I wrote The Occident while trying to make sense of my own mortality. I found myself sliding, somewhat unwillingly, from a settled adulthood into middle age, dealing with those small rebellions of the body that begin as inconveniences and gradually become liabilities. Around the same time, my father’s memory began to slip. What had once been occasional lapses deepened, over the course of a few years, into dementia.
Then I came across a review by Tim Flannery in The New York Review of Books of The Superorganism: The Beauty, Elegance, and Strangeness of Insect Societies by Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson. Flannery’s review described a species of ant with a class of designated “undertakers” who identify dead ants by detecting a chemical—oleic acid—released during decomposition. If you apply that chemical to a living ant, it doesn’t matter that the ant is still alive and kicking. The undertakers treat it as dead and carry it off for burial.
I couldn’t stop thinking about that. There was something comic and unsettling in the image—these efficient little morticians, calmly removing ants that were still very much alive. It felt like a way into the book: a system that operates with total confidence, even when it’s wrong, and a culture that prefers not to look too closely at what happens to the dead.
That’s where Surge came from—the ant morticians of The Occident’s fictional city of Port Union—and that city’s broader obsession, in the novel, with hiding corpses at all costs.
As I was finishing the book, my father fell, slipped into a coma, and died a few days later. That experience found its way into the novel more directly. And so it is in The Occident that the protagonist must reckon with his own father’s death as I reckoned with mine.
There’s another thread running through the book. The protagonist is an urban planner and architect, so he spends a lot of time thinking not only about the decay of bodies but also of buildings—how they’re designed, how they age, and what happens when the systems meant to support them begin to fail. To write those sections, I traveled to cities across the Midwest—Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Toronto—and spent time in large public housing developments built in the 1950s and 60s. I spoke with residents, housing advocates, policy leaders, and architects. I wanted to understand how a set of decisions, made over time, shapes the built environment and threatens to define the lives of those inside it, and how people find ways to push back.
A different kind of influence comes from the church. I’m no longer religious, but I grew up on stories of the flood, the plagues, the Leviathan, the burning bush. My Sunday School teachers did their best to soften those stories, but they didn’t succeed. Something in those myths remained disturbing. In The Occident, and in my earlier story collection, The Book of Disbelieving, I keep returning to that feeling—that sense of terror and awe, of metaphysical bewilderment—that comes with encountering forces that defy explanation.
After so much time in the realm of fable and invention, I try in life to stay grounded in the tangible world: playing with my dogs, walking the aisles of secondhand shops, learning to cook new foods, renovating old houses.
Originally from south Georgia, David Lawrence Morse studied in Russia after the collapse of communism, cleaned toilets in Yosemite, and taught English then lived on a rice farm in the foothills of Yamaguchi, Japan, before earning an MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan. His first collection of stories, The Book of Disbelieving, won the Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and was published by Sarabande Books. His short fiction has also garnered the O. Henry Prize and the Calvino Prize and has appeared in numerous literary magazines. He is the director of the writing program at the Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale.
Regal House Publishing is proud to bring you David Lawrence Morse’s The Occident in the spring of 2028.
