Kathi Appelt’s inspired first novel, 'The Underneath,' brims with heartache and hope

The Underneath, set in East Texas’s bayou country, features two intertwined stories. One’s about a cat who befriends a mistreated dog, and the other is about a vindictive ancient shape-shifter—half serpent, half human—who longs for her daughter’s love. What most surprised you about the story?

It originated from a short story I had written. I never intended to write an animal story. I resisted having talking animals.

That’s ironic, since there’s only one person in the story.

Right, and he’s the least human of all the characters. For the first three drafts, the main character was a boy who finds a drowned mother cat and a kitten that somebody had tossed into the creek. Only throughout the writing process, it was always the cat who saved the day, and the boy was simply retelling the cat’s story. My agent finally said, “I think the boy has outlived his purpose. You need to turn the story over to the cat.” That was both liberating and sorrowful, because I loved that boy. He was based on my own son Jacob, who had rescued a kitten when he was little. But when I removed the boy from the story, the animal characters were really able to come alive.

Photo by Chandler Arden.

I did not plan to explore darkness in such a deep way. I kept going back to the story and allowing it to unfold, and, as it did, the darkness arose.

Gar Face, who was abused as a boy, intentionally shoots his dog, Ranger, in the leg and hits him in the face with a board. Were you concerned about exposing kids to such violence?

Those sections were painful for me to write, but I had to be truthful about who Gar Face was. The Underneath has come under some criticism for that. There are a lot of people who feel it is too deep or too painful for children. I don’t think so. I think it acknowledges kids’ feelings, which are often shortchanged. I’m not suggesting that I’m braver than anyone else. Certainly, there are other writers who are tapping into those deep feelings of heartache and yearning. But I do think kids deserve literature that respects their own deep feelings.

When you were growing up in Houston, your father was often absent, working in the Persian Gulf oil fields. In your memoir, My Father’s Summers, I sensed the same deep longing for love that appears in your novel. Was it cathartic to write it?

It was cathartic in that I had for years struggled with writing a novel. And there was a huge part of me that never really thought I could write one.

Why was that so important to you?

I had hit a point in my writing where I felt I needed to do something significant and different from what I was doing. I felt stuck. In fact, I was starting to think in rhymes. I can write a rhyming picture book—and I love writing them—but I felt my soul had dried up career-wise.

What was the turning point?

In the middle of writing The Underneath, I had many dark nights of the soul. [M. T.] Anderson, who had hired me to teach at Vermont College, called me out of the blue. I was whining, and he said, “You should always write what you think you can’t.” It was exactly what I needed to hear. First of all, it was total permission to not write the story. It was complete permission to fail. It made me think, I’m going to write it anyway. If I can’t, I can’t. If I do, well, that would be great, too. It made me stop fretting so much.