fall apart, we’ll still be us, trying to make do and carry on. People adapt. It won’t feel so very different than it feels now. Linda is the kind of character who’ll wear blinders to survive, the kind of person who’ll say: “I’ll take a deal that assures my personal safety, even if it makes the world’s imperceptibly worse for everyone else.” She’ll deny she made this decision because it’s awful to think about, until she’s forced to confront it, and then maybe she’ll act with courage despite the very real and scary repercussions of losing that safety. I think most survivors, most people, are like that.
Rumpus: I was fascinated by Linda and Russell’s marriage. In the beginning, there are “years of small crimes between them” but also genuine love, and a shared commitment to keeping their family afloat. There are many times in the novel when they seem to reach a turning point, some crucial realization that I expected to permanently shift the marriage either toward estrangement or renewed commitment. And yet they often circled around again. Do you think their relationship subverts how we talk about marriage? How we write stories?
Langan: In modern feminism, married women have two options: (1) Get that house in order!
(2) Kick that man to the curb! Then everybody sings, “I am Woman Hear me Roar.” This narrative feels like false advertising—another way we blame women for not doing enough, for failing. Most of life is small epiphanies we don’t act on, imperceptible movement in the right direction that we hope is enough, we hope happens in time.
To me, the marriage and the cult of Plymouth Valley are twined. One is the black mirror to the other.
Rumpus: I keep thinking about Linda’s observation that corporations can operate like family and families like corporations, with each member working separately to move the collective forward. Is this a comment about capitalism? About survival? About human relationships in general?
Langan: The modern nuclear family is inherently selfish. We’re taught this unit is more important than any person or thing. If we step on someone else’s kid in order to help our own kid, it’s worth it. In fact, we’re morally obliged. If you watched The Last of Us, you know what I mean. In popular culture, every terrible thing is justifiable if it’s for love. But why? The thing about cults, they indoctrinate. They whitewash. They blind us to better alternatives.
Rumpus: Loneliness is also at the core of this story. At first, the Plymouth Valley residents all but shun the Farmer-Bowens. Sometimes, Linda even feels lonely in her family. Finally, she befriends the Act Hollow women, and I felt this surge or relief—she’s finally found genuine friends, who will let her be herself!—but then those relationships grow strained. What does A Better World have to say about community and loneliness?
Langan: The friends Linda makes care a lot about appearance. The façade is more important than the substance. I encountered this a lot when my family and I moved to Los Angeles. I was often asked what my husband did for a living—they were much less interested in what I did— where exactly I lived, what kind of car I drove, and where my children went to school. These people made me very uncomfortable. But I also understood that they were scared. LA is one big company town, and reputation means everything. Plymouth Valley is basically Los Angeles, at least, the enclaves where everybody does prayer hands and cries about stuff happening in the world but then never actually does anything about it. I miss having a community, childhood friends and extended family. I don’t think I’m alone in that.
Rumpus: As a writer, how do you immerse yourself in this question—the various ways our society can fall apart, and our lives with it—without falling into despair?
Langan: As long as my family’s healthy, I have no reason to despair. So much is getting better, it’s the best time to be a woman in the history of civilization. Health care is the best it’s ever been. Famine in the United States is rare.
I’m not happy that Congress can’t pass laws. I’m not happy Roe v. Wade got overturned. I’m not happy the boomers won’t give up the reins. But these are not new problems.
I think we forget that we’re an incredibly empathetic species. So we see this awful news on omnipresent screens, and we feel morally obliged to get upset, to even despair. It’s not productive. It’s not necessarily accurate. We’re actually doing okay as a species.
What bothers me is corruption and the way corporate interests have turned us against each other while they steal everything. I want their hands out of the cookie jars so we can get back to the important work we have ahead of us.
Rumpus: A Better World’s dystopia depends on information siloing. Linda suspects a young patient is suffering from a novel cancer, and Russell tries to determine the environmental impacts of Omnium, but they’re both stymied by hospitals, corporations, and countries refusing to share data. Right now, we’re facing a flood of disinformation, but do you think information hoarding is just as big a threat?
Langan: It’s all the same. If no one’s accountable, if TikTok and Facebook don’t have to answer for the crap they spread, you can bet the corrupt, interested parties will find a way to get rich.
For a hot second, we thought the Internet meant free information. But our lawmakers let us down and continue to let us down. Maybe they got bought. Probably they got bought. It doesn’t mean we people won’t ultimately win. But the suffering our greedy lawmakers have caused and will continue to cause was avoidable.
Rumpus: The caladrius is such a funny, creepy, and memorable creation. How did this idea come to you?
Langan: In mythology, the caladrius ate the sins or sickness of kings and purified them so they could continue to rule. Alternatively, the caladrius refused to eat that sickness and the king died.
In A Better World, the caladrius is a genetically engineered bird meant to replace chicken as a clean, high protein source of nutrition. But the creatures are hot-house flowers. They can only live inside Plymouth Valley, they’re dirty, and they’re mean. Everybody in the town keeps one, the way people might keep chickens, for use as a food and egg source. They’re omnivorous and happy to eat anything they find, including one another. Over time, they become venerated, incorporated into Plymouth Valley’s religion, Hollow.
The idea of the caladrius evolved for me. I liked the idea of something obviously weird that gave the sense that the town was slightly wrong. I also liked the idea of a culture so confused about its purpose, other than surviving and resource hoarding, that in absence of a higher calling, it begins to worship itself—a great, white, carnivorous, dirty bird.
Rumpus: A Better World includes so many genres: it’s a literary family drama, a science fiction-thriller and futuristic-folk horror. How do you think about genre as you write?
Langan: I don’t think about it. I just tell whatever story I’m interested in telling. I’m lucky my editor was okay with it. I pitched a novel about a marriage falling apart, then gave her this!
But to more properly answer your question, I want to write things that sell and appeal to wide audiences because it’s the only way anyone will hear my voice. So I very much wanted to write a smart literary thriller, and that was the plan. But I don’t have as much control over my work as I’d like. Whenever I try to lock myself into a specific story, it dies. It goes totally flat. So I had these hundred pages about a marriage and a crazy night out, where Linda realizes that a woman she met may have harmed her child. I understand that this is enough, this is a novel. But for me, I just didn’t care. I felt like the story of marriage, of a woman learning everybody’s a gas-lighter, had been done to the point of parody. I kept thinking about this wild company town and this nutty religion and these birds, these symbols of a deeper, global gaslight. The cult of modern culture we’re all fighting so hard to feel safe inside, even though it’s killing everything we love.
Rumpus: You’re a horror community fixture, a founding board member of the Shirley Jackson Awards, and winner of three Bram Stoker Awards. What does horror mean to you, and how does it inform your newer work?
Langan: I love horror. I love writing horror. I love genre. I love tight plots. I love stories that inspire and break hearts and then mend them again. The best horror does that. Almost all my writer friends are horror writers. It’s the best community.
On my instruction, my last two novels (Good Neighbors and A Better World) weren’t marketed as horror. It’s hard to know—right now, horror is getting published all over the place. So maybe I’m wrong. But when I speak to readers, most women tell me they love my work but would never read horror. The problem is that without these women, my audience suddenly gets very small.
Here’s a story: I saw the movie Evil Dead when I was a kid, and the rape scene upset me very, very much. I never really recovered from how it was treated as a joke, that raping women was funny and maybe they deserved to be humiliated. Director Sam Raimi regrets the scene. He was a kid at the time, and rape was weirdly part of pop culture. I remember seeing it on Fantasy Island, on General Hospital, even Barney Miller!
One day a few years ago, my next-door neighbor told me she never watched horror movies or read horror because she saw Evil Dead when she was a kid. She’d never gotten over it. I was shocked that I wasn’t the only person that movie had so deeply upset.
So while I love horror, and it’s excellent now—vibrant and ambitious and the violence against women is both reduced and less gratuitous—I can understand that if you’ve been burned once, you don’t want to go back. That’s why I have not called my last two novels horror novels, though they absolutely are horror.
Rumpus: It’s crucial to write about climate collapse and the other forces unraveling society, but it can also be very depressing! So much of the suffering in this book, too, seems like something that we could be experiencing or something we might experience sooner rather than later. At the same time, the novel isn’t all doom and gloom. There are figures, both immediate and beyond Plymouth Valley, who are fighting and even making progress on different fronts. How do you balance these negative and positive forces in the story?
Langan: I’m trying to accurately depict what I see while also offering potential solutions. The trap we get into because of social media, is the narrative of our own helplessness. But we’re not useless consumers whose only power comes from what we buy. That’s a lie. We’re producers. It’s our nature to create, and I think the reason people are so angry right now is because they’ve found themselves divorced from the very thing that makes them happy: creation. There’s plenty we can do.
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Author photograph by JT Petty
