I
remember being shocked when I first read it: The Great Switcheroo by Roald
Dahl. I was thirteen years old at the time. I had grown up devouring Roald Dahl
and his magical classics for children: Matilda, The Witches, Danny the Champion
of the World. Discovering his twist-in-the-tale stories was a delicious shock.
Though his children’s fiction involves waspish humour and caricature villains,
they are also very tender books, in my opinion, often involving a sweet
relationship between parent(figure) and child. But his short stories were
darker, all nastiness and schemes and games and come-uppances, with added
spice; whilst they were far more ‘adult’, sex was often a theme explored with a
school-boyish glee.
I
loved The Great Switcheroo. It’s about two men who live opposite each other,
who decide to creep into each other’s houses and swap wives in secret, in the
dark, without them knowing. Dahl always anchored his outrageous conceits with a
forensic attention to practical detail – each man spends weeks practising
creeping into each other’s house, paying attention to the creak on the stairs
and so on. Dahl has been accused of misogyny – unsurprisingly given that the
story was originally written for Playboy and subsequently included in a
collection called Switch Bitch. However, the men do get a come-uppance; their
actions have consequences. The end result of their manipulations is the
discovery that their partners have been sexually unsatisfied in the past and
the secret swap has brought them a fulfilment not known before. The men are
humiliated. They realise that they have trapped themselves in their own game.
I
decided to turn the story on its head and explore the female equivalent: what
would happen if two women decided to swap their male partners without them
knowing? What if they also paid attention to every detail, a la Dahl, to the
perfume they wear, the underwear, their shampoo, to see if they could pull it
off?
I
set the story in Wimbledon village, the home of many a glamorous millionaire.
When my heroine, Elena, gets a housesit to stay there with her partner, she
meets a dazzling couple called Sophia and Finn. Sophia is like a Hitchcock
star; Finn exudes Cary Grant charisma. Elena feels drawn to them and so when
Sophia makes an indecent proposal – inspired by reading Dahl’s story in homage
to him – to practise a swap, Elena is initially uncertain and shocked. Sophia’s
logic is twisted and like all manipulators, she plays different cards to win
her argument: one minute, she assures Elena that the swap, a ‘perfect crime’,
requires attention to detail, and the next she airily justifies sex without
consent by declaring that all men enjoy sex and wouldn’t mind the game. Soon
Elena is sucked in despite her moral concerns and the games become an addiction
that spirals out of control. They are uncertain, too, whether their male
partners have sensed what is happening and are playing them in turn.
For
Sophia has her own agenda, one that she doesn’t reveal to Elena at first –
behind her game is another shadow game. I wanted The Switch to be a domestic
thriller, one where the darkness and danger tiptoes it slowly and mounts on
every page, until the ending escalates into darkness and terror, kidnapping and
a conspiracy to murder.
Like
Dahl, I was interested in the theme of class. Elena studied at Cambridge but is
from a working-class background, which echoes my own experiences – I grew up in
a house in benefits and was the first person in my family to end up at
university. I know that when you switch class outwardly, something inside never
quite catches up: you find yourself in a liminal space, never quite fitting in.
Sophia senses this and plays on it, using it to subtly undermine Elena. Their
female friendship is warm and sincere at first, but gradually becomes toxic.
However, having grown enjoying thrillers such Fatal Attraction, I didn’t want
Sophia to be a caricature female villain who is manipulative for the sake of
it. She has suffered secret trauma, and troubles in her past which have shaped
her misandrist actions in the present; she has come to see life as a game which
she needs to control. I wanted everyone in the book to be behaving terribly,
but not be entirely unsympathetic, to create a thriller that was a cocktail of
sex, lies and deceit.
The
Switch by Lily Samson (Cornerstone) Out Now
TWO
COUPLES. Elena and Adam are housesitting in Wimbledon and are instantly seduced
by their new upscale surroundings. Sophia and Finn are their beautiful,
enigmatic neighbours who invite them into their world. ONE TWISTED GAME. When
Sophia proposes a wicked game to Elena whereby, they will swap partners in
secret, it's not long before Elena starts to experience a sexual awakening that
blossoms into an illicit love affair. But Sophia's plans are far more complex
and dangerous than Elena could ever have imagined... WHO WILL SURVIVE?
You can follow Lily Samson on “X” @LilySamsonbooks
