Devilfish Annotated Read-Along · Chapter 23

End Notes

1. 1
   Elliot's method for handling anything difficult is to build a wall around it and then describe the wall in enormous detail, which is exactly what he’s doing here—making a list of all the things he is refusing to think about, thought at great length. He does this in earlier chapters with Celeste and in Chapter 15 with the possibility of simply staying on the ship. The man has never once successfully not thought about something. It’s a talent, for sure. Read in context ↩
2. 2
   These are ochre sea stars, and in 1888 that rock face would have been absolutely crawling with them—they're the classic Pacific Northwest intertidal animal, orange or purple or brick red, packed shoulder to shoulder in the splash zone. Sadly, that’s not what the splash zone looks like today. Sea star wasting disease swept the Pacific coast starting in 2013 and killed billions of them; ochre stars have recovered somewhat in places but the sunflower star is functionally gone from most of its range. So this is a moment in the book where the historical setting let me put something back that we've since lost. It's also obviously doing double duty: Elliot can’t look at anything right now without seeing what his body did to Declan. Read in context ↩
3. 3
   Nance's compound is on the west coast of Vancouver Island, and I built this hot spring out of a real one: Hot Springs Cove, in what's now Maquinna Marine Provincial Park, about forty kilometers north of Tofino. The geology there is almost exactly what I describe—water that percolates several kilometers down into the earth, gets superheated, and comes back up through fractured rock at around 50°C. It pours out as a waterfall and then runs down a rocky chasm through a chain of pools that get progressively cooler the closer they are to the ocean, until the lowest ones are getting slapped by cold Pacific waves. You totally can sit in one spot that's scalding on one side and freezing on the other. I didn’t invent a single bit of that. I just gave it to Nance. Read in context ↩
4. 4
   Elliot walks right past this without thinking about it and I wrote that deliberately. Those steps didn't carve themselves, and Nance's compound is not the first thing to exist on this island. Hot Springs Cove sits in Hesquiaht territory, and the springs there have been used and cared for by the Hesquiaht people for a very long time—long, long before any white trader built a big house with a green-wallpapered room in it. I didn't want to write an island that was empty until my characters showed up but I also didn't want to appropriate a specific living tradition for a story about a tentacle monster, so I settled for putting the evidence in the rock and letting Elliot, who is preoccupied and not especially observant at the best of times, fail to notice it. Read in context ↩
5. 5
   Two things are happening in this sentence. One, the Pacific Northwest in late March is not warm, and Elliot has lived on this coast his entire life, so him remarking on it means something is off. Two, the ocean does not care what the air is doing. Water temperatures out here hover in the high forties Fahrenheit year-round and a warm afternoon changes that not at all. Elliot is about to spend a considerable amount of time in it anyway. Read in context ↩
6. 6
   I spent a long time trying to get eight tentacles out of a human lower body and I couldn’t make it look like anything but a bad drawing. Counting his arms solved it, and I like what it does thematically: Elliot doesn't lose the human parts of himself, he just gains. And while I still needed Elliot to have a cock for…obvious Reasons in a romance novel, it turns out the most ludicrous thing I did has real precedent. In octopuses, one arm is the reproductive organ—the hectocotylus, usually the third arm on the right, modified with a groove and a specialized tip for delivering sperm packets to a female. In argonauts the hectocotylus is enormous and detaches entirely during mating and swims off on its own, which is why Georges Cuvier, finding these things loose inside female argonauts in the early 1800s, classified them as a parasitic worm and named them Hectocotylus octopodis. It took Jeanne Villepreux-Power—the self-taught lady naturalist mentioned in Chapter 3, who also invented the aquarium—to suggest they might be male octopus anatomy instead.
   
   Not to mention, Disney did the same thing with Ursula the Sea Witch—gave her six tentacles instead of eight for practical reasons. Read in context ↩
7. 7
   Octopus suckers don't just grip. Cephalopod suckers have chemotactile receptors, which respond to molecules that don't dissolve well in water. Which is to say: an octopus tastes things by touching them. It doesn't have to bring food to its mouth to know what it is. Every sucker on all eight arms is independently sampling the chemistry of whatever it's on. So when I write Elliot as overwhelmed by sensation in this scene, and later in this book when he touches Declan with these limbs, I'm not exaggerating for effect. He’s just grown several thousand tongues. 👅 Read in context ↩
8. 8
   This is my favorite piece of octopus anatomy and I'd been waiting the whole book to use it. Octopuses have no skeleton whatsoever—the only hard part of an octopus is its beak, which is roughly the size and shape of a parrot's. Everything else is muscle and skin. This is why an octopus can pour itself through an opening barely bigger than its own eyeball, and it's why aquarium keepers have such trouble containing them. So when Elliot's pelvis lets go, that's not me being weird for the sake of weirdness. (Or it’s not only me being weird for the sake of weirdness.) It’s the single most important structural fact about the creature he's becoming, and it's the one that makes everything that happens later in this cove physically possible. Read in context ↩
9. 9
   There’s gotta be a hole, right? In a real octopus, the beak is at the center of the web, and while that’s an octopus’s mouth, the only logical counterpart for Elliot is his asshole. Read in context ↩
10. 10
    An octopus in a hurry swims arms-first-behind-it, streamlined into a point, and moves by jetting water out through the siphon—a muscular funnel under the mantle. It's startlingly fast and they can't keep it up for long, because an octopus's circulatory system isn't built for sustained exertion. (They have three hearts, and the main one stops beating when they swim, which is one reason they'd generally rather crawl.) Elliot is doing a slightly more human version of this, using the limbs themselves for the initial thrust, but the shape of the movement is straight out of the footage I watched approximately nine hundred times. Read in context ↩
11. 11
    Yes, really. A startling number of nineteenth-century professional sailors could not swim, and this held true up through the age of sail and well into steam. Some of it was practical—you rarely learn a skill you have no place to practice—and some of it was a genuinely held belief that being able to swim only prolonged your dying, since a man overboard in open ocean wasn't getting picked up anyway. Better to go quick. Cheerful people, sailors. I gave Declan the same gap because it's true to who he'd be, and because I needed it. Notice that Elliot registers this fact and immediately uses it as a weapon. Three paragraphs later it goes off in his hand. Read in context ↩
12. 12
    Elliot has spent twenty-two chapters convinced that what's happening to his body is a horror to be hidden, suppressed, and outrun. In this pool he finds out that a man with two arms and two legs could not have pulled Declan free, and the thing he's been trying to strangle out of himself is the only reason Declan is still breathing. I wanted the reveal to be entirely physical—no speech, no epiphany, just leverage. A giant Pacific octopus can exert an extraordinary amount of force with its arms and each sucker adheres independently, which means Elliot has more purchase on those rocks than any human body could manage. He's also, notably, still using his hands at the same time. He is both things at once, in the water, and it works. Still takes him a while to notice that. Read in context ↩
13. 13
    Declan just nearly drowned, and his first complete sentence that’s not reassuring Elliot that he’s fine is an attempt to get Elliot to think one kind thing about himself. This is the whole man in one line. He's been doing this since Chapter 1—taking the thing Elliot is most ashamed of, turning it a few degrees, and handing it back as though it were a obviously a good thing. It almost never works on the first try. He does it anyway, every single time. Read in context ↩