Episode #70
#70: Cassandra Khaw Interview: When Death Comes Calling as a Black Dog | The Year's Most Vital Horror Novel 'Find Me Where It Ends'
What if Death came to your door not bearing a scythe, but as a black dog — and turned out to be rather good company? That’s the moving, melancholy premise at the centre of Cassandra Khaw’s latest novel, Find Me Where It Ends.The story follows Antigone, who is no stranger to death. For the women in her family, it has always arrived as a black dog, and when her own spectral companion finally appears, she invites it inside. What begins as an unsettling encounter gradually becomes something much more intimate, as Antigone is forced to reckon with the life she has lived, the parts of herself she has hollowed out for others and the bone-deep exhaustion that has followed her through it.Find Me Where It Ends makes a strange companion of Death, turning the black dog at Antigone’s door into something less like a harbinger than a confidant. Khaw’s real sleight of hand is to make survival feel tangible: not some grand revelation, but a messy accumulation of people, memories and tiny reasons to keep going.CinemaChords spoke to Cassandra Khaw about the new book, the folklore and symbolism behind its central black dog, the complicated relationship between mortality and the people who keep us here, and why the smallest details of a life can sometimes provide the strongest reasons to stay.
