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Danielle Valentine, the author behind Delicate Condition — the book that’s being adapted for the upcoming season of “American Horror Story” — is giving fans a taste of the 12th season by detailing what her book is about, out August 1.
With all the buzz surrounding the title, Delicate Condition publisher, Sourcebooks, and “AHS” creator, Ryan Murphy, have kept information surrounding both the book and show’s storylines under wraps; however, Valentine is spilling the beans on what fans can expect.
The upcoming psychological horror-thriller centres on Valentine’s lead character Anna Alcott — whom Emma Roberts has been cast as — a New York City-based actress. After Anna’s breakthrough performance in a surprise hit indie film, she’s suddenly left navigating newfound fame “while also desperately trying to conceive a child after multiple failed rounds of IVF treatments,” as per Entertainment Weekly.
In the novel, Anna suspects someone is trying to stop her from getting pregnant, EW reports after speaking to Valentine via a Zoom interview.
“Could it be the anonymous online Tumblr user @Number1Fan, who’s been dragging her on the internet? Could it be the strange lady that snuck a photo of her as she entered her doctor’s office? Could it be the stranger who broke into her house one night and crept into her bed while she was sleeping? She can’t be certain of anything these days,” the outlet offers a synopsis. “Anna finds support in her close friend Siobhan, another actress who’s much more well known than she is, but her own husband doesn’t even believe her half the time. Then Anna’s worst fear becomes a reality: her doctor informs her that she has miscarried… except she can still feel the baby inside her. She can still see the physical effects it’s having on her body.
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As someone begins stalking Anna through the Hamptons, her pregnancy symptoms grow “more severe and horrifying.” Making matters worse, no one takes her seriously when she insists something isn’t right.
“It is essentially a horror novel about pregnancy,” Valentine teased. “It’s a novel exploring not just the actual physical gruesomeness of what pregnancy is, but also the medical gaslighting that even modern, very privileged women experience as they’re going through their pregnancies and the symptoms that I feel we as a culture still don’t talk about for strange reasons.”
Delicate Condition has already garnered early praise, some of which liken the book to a modern, feminist version of Rosemary’s Baby. While Valentine is honoured over the comparison, she revealed she was “much more inspired by [the 1979 sci-fi/horror] “Alien”, which I think will also give readers an idea of where I’m taking this.”
When the topic of “Alien” resurfaced, Valentine was six months pregnant with a baby girl, prompting her to begin working on a thriller concept, which she ultimately scrapped as it began to feel cliché and the characters fell flat. Then, Valentine and her husband began having conversations about another story, keeping “Alien” as the reference.
“It’s really a movie about pregnancy, but it’s been written by a man who doesn’t understand that that’s what he’s writing about,” Valentine shared. “It’s what happens when a guy thinks, What’s the scariest possible thing I can come up with? And it’s this idea of, what if you’re growing this creature inside of you and it’s using your resources to get bigger and you can’t control it? It has a mind of its own, and then one day it just bursts out of you in this gruesome, bloody mess. When I first saw it when I was a kid, it didn’t occur to me that that’s basically what pregnancy is, but at six months pregnant, I’m like, ‘Oh, wow! That’s just a pregnancy story without the pregnancy.’ That was the seed right there.”
In just one hour, the author came up with the ideas for the story, then made sure they hadn’t been explored before by checking Rosemary’s Baby.
In addition to “Alien”, Stephen King, and books like The Handmaid’s Tale, several other works inspired Delicate Condition.
Valentine credits “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, led by Sarah Michelle Gellar, “and that idea of using horror as a metaphor for some of these bigger moments in your life.” In the book, Anna’s career as a teen actress kicked off after landing a role on a fictional show called “Spellbound” — inspired by “Buffy”.
“Silence of the Lambs” is another project that influenced the book.
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“Much of the horror comes from this atmospheric creeping, this dread that keeps building,” Valentine told EW, referencing that Jodie Foster vehicle in the 1991 flick.
Like her book, “Alien” involves “a woman surrounded by men who don’t believe her,” Valentine added.
Aside from drawing inspiration from entertainment, the writer said there’s also the horror of reality, in which she recounted the “horrifying” 2022 Roe v. Wade landmark decision that legally guaranteed abortion access in the U.S.
“About a year before I came up with the idea for this book, I miscarried,” Valentine recalled. “That experience was very surreal and horrible and I think made me a little bit more aware as a woman of what it means to carry a child, how huge it is that we’re asking women to do that. We’re not being honest with them about the side effects and how it’s going to feel and how it’s going to change their bodies and their minds.
“My brain is different,” she stressed. “I know women say that, and I didn’t understand what they meant. I have anxiety that I didn’t have before. I feel like a different person, physically and mentally, just from having gone through this experience. It really bothers me when I hear particularly male lawmakers and male politicians talking about how women can go through pregnancy and give the baby up for adoption or what have you, and really not giving enough weight to what it is to experience pregnancy and how life-altering that experience is.”
Valentine noted that her later pregnancy “was about as typical as it possibly could have been,” but she still wanted to draw attention to not-so ideal experiences and feelings surrounding pregnancy, and “make it a metaphor, make it bigger, make it hyperbolic in the hopes that people who never are going to experience pregnancy, who have no desire to experience pregnancy, who haven’t experienced pregnancy yet will just feel it a little bit.”
While “American Horror Story” season 12 is currently filming in New York City, using Delicate Condition as its inspiration — marking the first time the popular FX horror has adapted a novel — Valentine is eager to see how the show will adapt her material.
Nonetheless, she couldn’t be more excited.
“I am such a fan of Ryan Murphy and that whole team that I just have utter faith that it’s going to be glorious,” Valentine gushed. “So it’s been really easy for me to feel entirely excited for that.
“It has been purely thrilling to watch it happen,” she added.
This is the first time one of Valentine’s books are being adapted for a screenplay. Two of her previous works, The Merciless and Survive the Night, were considered for Hollywood projects, however neither were seen through.
“American Horror Story” season 12’s cast includes Roberts, Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, Cara Delevingne, Kim Kardashian, and “AHS” veteran Zachary Quinto.
Melissa Romualdi
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