‘Nymph’: Stephanie LaCava on Clandestine Assassins, Lunar Storytelling and Swedish Death Metal

Nymph is the new novel by Stephanie LaCava, author of I Fear My Pain Interests You (2022) and The Superrationals (2020). In this elliptical story, Bathory, the daughter of two assassins, raised among the ripple effects of secrets and losses, slowly becomes embroiled in her parents’ world. Preternaturally adept at analyzing her environment for clues and codes, she lives in a realm of cloaked meaning and encoded information, where hidden messages might be contained in basketball games, shipping forecasts or graffitied Latin phrases. Structured by themes and rhythms of disappearance and reappearance, LaCava’s story follows Bathory as she, and those that she cares about, slip in and out of visibility. 

Laura McLean-Ferris Nymph has a kind of lunar storytelling structure in which events are only half lit, half told. So much is concealed in the spaces between paragraphs and chapters and in the way Bathory speaks as a first-person narrator, reflecting her upbringing, where much was concealed from her by her parents. Tell me how she came to you as a character and a voice.

Stephanie LaCava I love how you call it ‘lunar storytelling’. That’s perfect. This book is about a strange desire for invisibility and a denial of the desire for human connection. The two are different, of course. The first involves a conversation with phenomena of the three-dimensional, real world: surveillance, media, consumerism. The second is more related to magical aspects of being human that are not reducible to metrics or logic. Bath is ‘telling a story’ in which she tries to access both desires at the same time, only to find that there’s a strange dance that happens between them. The trappings of not wanting to be seen, in a very literal, technical, performative or real sense, may or may not be in service of finding true connection – as in, on the ground or in nature. A huge part of the story surrounds the differentiation between something being true and something being real, which I think it’s best if I don’t explain.

LMF Bathory is named after a Swedish death metal band that itself is named after Elizabeth Báthory, a 16th-century Hungarian countess. Her name is often shortened to ‘Bath’, pronounced ‘bat’, and this confusion around pronunciation and the resemblance of the word to ‘bath’ as in ‘bathtub’ create strange hiccups for her as she moves through the world.

SL When Bath’s a child, she wonders what it means to share a name with a weapon and an animal – while also being a little girl. The book also plays with ideas surrounding family lore and personal mythologies. There’s a part where Bath’s father insists that it’s important that her name is once removed from the countess, which he finds to be a base reference. No, it’s the band. This is funny for obvious reasons. With these two observations, you’re hitting on something important about the cycling of signs, references and associations that happens throughout the book.

LMF Yes, there are pieces of information planted throughout the novel like clues or codes – some of which must be circled back to so that one can make sense of them. These brought to mind paranoid noir novels, but I also thought of Lolita [1955] and the way Vladimir Nabokov places important information – the death of Mrs. Richard F. Schiller, for example – in the book’s foreword in a way that is almost unintelligible on the first read. I like the way that Bath’s ability to read signs mimics the way in which the book encourages us to read it but at one point I started wondering if she had gone too far down the rabbit hole. By midway through the book she has taken a job at a mysterious stationery store named Card Town in Alphabet City, which she understands to be a training position for work in a criminal underworld. I started thinking it would be funny if she was just working in a barely functioning stationery store and studying Latin, always believing that there was some great conspiracy at play. Incidentally, I loved Card Town as a dramatic location. It provides some surprising moments of levity that are so vivid and specific: I almost feel as though I’ve been there.

SL You may have been there: 47 Avenue A? It’s modelled after the Essex Card Shop in New York. I love that shop and the owner so much. There was a fire there a few years back; if anything else comes from this book, I hope it’s that more people will visit and support it. With Card Town, I was thinking of all the great fictional New York City fronts. The one in Léon [1994]? It was filmed at Guido’s Supreme Macaroni in Hell’s Kitchen. Bath’s Latin Research Society has the address of the building where the murders happen in the opening scene of Three Days of the Condor [1975]. In some ways, all these fronts moving throughout cultural production, between the real and the imagined, makes so much sense in the context of my work. The Dakota [apartment building] makes an appearance, as do Tompkins Square and Seward parks, Grand Street, a familiar bodega on Canal, that little sushi joint and, of course, the graffitied metal shutters that come down in front of shops. I also wanted there to be an understanding of a kind of hustling that is very New York, through the way some of the characters show up to make deals or connections at these places. There are also characters who hold back from appearing ambitious: performative detachment and professional loserdom is kind of just another form of hustling. More than any of my other books, I wanted New York to be a character in this one. 

LMF Were there any films, novels or artworks that accompanied you in writing this? I must admit I thought of the television show The Americans [2013–18] at times, which featured a teenage girl trying to enter her parents’ profession as embedded KGB operatives.

SL Yes – the interior cover of the book reproduces Rembrandt’s Christ in the Storm on the Sea of Galilee [1633], which hangs in the manor that appears early in the book. It’s not explicitly called out, but it becomes clear the house is full of stolen art. That painting was taken from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston in 1990 and still hasn’t been recovered. I absolutely love the recordings, ephemera and lore from this unsolved crime. So much was left behind, despite what was taken! It’s a very narrative scene for Rembrandt, and it calls to mind the opening of Nymph, which takes place on the North Sea. There’s also Catholic imagery throughout the book: resurrection, angels. The title is above all a nod to the art historical term. I was thinking of Giorgio Agamben’s book Nymphs [2013] and then how they show up in Catherine Malabou’s philosophical work [such as Pleasure Erased, 2020]. This also links to the idea of the assassin or the operative as a cipher. There are nods to alienation and cyberpunk noir, as in Abel Ferrara’s film New Rose Hotel [1998] or the speculative fiction of Izumi Suzuki. There are so many.

LMF You’ve also started a metal band, Demsyl, who are performing around the time the book comes out. How did that start and how is it going?

SL We’ll play in New York at the end of the month as one of four acts for Artists Space’s monthly music series, Abasement. The name is a misspelling of the cough syrup Delsym. It was formed originally by me, Max Lawton and Mark Iosifescu. There’s a noise music element, as well – and the members change depending on where and when we’re performing. For example, the New York performance will include Jack Callahan and Laszlo Horvath. At the beginning of November, we’re doing a performance in Louisville where we’ll play different songs and perform with Kris Abplanalp and Britt Walford. Barrett Avner is also involved in the project. It’s going really well, is super fun and will soon disappear.

Stephanie LaCava’s Nymph: A Novel is published by Verso Books

_{Main image: Stephanie LaCava, Nymphs, 2025, book cover. Courtesy: the author and Verso Books}