Red Still Runs Through You

David Hering interviews Stephanie LaCava about her new novel, “Nymph.”

By David HeringNovember 28, 2025

• Fiction

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.

I talked to LaCava about Nymph, noir films and black metal, and the role of beauty, mystery, and iconography in her work.

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DAVID HERING: I wanted to start by asking you about the novel’s title. In your first novel, the protagonist Mathilde is also referred to as a “nymph.” It’s a slippery expression—mythical, sexual, disruptive—and I wonder if you could talk about why you return to it.

STEPHANIE LACAVA: You’re the first person who has noticed “nymph” in The Superrationals. I love the word itself. Its root is the Latin “nympha,” which in its original Greek form means “young wife.” Latin is important throughout Nymph: Bat teaches Latin to children as part of her front. I was thinking of the nymph in art history when I chose the title, and how the image of this mythological spirit has evolved or devolved in different directions. In Giorgio Agamben’s Nymphs, for example, he writes that the nymph is an “image of the image, the cipher of the Pathosformeln which is passed down from generation to generation and to which generations entrust the possibility of finding or losing themselves, of thinking or of not thinking.” Maybe Mathilde is more developed in The Superrationals as a straight cipher and Bathory is the true “nymph” in Nymph.

Over time, “nymph” came to mean a beautiful woman who may or may not be part god. And then it became somehow synonymous with the diagnosis of nymphomania, meaning sex-obsessed. That’s a crazy trajectory. I like the word as a stand-in for “cipher,” or a collective fascination for something that’s wild and hard to trap—even hard to understand or see.

Unknowability is a key feature of your protagonists—we rarely have full access to their minds. But this obfuscation is often presented as the obverse of a very high level of visibility or objectification, particularly in the context of being a woman viewed by men.

All of my books deal with invisibility or the desire not to be seen or known. A disguise can be a form of invisibility or a way of creating a persona, which is then a kind of visibility. Mathilde, Margot, and Bat—maybe the latter less so—appear at first as very public characters, but that’s not the full story. Expository details about them aren’t always provided in the classic sense.

For me, this lack of exposition extends to the style of your novels. Reading the blurb for Nymph, you might expect an espionage thriller, but the novel refuses that kind of propulsive narrative. There’s this glassy, often dreamlike atmosphere that prioritizes exploring a mood over revealing or expositing.

There’s a lack of concrete information in Nymph. How much can one ever know the real story or intention behind someone’s actions or relationship? In this story, there is an important focus on differentiating what is “real” versus what is “true.” Sometimes, what isn’t said may be more true even if it is not real. Likewise, a relationship can be real, but not true.

And what’s an assassin story without “on-screen” violence? I’ve had a number of people tell me that Nymph is a “French movie.” I think this is a way of saying that there’s no classic “Hollywood” action or that it takes a different approach to the assassin story. You can see my characters fuck but not be hurt. In I Fear My Pain Interests You, Margot doesn’t feel physical pain, so she can’t express what happens to her body. Violence is seen only on a television monitor, recorded as proof. In Nymph, the idea of proof becomes something else, and maybe the very idea of airtight evidence or record is called into question.

So much of Nymph is about the necessity of secrecy, of places one mustn’t or shouldn’t go. There’s a striking image early on of a line on the floor in the house that Bat isn’t to cross, and beyond that, a room inside another room where her parents’ “business” takes place. You don’t describe this room in detail, but there’s a feeling that’s being conjured through this secrecy.

It’s funny the way you say that—for a child, “business” can kind of mean anything: espionage or contract killing or sex. This lack of certainty is perfect for the story. Feeling and atmosphere are important because this is the synthesis of Bat’s worldview as a child (another kind of “nymph”).

Your work seems to be influenced by a particular aesthetic, the kind of grungy East Coast late-1970s feel that you might see in a Larry Cohen or Abel Ferrara film, or perhaps Chantal Akerman’s News from Home. There’s a flyblown, noirish version of the city that I can see in your previous novels, but in Nymph, it seems to have attained its clearest form.

If I consider my style in a cinematic or visual sense, there are noir leanings to the story and there are also moments of intense color. I don’t know if this is literal or like the red on an infrared scanner. There’s a line in Nymph that reminds me of this: “The difference between noir and cyberpunk is that red still runs through you.” The cold-bloodedness of an assassin story is tempered when there’s a discussion of a soul.

The assassin subplot in this novel, coupled with that seventies aesthetic, makes me think of Ferrara’s film Ms. 45, which starred Zoë Lund, whose poems you’ve published with Small Press and whose short film Hot Ticket you recently rediscovered and screened. Could you talk a little about why you gravitate toward her work?

Lund worked with Ferrara in different ways. She wrote the screenplay for Bad Lieutenant, and it’s said she wrote a version of New Rose Hotel. Lund was also a talented musician, screenwriter, poet, and novelist, and her longer-form works have yet to be published. In his new memoir Scene, Ferrara speaks very highly of Lund’s writing and attention to detail. Lund was also very political. I love her interest in revolutionary films—I used her treatise on The Battle of Algiers in a play that I put together based on Pasolini’s The Gospel According to St. Matthew. It’s rumored that Lund was once considered to play a female Pasolini in Ferrara’s biopic. Funnily enough, she has a line in a short she made for the Rotterdam Film Festival in the nineties that circles back to what we discussed earlier: “That which is not yet, but ought to be, is more real than that which merely is.”

The covers of your novels, which I understand you chose yourself, each feature a female performer. This time it’s Uschi Obermaier. Can you explain why you chose these women?

I chose the photos on the covers of all three of my novels, and each woman is a public figure with certain immediate associations. The Superrationals was the French actress Isabelle Adjani. Pain had the American guitarist Poison Ivy from the Cramps, and here it is the German model-turned-activist Uschi Obermaier. She was shot by Richard Avedon and Helmut Newton as this sex-bomb cipher, but she also appeared in news footage during a demonstration in Berlin, and at home with [filmmaker and member of German political commune Kommune 1] Rainer Langhans. Even if she denies a political agenda, she was her own kind of “double agent” as both a legendary groupie and then a (perhaps reluctant) face of Kommune 1. She also played the maracas for the experimental group Amon Düül, which I find hilarious.

Your writing has always circled around particular musical forms—punk, hardcore—and in Nymph there are several references to black metal, most obviously the protagonist’s name, Bathory, which she shares with the band.

The power of the music and spectacle in black metal may shift the revolutionary potential on some registers, because it’s not based in energies beyond entertainment. Intention, unseen behind the scenes, in both cultural production and human interaction, is something I always come back to. This is a way of playing with the lore of those who create “culture” or “subculture.” I am very interested in when the latter morphs into the former, and is or is not destroyed.

I recently had a funny exchange with a friend where I showed him this picture of the cover of a third-wave grunge album, and it looked exactly like a newer photograph by a prominent conceptual artist. He texted me back: “When you’re a genius all you can do is take from what’s below you.” What is below someone? Who is the genius if the rubric is something else altogether?

This is a book about the different kinds of visibility and imprint that are possible or impossible in the contemporary cultural landscape, which includes the marketplace. And this seeds the importance of human-to-human bonding above all else. There’s a separate side that urges us not to focus on being too clever or obsessed with intellect, or its performance.

You spent a lot of your childhood in Paris. Despite the American settings, the tone of your novels has more of the markers of European, and particularly French, fiction.

I don’t really read that much contemporary American fiction. I’m not even sure if I belong in that category. Growing up, I went to an international school, and we focused on English-language writers, but mostly on theater. I guess this tracks with the incantatory or dialogue-heavy nature of my work.

The time frame of this novel is interesting to me—the events referenced seem to suggest that it takes place in the near future, yet it still feels very much of that 1970s era.

There are very ancient aspects to [the time frame]. People leave messages in lost languages, like a character trying to speak or write in Latin or make smoke signals. You don’t get to see the explicit crimes, but you know they are there, and there is certainly surveillance, even if not explicitly in Bathory’s retelling. Of course she’s being watched. You’re watching her!

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Stephanie LaCava is a writer based in New York City. I Fear My Pain Interests You was published to global acclaim in 2022. Her debut novel, The Superrationals, was published by Semiotext(e) in 2020.

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Featured image: Photo of Stephanie LaCava by Collier Schorr.