When Vi Liu finds a strange blob outside a college town dive bar, she’s not sure what to make of it. Eventually, and with a little help from Vi herself, the blob will morph into something beyond her wildest imagination.
“I was thinking about relationships and how mysterious they are and how difficult it is to find someone to connect with,” says author Maggie Su on the concept behind her debut novel, “Blob: A Love Story.” The initial idea, she adds, was, “What if we gave this character exactly what she thinks she wants, which is this blank slate, and what could possibly go wrong with that?”
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In “Blob,” Vi is a college dropout working at a hotel and still reeling from a recent breakup. The blob comes into her life at a time when she’s struggling with loneliness. Su, who grew up in Champagne-Urbana, Illinois and currently lives in South Bend, Indiana, was working on the novel during the pandemic, at which point she was residing in Cincinnati.
“I actually lived in a basement apartment in Cincinnati, in a studio, and so Vi’s apartment is very much inspired by my own apartment,” says Su. “I think those feelings of loneliness and isolation definitely made their way into the novel.”
At least in the beginning, the blob is based on the blobfish, which lives deep underwater near Australia and New Zealand and has frequently been called the world’s “ugliest fish,” although that’s largely based on how it looks when the fish has been brought to land. “At its normal depth, it just looks like a fish,” says Su, “but we bring it up and it decomposes into this monstrous thing.”
The blob, who eventually will be known as Bob, isn’t a fish, though. As Vi learns, the mysterious, sentient creature learns from the world around him as he begins to take on a new shape.
TV plays a role in Bob’s assimilation into the human world, as he learns from reality series and game shows. Su says that she thought a lot about the shows that were on when she was growing up as she wrote “Blob.” One long-gone reality series that Vi namedrops in the book is 2004’s “The Swan,” which controversially centered around “ugly ducklings” whose makeovers included cosmetic surgery. It’s a show that Su “vividly” remembers seeing in her own youth.
“It’s such a wild conceit and, as a kid, watching all these women be transformed,” she says. “There was something very grotesque, but also transfixing about it that I think I never forgot about.”
Su watched films like “Her” and “Lars and the Real Girl” while working on “Blob,” as well as “Fleabag,” specifically, the first episode of the acclaimed British TV series’ second season, and the 2023 film “Joy Ride.”
“I was really inspired by the idea of messy women characters and messy Asian American characters I haven’t seen too much,” says Su.
She also notes that some of her influences wrote blurbs for “Blob,” including Kevin Wilson, author of the 2019 bestseller “Nothing to See Here” and Ling Ma, who wrote the post-apocalyptic novel “Severance.”
In “Blob,” which began as a short story and was performed as a short play in Cincinnati before Su developed it into a novel, Vi’s connection to Bob is forged as she tries to turn the blob into the perfect boyfriend.
“She also wants to believe that she can know someone really well, that she can fully understand someone’s motivations and she can kind of become one with another person,” says Su. “I think that comes from her fear of people leaving her. She’s afraid that someone is going to have this internal life that she has no access to and that they could potentially break up with her suddenly or leave her or stop being in a relationship with her.”
Su is currently at work on her next novel, which she describes as “horror-inspired literary fiction” that looks at “being Asian American in the Midwest.”
“It’s always been really interesting, the relationship that I have to this place, a sense of belonging and also a sense of not belonging,” says Su of the Midwest.
Specific to “Blob,” though, is the shared experience between Su and Vi of growing up in Midwestern college towns. “Being a townie in a college town growing up was really interesting,” she says. “I think I get into it a little bit with Vi’s feelings of stagnancy when she’s dropped out of college, but she’s still living in the college town. Her childhood, young adulthood and college life all mix together. That’s a little bit how I felt.”
More generally of the Midwest, she says. “There are so many stories here that haven’t been told. It’s exciting to lift up writers who do interesting work that thinks about the heartland in different ways.”