Stories are insubstantial things, only words strung together, and easily broken apart. With this comes one big advantage: Stories are not constrained by reality. In them, Bengal tigers and teenage boys can survive together for seven months in a small boat on the open ocean. Human men can have enormous wings and fly away from people who mistreat them. No matter how strange these events are, the strangest thing about fabulist stories is that they can change the real world. In her new novel, Clear Water (Flatiron Books, 2026), Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes makes splendid use of the fabulist’s tools to portray the violence done to girls and young women in ways that both subvert and heighten a reality that we have become so accustomed to, we are at risk of no longer feeling it.
Fuentes began writing Clear Water out of frustration with what she calls “the beautiful dead girl trope.” Many mysteries begin with a dead girl, and Fuentes noted the silence and passivity of these stories. In real life, dead girls don’t solve their own murders. They can’t point the finger at the person who did them violence. But writers don’t have to stick to real life.
The novel opens with Alma, a woman in her late twenties whose marriage has been over for a few years and whose sister has been gone for a decade. These losses and Alma’s own role in bringing them about intrude on her daily—in the form of driving her ex-husband’s truck for one thing, and then in the form of a girl she finds on the side of the road. A speechless girl, but very much alive. Soon several people in Alma’s small hometown begin to see girls. They appear where they shouldn’t be, in snow drifts, underdressed for the bitter Wisconsin winter. Just as unexpectedly and inexplicably, the girls disappear, every one of them before the person who sees them can make real contact. Who they are, where they come from, and how they disappear are questions Alma feels she must answer.
In addition to Clear Water, Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes is the author of the collected stories Are We Ever Our Own (BOA Editions, 2022) and the novel The Sleeping World (Atria Books, 2017).
I spoke with her over Zoom about why she chose to tackle the mystery genre, how she blended it with the lyrical approach of her previous fiction, and why these particular characters tell us about the missing and dead girls of rural Wisconsin.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The Rumpus: Many characters experience the events in a book, but the meaning of the story is determined by who tells it. Your book has six points of view. Five of them are characters in the story. How did you select these characters and decide to write in the third person?
Gabrielle Lucille Fuentes: I had been writing a lot of first person in my stories and a novel, but I wanted to work with third in this book because it allows more distance from myself. Alma is the main perspective and there are parts of her life story that are similar to mine and others that are really different. This was even more true with the other point-of-view characters, especially Therese. Third person acknowledges that the character might know things and have had experiences that I can’t access. When I write in first person, it doesn’t feel like there’s anything hidden. Even close third allows the character some privacy and acknowledges difference and distance from the author.
Rumpus: Third person suggests there are parts of the character that haven’t been presented to the reader.
Fuentes: Yes. Not that first person is me, but that I have fuller access to that character. Third person was hard for me when I started writing because I associate it with the all-knowing realist narrator in classic novels, a narrator who has full knowledge of the world, an authority I didn’t feel I had. But as I wrote I began to think that I do have some authority. This is my book. Also, Alma just came to me in the voice of third person. Perspective is so linked to voice. I did feel comfortable writing from Alma’s perspective because she’s from Wisconsin, like me. Our cultural touch points and spaces are the same. I felt we had a shared worldview.
Rumpus: No matter how close the narrative distance in third person is, the story’s voice is not identical to the character’s. But in first person point of view, it is.
Fuentes: Yes, it is.
Rumpus: In addition to the chapters told from a character’s perspective, we also have three short chapters in something more like an omniscient point of view. Is that how you think of the narrator in those chapters?
Fuentes: Those chapters were essential for me to write the book because in part the story grew out of my frustration with the beautiful dead-girl trope in books and shows like Twin Peaks. The three chapters you called “omniscient” I think of as being from the perspective of the earth and its animal inhabitants. The chapters also give a voice and agency to the missing girls, a collective voice, which was really important to me, that the girls have agency in the book, that they are propelling the story. The last chapter more strongly reflects my belief that the land and the animals who inhabit it are so important, that they too have agency, so I wanted the reader to learn what happened at the very end through their eyes.
These chapters also reflect my perspective as the artist, what interested me most about this story, what I was reading as research and inspiration. The chapters were also fun to write because I get to be in this lyrical space, free from time and the material world, free from the logic of plot.
Rumpus: Novels with multiple points of view commonly distribute text evenly among the point-of-view characters, but not so in Clear Water. Most of the chapters come from Alma’s point of view. Her former classmate Vinnie, now a police officer investigating the girls, shares his point of view in five chapters. The perspectives of Alma’s ex-husband, Dale, and her good friend, Therese, who has recently moved to town from Chicago, each feature in three chapters, and only one chapter uses Alma’s childhood best friend Inger’s point of view. How did this distribution come about?
Fuentes: Perfectly divided wasn’t going to work for this story. It felt inorganic, like a structure that other people have used for stories where it worked for them. I didn’t write the chapters in the order they appear in the final draft. I wrote them all out of order over a long period of time. Their published order was part of the revising and editing process once I had a sense of the book’s final storylines. I concentrated on how to draw the reader forward through the book, releasing information when it was most needed and providing a chapter from someone’s point of view besides Alma’s once readers already had a chance to develop an interest in that character, and care about seeing things from their perspective. I wanted these other perspectives because this is a story about a community.
Rumpus: Is that one of the reasons you made a point of including chapters in which Vinnie and Inger also see the mysterious girls?
Fuentes: Yes, I wanted it to be really clear that the girls aren’t Alma’s hallucinations and that all sorts of people experience their appearance in different ways. Like Alma, Vinnie and Inger are able to connect a little bit more with the girls because they’re more open to the message the girls are sending because they too lost someone they loved. They’re in that space of grief where our world and the world of these animal girls meet.
Rumpus: In general, what do you see as the advantages of the multi-point-of-view novel?
Fuentes: My first novel was about the lack of community and how totalitarianism destroys communities. In this novel, I wanted the characters to have a little succor, a soft place to land, and I wanted Alma to thaw some, allow herself to have connections. I also started to really like the other point-of-view characters and wanted to spend time with them, to see who they were outside of Alma, see parts of them she wouldn’t have seen, which is what writing many points of view allows us to do: It allows us to see more of the world.
Rumpus: As a reader, it seemed particularly important to me to see the story from Dale’s perspective as a way to understand how far his intentions are from Alma’s suspicions and worries about him. Though there is a gap between how he and Alma see the world, Dale is not indifferent to or unaware of the gap.
Fuentes: Right. Dale will never tell Alma what he’s feeling because he doesn’t know how, so there is going to be a rift. But by taking his perspective, I was able to let the reader see what is holding him back, which is different from what Alma thinks it is. I also wanted to explore male characters because most of my previous stories have been about women. I did feel a little more connected to Vinnie than Dale in some ways because he is Latino and marginalized, but because he is a police officer, I also found it really challenging to inhabit him. What do you do when you are drawn to a character, yet very strongly disagree with a choice they make or a view they hold? This book is a mystery, but the person who solves the mystery is not a cop. That was important to me. I didn’t want to write a procedural that followed typical rules about who’s in power and who has access to information.
Rumpus: Do you see any disadvantages to a multi-point-of-view approach?
Fuentes: Many. Sometimes readers don’t like one of the characters, or they get invested in one character’s story and feel disrupted when the perspective changes. I often feel that in a novel where each chapter features a brand new perspective. It’s always a risk. If a reader wants a book mainly about Dale, then mine is not the right book for them, and that’s okay. In the end, for this novel I felt like there were more positives than negatives to using multiple perspectives.
Rumpus: In addition to multiple points of view, Clear Water features multiple time periods. Two-thirds of the chapters are set in 2018, when Alma is an adult. One third dramatize key events during her high school years. How did that come about?
Fuentes: I wanted multiple timelines to depict how we experience time, memory, and loss. Alma is stuck in the past in many ways. The past is not just a flashback for her. It has gravity, like a planet pulling at her. My editors helped me make sure that this was not just a book about memories though, that there was vital action in the characters’ present lives as well. In the final draft, the present is the main story. I like Luis Alberto Urrea’s image of a snapping turtle underwater. You only see the little point of its head, but the turtle could get you. If you’re looking at a geological section of the earth, the visible part is the present, and the past rises like mountains. I wrote the moments of this novel while I was writing other books and in a different order from how they appear in print because I didn’t know until late in the process exactly how the past was going to inform the present. Once I realized how they were all connected, I had to go back and change everything. That’s the challenge with the time-braided novel. Rather than one forward movement, you have backward movements and sideways movements like a web.
Rumpus: What do you think the risks of a time-braided novel are?
Fuentes: So many. It’s not going to make sense. It’s going to take 300 years to write. It’s a lot to hold in your head, for both the reader and the writer, and every piece has to speak to other pieces of the story. In my case, I also worried that if I’m constantly dipping into the past, maybe what happened in high school to Alma and her sister is really the story. Ultimately, it was clear the story was about the long-term impact of pain and loss on an individual and a community, and therefore I did need three time periods in the book. While I was editing, the writer Hanna Pylväinen showed me a grid she uses to record what characters are doing during scenes or periods of the book in which they don’t appear. This helped me track the hidden parts of the story and the characters’ lives.
Rumpus: I call those off-stage events, things going on outside the view of the readers and other point-of-view characters that will become relevant and be revealed later in the story. Off-stage events are often particularly important to map in mysteries and thrillers.
Fuentes: Yes, and I have to do that on a big scale. Physically record it on paper, put notes on the wall and the floor to see the timeline and track characters’ off-stage experiences and actions. The people who read my early drafts are also enormously helpful in pointing out where I’ve lost track of these things.
Rumpus: The process requires looking at the tree and looking at the forest. Writers spend a great deal of time on the tree—its bark, its leaves. To tell a good story, you also have to board the helicopter, get up high, and scan the forest of the story.
Fuentes: Exactly. What I love about novels is that they can embody our experience of time and loss. Alma’s losses are still churning through her in the novel’s present, so the past is her present, her reality. I think it’s hard to explore that in a traditional mystery because they are plotted to clock time. Louise Penny says that in a murder mystery, the murder actually started many years before it happens.
Rumpus: When you began writing this book, were you thinking of it as a literary mystery or did someone else give the book that description?
Fuentes: I did want to write a mystery. My early writing was very lyrical and dense, and had less of a focus on plot. The heart of Clear Water is personal, but I also wanted to engage in artistic experimentation and challenge myself to write something different from what I’d done before. I use the term “literary mystery” because Clear Water isn’t Agatha Christie. It’s not a puzzle box, but it’s mysterious because life is mysterious. We don’t get clean answers.
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