For months, I kept two words in my phone’s Notes app: “Victoria Brooks.” I’d hastily typed in the name during a lunch with writer, Jack Skelley, in Los Feliz. He promised I’d be a fan of her work. Three months later, House of Vlad founder, Brian Alan Ellis, sent me a pdf of Brooks’ psychosexual sci-fi brilliance, Silicone God, with a similar endorsement. They were both so damn right.
I let Brooks’ words (world?) consume me, finishing the last pages as dawn broke. We recently engaged in a virtual conversation about the trope of the “mistress,” body as text, and why writing about fucking is liberating. Silicone God had its US release via House of Vlad Press on February 14, 2025.
Jillian Luft: You and I are pressmates, so I found it intriguing when Brian Alan Ellis, founder of House of Vlad, described your book to me as the inverse of my book, Scumbag Summer. Both of our books examine the “mistress” archetype. In Silicone God, the other woman is exalted as a supreme being by the gods while simultaneously viewed as a renegade of sorts. What inspired you to interrogate this particular dichotomous state of being?
Victoria Brooks: The interesting thing about the mistress is that she doesn’t exist without marriage. And yet she’s its biggest threat. She keeps the institution in place, while desecrating it through her very existence. Being a mistress, in my own experience—and in my experience of reading Scumbag Summer—can be both fucking thrilling, and rock bottom, with little in between. She lives the high life and the low life, contradictions through and through. I think her very being is duplicitous—and I mean that in the most positive and revolutionary sense. She’s dangerous—she attacks from the outside with the secrets she’s gathered from the inside. In Silicone God, while the mistress is supreme—in fact a whole dimension (Time) is the mirror of her being—the place she lives is neither utopian or dystopian. Even the light is dark. It’s kind of fucked in a forever cycle of patriarchal doom, because we made it that way.
JL: Hell yes. I completely agree that the mistress is dangerous in the best way, yet still dependent on malevolent patriarchal forces. She occupies this liminal space, a purgatory where she hopes she’ll ascend to some “respectable” realm rather than plummet to hell. More often than not, hell awaits and it’s the married man that determines her fate. Speaking of men, I so appreciated how they did not dominate the narrative of Silicone God. Even when their stories are shared, it’s in relation to the overarching narrative of the women characters. Was that a deliberate choice?
VB: Yes, absolutely. I think particularly in relation to the mistress—it’s the married man’s narrative, or otherwise a patriarchally constructed one, that sits in the place of what should be her story, and I wanted to subvert that. In the context of trauma, I also wanted to bring the reader into the battle of who gets to tell the story of that trauma—it should of course be the survivor as an essential part of their recovery, but regaining power over the narrative is a huge tussle with structures—such propriety/morality weaponised for the protection of those in power, as well as an internal battle.
JL: Women’s bodies permeate the narrative of this novel in such a visceral way without being wholly objectified. There are elements of body horror, i.e., Cronenbergian mutations of the flesh, but I wasn’t necessarily horrified as much as I was intrigued by how present and alive these women’s bodies felt to me even when warped by godly spore-spunk. Their bodies are the story and the actual “Book” is silicone, the same material that comprises their bodies. In this dystopic world, silicone is text and text is silicone. I guess, I’m wondering why silicone in particular? What was the seed of inspiration?
VB: I think in terms of body horror, I was trying to get to grips with the very basic horror of having a body. The sci-fi genre allowed me to go where I needed to, particularly when thinking about the text of the body (and in Silicone God this is often trauma—i.e. the score/story kept by the body). Silicone has also always fascinated me as a potentially revolutionary (at the level of material life) substance. The possibility of silicone based life forms, digital forms, something that brings out the alien freak in us; like silicone sex-toys, strap-ons and sex-bots. I wanted to take this idea and see what alchemy would happen if we mixed silicone with the revolutionary body and consciousness of the mistress. Silicone God is the fucked up result of this experiment.
JL: The fucked up and awesome result! I’m often curious about a writer's media consumption during the writing process. Did you find inspiration elsewhere ( in film, television, music, other literary works, etc.) prior to writing or as you wrote?
VB: I absolutely did! There are works in terms of books and films that are longstanding and probably permanent influences on my writing, such as Under the Skin by Michel Faber, Lolita, anything by Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin, Eliza Clark, Samantha Allen, Derek McCormack, or Lisa Taddeo, Alison Rumfitt or Elle Nash. The films Arrival, and Interstellar. In terms of music—I have such trash cheesy 90s/00s taste—much like I imagine the protagonist in Silicone God to have, such that I’m frightened to divulge—although I’d love to put together a Silicone God playlist one day! And yes, I definitely did listen to some of this cheese while writing. I also love a bit of atmospheric weird music like anything by Max Richter, especially for writing the high sci-fi scenes.
JL: We need the Silicone God playlist! Your book creates a psychosexual space that feels almost uncanny—so unreal it becomes hyperreal. I adore books that depict and examine sex as a base act rooted in existential angst, ha. What’s your take on sex in literature in terms of its role or function? Loaded question, I know.
VB: Totally loaded, and important too. It’s been interesting seeing how Silicone God has been sometimes categorised as erotica, or just too spicy for certain contexts. I don’t mind this. Yet, I’m not sure it’s accurate. I think Silicone God just has a lot of sex in it and accepts, as you say, that sex is an act that often reveals our existential angst. Sex is such an important part of being, and also, sadly, a site of trauma, too. I feel that sex is something to reclaim and I think this is only possible if we bring it out of the shadows. But the world of publishing/literature is still getting to grips with the place of sex in writing. That’s why I think sex-writing—in whatever genre—is a powerful and essential literary and liberatory tool. The role of sex in literature is to tell a kind of collective, mycelial truth, and, of course, to arouse the reader. I love that literature has this power—to create intimate physical reactions within the reader, to immerse them so much in the storyworld that they can feel it taking root in their body. Much like silicone mushroom-spores.
JL: My body still clings to this book. It’s like it revealed some unnatural element in me that I somehow detected but could never name. Scumbag Summer has also been classified as erotica and, at first, I took umbrage because of ego–as though the literary ambitions of the novel were inherently degraded with such a categorization. And now, I think, “Well, if erotica means exploring who we are through the basest and yet most richly human act at our disposal, then I’m fucking proud to write about fucking.” It is liberating–as you said–for both the writer and the reader. As much as “performance” is discussed in connection to sex, there’s an honesty to our bodies–an inelegant lack of pretense uncovering core truths about us in spite of our best efforts to mask them through performances of sexuality, identity, mechanics, whatever. Our bodies speak their own language (of ecstasy, of trauma, of primal understanding) and it’s worth translating. Wholeheartedly agree with you that sex is something to reclaim, especially in literature. And I think books like Silicone God bring the best of sex writing into the light. You write about it with curiosity and sagacity and without shame. I’m quite averse to warnings from writers about the “spicy” content in a novel or story as it only reaffirms sex in writing as taboo or strange. Humans fuck. I’m not saying let’s normalize it. I’m saying let’s take to the subject like writers. Let’s exalt it, let’s depict it as is, let’s cheapen it for our own creative purposes. But let’s write about it more. Okay, end of rant.
VB: Hard agree! I particularly love two things that you say above: “If erotica means exploring who we are through the basest and yet most richly human act at our disposal, then I’m fucking proud to write about fucking” and “Let’s exalt it, let’s depict it as is, let’s cheapen it for our own creative purposes. But let’s write about it more.”—I’m writing these down so I can keep them as daily affirmations and writing prompts!
JL: At its heart, this book reads as a queer love story. I think of it as a love triangle between Shae, Anemona and Evaline. And yet, it feels reductive to classify it as such because the novel’s queerness feels so expansive and, frankly, revolutionary. As a writer, what does queerness mean to you? How do you feel about this book being read as queer lit?
VB: I am honoured that this book is read as queer lit, and that it finds itself within that category (which, of course, ought not to be a category since queerness is always bursting out of any container it’s given). Thank you for the description of Silicone God’s queerness as revolutionary—I hope so! Through the novel’s form, structure, characters and, of course, the fucking—I wanted to make it clear that any power that might be revolutionary is always queer. Untameable, uncategorisable and forever threatening to overthrow. As a writer, I think this feeds into my practice as always defying convention, always playing at the edges of what I dare to write, and always fucking-with the rules—particularly those that might seek to censor queer literature. That’s why I love small presses so much, like House of Vlad—they’re the best co-conspirators and publishing the most exciting work!
JL: Agreed! Are you working on anything currently that is fucking with the rules and refuses to be contained?
VB: Yes! I have a second novel (speculative fiction) in the works which I’m billing as A Clockwork Orange meets Judith Butler, which is perhaps a little more focused on gender exploration than Silicone God (but is also about fucking!) and which also leans into body horror as much as I dare to!
