SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
A psychic, his wife, his manager, a Chicago reporter and a couple of guys get stuck in a cave with a massive underground waterfall, looking for a hatpin. No, this is no joke. There's a murder. How do they get out before there's more? The new novel "Ruby Falls" is set in 1932 in Chattanooga, Tennessee shortly after a real-life caver, Leo Lambert, did find an underground waterfall and named it for his wife, Ruby. Gin Phillips joins us now to talk about her novel from the studios of WBHM in Birmingham. Thanks so much for being with us.
GIN PHILLIPS: I'm very excited to be here, Scott. Thanks for having me.
SIMON: And I gather you saw the actual Ruby Falls years ago, and that set your mind racing.
PHILLIPS: Yeah. I mean, I think, like most people who live in the Southeast and maybe all the way up the coast, I've seen the signs for Ruby Falls my entire life. But the first time I went there was about 2018. You take a elevator down into the middle of the mountain, and from the minute I stepped out, I felt like this is a place I really want to set a book. There is something about realizing there is an entire world right underneath you - different animals, different rock, different landscape entirely that has been there the entire time, and you never knew about it that is extremely interesting.
SIMON: Your central character, Ada, she's drawn to the caves, isn't she?
PHILLIPS: Yes. She - I think, for a few different reasons. For one thing, there are some limits above ground of sort of what a woman is expected to do, what template you're supposed to fit. And so, yes, she is, I think, thrilled to realize there is a freedom below ground that she was unaware of, and she is someone who loves the unknown, someone who sees a 12-inch by 12-inch crack in the middle of a rock - a big, dark hole - and thinks, I should go in there and see what I find. I mean, to me, it feels obvious what's in there is roaches. It's...
SIMON: (Laughter).
PHILLIPS: ...Definitely going to be roaches. But so that was part of Ada, too, of sort of who is this person who loves leaping into the dark and seeing what she finds.
SIMON: Could you read for us, please, your counter - first solo adventure into the caves?
PHILLIPS: Sure. (Reading) The route in front of her narrows, too tight, and she veers around it with a kick of her foot. The rock is so clean - no mud or moss or crawling things. She maps the possibilities in front of her, and when she finds a taller space where she can raise onto her elbows, she moves faster. She is only a body, and if her mind exists at all, its only purpose is navigation. She has no thoughts other than left and right and forward and push and flatten and bend. She has no idea how many minutes have passed when she pulls herself into a larger chamber, shoving her head and shoulders free and then pulling her legs to her chest. She shines her light on what might be a millipede embedded in the smooth rock, fossilized. The ceiling ripples like a lake. She has found something in this dead end. Her house is still silent, and the chairs at the dinner table are still empty, but she has found this.
SIMON: Wow. She's in love.
PHILLIPS: (Laughter) Yes. Exactly. I think she is in love with a world she never knew existed. You know, I wanted - when I set up this book, I really liked the idea of a woman in middle age whose house is empty, who finds the world to be not the end of a narrative - of the notion of marriage in kids - but instead sees a narrative unfurling in front of her. And that is adventure and discovery and romance and a little bit of murder.
SIMON: (Laughter) Yeah - little bit of murder. Tell us about the publicity stunt that sets the story in motion. Because by the 1930s, the Depression has set in, and Leo Lambert - the Leo Lambert of your novel - gets an idea involving a hatpin.
PHILLIPS: Right. So the beginning of the novel, the discovery of Ruby Falls, is historically accurate. And it was a very poor time to open a natural wonder at a point when most people were struggling to put food on the table. There was really not a lot of spare money to spend to have a nice Sunday out and enjoy a walk through the caves.
The notion of a mind reader who says he can find a hidden hatpin in miles of caves using only the power of his mind is from a real-life publicity stunt in South Dakota at Wind Caves that took place in the 1890s. A supposed psychic came to town and said the exact same thing, although he, in real life, was blindfolded when he went down into a much larger system of caves. So, yeah, I liked the idea of that whole setup of what happens when you get all these people underground, removed from the world as they know it, and the time starts ticking down, and the flashlights start going dark?
SIMON: Your novel reminded me of the fact that decades ago - I'll just refer to them respectfully - of self-proclaimed psychics could be taken quite seriously, couldn't they?
PHILLIPS: Right. I mean, I think we're looking at a time where science is also expanding. So the notion of talking to the dead - you know, sort of as we learned about germs and all the things we couldn't see that were scientifically believed, there was a lot of gray area there. Just, what else might be real that we can't see? There was that line, I think, between science and spiritualism that people had not quite figured out. And, yeah. A lot of people felt like it was very plausible.
SIMON: Did you ever feel claustrophobic while writing this novel?
PHILLIPS: Well, thank goodness, no. I did some caving in Raccoon Mountain, which is in Chattanooga - a different set of caves than Ruby Falls. Like, you can stand up at first. And then pretty early on, the first little pass you come to you get down on your knees, and the guide shines a flashlight and shows you how there's this sort of slot in the rock, and it's about a foot-and-a-half tall. And you're supposed to get on your belly, and you slither. And she kind of shows you the map you're going to take and just kind of crawl flat, where you can't even lift your head for about two minutes, before you pop out the other side. You sort of see the light and not the darkness. You see the space that's there instead of everything that's beyond. And so it would have been a problem, I think, if I'd had a sudden attack of claustrophobia.
SIMON: But as Ada points out, I believe darkness and tight spaces don't always bring out the best in people.
PHILLIPS: No. I have a friend who's a therapist who just finished the book, and she always tells me things that I've done that I was unaware of psychologically. But she talked a lot about phobia and psychosis and just how this set of circumstance could bring out the sort of deepest, darkest part of you that you were able to mostly keep hidden. And that is what happens. I don't think I knew any of the technical terms for it. But I think, yes, you put people underground in tight quarters for hour after hour, and the parts that they might have managed to tamp down are not quite so tampable. And so murder and caves and all the sort of dread and suspense of this, I think, are a very nice way of cracking open the characters.
SIMON: Gin Phillips - her new novel, "Ruby Falls." Thank you so much for being with us.
PHILLIPS: Thank you, Scott. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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