DF Interview: Simon Spurrier allows readers to experience the fever dream of a sweaty swamp thriller in ‘The Voice Said Kill’

By Byron Brewer

The wet heat of the Louisiana bayou. Alligator poachers prowl the mudbug mire. A park ranger, heavily pregnant, raises a hateful mug of moonshine with a criminal matriarch. And one deadly sonuvabitch, out of his mind on shrooms and retribution, loads his rifle for the Human Hunt and screams down the stars.

From writer Simon Spurrier (Coda, X-Men) and artist Vanesa Del Rey (Black Widow, The Creeping Below) comes The Voice Said Kill, a spicy new Cajun crime miniseries set in the sweaty Southern swamps. I was down for an interview as soon as I saw Si in the solicit. Here is what my friend the scribe told me about the comic.

Byron Brewer: Si, it is wonderful when a writer is stoked about his coming book, which you seem to be with The Voice Said Kill. What is the genesis of this Southern swamp thriller, and – if I understand correctly – why did it take you such a long time to produce, having had the initial idea years ago?

Simon Spurrier: TVSK is one of only two books I’ve ever made where the entire story occurred to me all at once, fully formed. Generally it’s a far more accretive process, little bits of character or plot forming around the core, like the formation of a mental solar system.

Given how much of the tale and its themes are informed by the main character’s pregnancy, it’s no surprise the idea arrived when my wife was expecting our daughter. There wasn’t one moment during our long journey to parenthood – the soaring highs, the crushing tragedies, the self-doubt, the wild shifts in perspective – that failed to leave me agog at the superhuman power and resilience of mothers.

How that inspiring experience sunk its tendrils through this story’s richest controlling ideas (to do with responsibility, the inseparability of life and death, the requirement for all of us to walk the righteous paths through this garden world we’ve inherited — all that rich gumbo) was a process that played out through the writing itself.

As you mention, there was a long gap between conception and arrival. The tediously simple explanation is that I was waiting for the right artist.

Byron: Perfect timing!… Artist Vanesa Del Ray was apparently key to this miniseries seeing the light of publication. How did the two of you join for this collaboration?

Simon Spurrier: TVSK had a couple of false starts before it found Vanesa. That’s the nature of creator owned comics, for better or worse: there’s a huge array of variables that have to miraculously align in order for anything to progress beyond the realm of enthusiasm and good intentions.

Vanesa’s excitement for the idea not only reinvigorated what I was starting to worry was a doomed project, but performed a sort of tonal metamorphosis that’s been nothing short of miraculous.

TVSK would’ve worked very nicely as a straightforward, right-down-the-barrel crime thriller with an eye on realism. But under VdR’s pen, it’s taken on a very different and in my view deliciously elevated character. It’s more than just a crime book that happens to be set in a swamp. It’s become instead an evocative, impressionistic fever dream, perfectly suited to the environment and subject matter of our tale. The forest crawls with life and detail, the psilocybin sensations boil, the bayou clamors with all the chaos that Marie, our central character, considers so sacred. It’s a helluva thing, and is the sort of synaesthetic trick that really only works in comics.

Byron: The Cajun culture and its influence seem to permeate this work. Did Vanesa and/or yourself do any research about that culture as it exists in the bayous of Louisiana? I am always fascinated by such things.

Simon Spurrier: Speaking for myself: absurd amounts of research. Up to and including some time spent in Louisiana.

Again, with Vanesa I lucked out. Not only is she personally familiar with these environments (and I emphasize the plural there; the Louisiana coastal waterways have this extraordinary abundance of different biospheres, to the extent that a half hour hike in any direction leaves you feeling like you’re teleporting between worlds), but she’s also set her talent to evoking its feeling before, in the incredible Redlands.

Readers are, in short, in very good hands.

Byron: Introduce your cast to readers please, and (if possible without spoilers), tell a bit about their relationship with each other… or at least how they will come together to drive this mini forward.

Simon Spurrier: There are quite a few fascinating characters over the course of the miniseries, so I’ll focus in on a favored handful.

Marie, our heavily-pregnant lead, is technically a Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries Agent, Sergeant Class. She’s part of a smallish team of agents tasked with law enforcement within the boundaries of the Corbeaumort Wildlife Reserve.

In practice, “law enforcement” tends to mean the issuing and regulating of permits for hunting, fishing and – especially – the harvesting of alligator eggs by leather ranches. (This latter is a fascinating industry, rife with corruption and brutality, which our story explores at length.) She is very quick to insist she is not a cop, and has very strong feelings about that.

At the story’s start, we quickly learn a strange sickness has befallen the rest of her team – they suspect food poisoning at their annual summer barbecue – and despite her advanced pregnancy, Marie’s the only one who can hold down the fort.

Typically, this is precisely when multiple things start to go wrong in the park.

Next we have the formidable Mrs Watters. On the surface a successful producer of luxury alligator skin, in fact the matriarch of a clan of moonshiners, gator poachers and violent criminal wrong’uns. She presents as this awe-inspiring mountain of a woman, all steely eyes and cigarettes. But beneath the greed and venom her major concern, in fact what brings her into our story, is her unshakable love for her wayward son, Buck. He’s a violent source of conflict and chaos, who’s disappeared into the swamp with a large stash of magic mushrooms, several major grudges, and none of his prescribed medications.

The last one’s a character who doesn’t actually appear until issue #2, but plays a profound role in all that follows. She appears to be nothing but a ditsy tourist on a trip with her elderly dad to scatter her mom’s ashes. Heart-shaped sunglasses, too-short-shorts, long-lasting “liiiiiiike” in between every second word.

In fact, Cindy’s probably the most frightening monster I’ve ever written.

Byron: Aside from fleshy fruiting fungi, can you reveal anything else about the big-bad of the book? Is there a “human hunt” going down?

Simon Spurrier: I can’t say too much without spoiling things. What I’ll say is that the aforementioned Buck Watters – the unnerving face peering from the foliage in Vanesa’s A-Cover for #1 – would appear, on the surface, to be our story’s major antagonist.

In a sense that’s true, in as much as his actions present a catastrophic challenge – and a series of seemingly insurmountable obstacles that follow – to Marie’s formerly predictable, controllable life.

But it’s absolutely not that simple, and readers are in for a few surprises if they come into this story with preconceptions.

What I’ll say is that the appalling ordeal Marie endures in the first issue, and the not-entirely-noble decisions she makes in the midst of it puts her in a position for issue #2 and beyond in which the danger, and loss of control, just spiral away from her.

Byron: Can you give us a summary of the overall story, especially its first issue? What can readers expect when they pick up The Voice Said Kill in July?

Simon Spurrier: Basically, Marie has the day from hell. She’s been left single-handed at the rangers’ lodge by the mysterious poisoning of her colleagues, and of course that’s when literally everything that could go wrong does so. It culminates in a brutal encounter out in the wilderness, which radically changes Marie’s outlook and casts shadows across everything that comes after. Feeling profoundly alone, her only ally is Carrie, a kindly police dispatch controller who advises Marie via a radio earpiece.

The middle stage of the story is a sort of unwilling pilgrimage, in which Marie is forced to journey deep beyond the relative civilization of her world and into the wild, relying on reserves of strength, knowledge and resilience she never knew she had. With blood, treachery and terror at every step.

The final act? Grand Guignol.

I’m not a big fan of comp descriptors, but you could make the case for something like Fargo meets Deliverance by way of Apocalypse Now.

Byron: Si, what else is coming out of the Spurrier Thought Factory that you might be able to tell our readers about.

Simon Spurrier: The promising first half of that question was, I’m sad to concede, completely torpedoed by the second. I have an absurd number of projects on the burner, in various media and from various outlets, but can talk about almost none of them.

The one I’ll mention here, because it’s been announced already, is A Mischief of Magpies. That’s the DSTLRY book I’m doing with my longtime collaborator, the genius Matias Bergara. A few years ago, we made Step By Bloody Step – our bittersweet fantasy adventure featuring precisely zero recognizable words. A Mischief of Magpies is our attempt to swing the pendulum the other way: creating a deeply affecting and very personal story from an organic mix of sequentials, illustrations and diary texts. It’s like nothing else we’ve ever read, let alone created.

We’d hoped to have the first issue out by now, but for reasons originating way above our pay grade – mostly to do with the spasms in the direct market’s distribution environment – we’re no longer quite sure when it’ll drop. But drop it shall, at some point. I assure you it’s very worth the wait.

Dynamic Forces would like to thank Simon Spurrier for taking time out of his busy schedule to answer our questions. The Voice Said Kill #1 from Image Comics is slated to be on sale July 23!

I interviewed Si about A Mischief of Magpies a while back. Check it out: https://www.dynamicforces.com/htmlfiles/interviews.html?showinterview=IN04092546751

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