Four Questions with Alp Şahin

Question 1

Cassie Hour is framed as both a literal song and a metaphorical hour that everyone at Villa Liminal is trying to forget or reconstruct. Which came first for you, the mystery of what happened to Cassie, or the idea of a forgotten cassette tape as the way into that mystery?

Usually a story comes first and music is asked to follow it. A film has a soundtrack, or a novel later acquires a song. But every song is already the outward expression of a story, even when we do not yet know what produced it.

Cassie Hour moves in the opposite direction. We hear the song first and begin to sense the story trapped inside it. The cassette gave me the feeling that an entire night had survived in sound while the facts around it had disappeared.

I did not begin by trying to explain Cassie too quickly. I began with the feeling that the song knew something the people around it did not want to say. The mystery grew from listening to that absence.

Question 2

Adrian starts out trying to rescue Cassie’s story, but the book suggests he might be repeating the same dynamics that trapped her in the first place. Was it important to you that the person searching for the truth is also implicated in the same impulses, curiosity, desire, and the urge to possess someone else’s story?

Yes. Adrian’s curiosity is sincere, but sincerity does not remove the possibility of possession.

He believes he is restoring something that was damaged or buried. But restoration is never completely neutral. You decide what to amplify, what to clean, what to treat as noise and what to call the original signal.

The closer Adrian gets to Cassie, the greater the risk that he turns her into material for his own need to understand. He may want the truth, but wanting the truth can still become a way of claiming someone.

That mattered to me because people who believe they are rescuing a story can repeat the same structure of control if they assume that access gives them ownership. Adrian is not standing safely outside the system. His curiosity, desire and need for resolution place him inside it.

Question 3

A lot of the women in this book protect themselves through silence rather than confession. Was that a deliberate choice about how power and self-preservation actually work for women in rooms like Villa Liminal, where what you don’t say matters more than what you do?

Yes, it was deliberate. In a room like Villa Liminal, speech rarely belongs only to the person speaking. It can be recorded, repeated, traded, edited or used later. Silence can therefore be intelligence rather than submission.

But I did not want every woman’s silence to mean innocence. Some may remain silent because they are protecting themselves. Others may also benefit from the way desire, access, secrets and attention are distributed. They may have reasons not to interrupt the system completely.

Cassie complicates that further. She may be resisting George’s system, but she may also be asking why George should be the only person allowed to benefit from it.

I wanted that uncertainty to remain. Power does not become harmless simply because it changes hands.

Question 4

The book ends on the idea that the real question isn’t what happened to Cassie, but who gets to play her now. Without spoiling anything, what does that question mean to you? Is it about ownership of a story, or something more specific to Cassie as a character?

For me, ‘Who gets to play her now?’ opens in two directions.

The first is: who gets to play with Cassie next?

George plays with everyone. He creates situations, watches people reveal themselves and then uses what he learns. Rafa believes that bringing a buried story into the open is the right thing to do. But even that can become another way of using Cassie. He is still taking her story and putting it to work.

Adrian may be doing the same when he tries to recover her. Then the question reaches the reader, the media, the algorithm and even me as the author. Are we finally allowing Cassie to be seen, or are we finding a new reason to play with her?

I do not see Cassie as the purely moral opposite of George. She may be trying to break his system. She may also be refusing to remain outside the part of it that holds power. That is what makes her interesting to me.

The second direction turns the question toward us. In which story in our own lives are we Cassie? When has someone else used our image, desire, silence, data or memory to create a version of us that they could control?

By the end, the person controlling the game may have changed, but the desire to use Cassie has not disappeared. The final question is both whose turn it is to use her and whether we can recognize the moments when someone else is playing Cassie through us.