Red Still Runs Through You

IN NYMPH, the new novel by playwright, filmmaker, and novelist Stephanie LaCava, the young heroine, Bathory (nicknamed “Bat”), realizes that her parents are employed in espionage and assassination and follows them into the underworld. In LaCava’s hands, the novel avoids the clichés of the spy or contract killer narrative in favor of something more oblique. Violence is rarely seen, but emotional damage is inflicted in full view. Across her work, LaCava’s female protagonists contend with being seen or projected upon, being constantly on the borderline of hypervisibility and disappearance. It’s no coincidence that Mathilde, the heroine of her debut novel The Superrationals (2020), works in the art world, or that Margot in I Fear My Pain Interests You (2022), daughter of famous parents, becomes reclusive. LaCava’s work exists at the convergence of different forms of media—the cinema of Pier Paolo Pasolini, the writing of Zoë Lund, the spectacle of punk and metal, the history and aesthetics of 1970s revolutionaries, and the grunginess of old-school New York City. It’s also preoccupied with what we might call confounding objects—items and people that both attract and resist easy interpretation.