She Had Glass Eyes - C.S. Schiavone - Victorian Gothic - Short Story - Indie Author

Our discussion of She Had Glass Eyes, a book by C.S. Schiavone that explores how humanity and technology connect and blurs the line between reality and the narrator's imagination.

00:00 Introduction to 'She Had Glass Eyes'
10:04 Character Analysis: Dilly the Mortician
20:00 Themes of Obsession and Madness
30:02 Writing Style and Historical Context

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YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@calliesioux


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Creators and Guests

Host

Jonathan

Host

Slava

Digital Strategist. Co-Host. Aspiring writer of stories.

What is The Side Quest Book Club Podcast?

If you’re a reader looking for something deeper or an indie author working on your book, The Side Quest Book Club is for you. We skip the usual book reviews and ratings. Each episode turns fun side quests into real lessons, so you’ll leave not just entertained, but with a better understanding of why storytelling matters.

It's a page turner. It is. It's not just first page, I think it was the first 15 or 20 pages where there's always at minimum one line that I'm like, oh man, that's good.

One of the better ones I read in a long time, even the books that we both gush over and have read and fanboyed out and loved, I think this one takes the cake. In a long time I haven't read something this good for a first line. She did such a great job staying in her genre, staying in the historical time period, the words she chose, the cadence, thought process that the main character had.

But if you like Poe, if you like Lovecraft, very much this is on par with their style and their quality. Coming to you from an endless library where every book is read and every spoiler discussed. Join us as we dig into the lives of fictional people who cannot defend themselves.

This is the SideQuest Book Club. Welcome back SideQuesters to another episode of the SideQuest Book Club podcast. It may be a mouthful, but you know what's really full is our bookshelves.

You got It over there, Vidalarium. Is that Pet Sematary next to it? No, Nightmares and Dreamscapes.

But today we're reading She Had Glass Eyes by C.S. Schiavone? It's Italian? Schiavone.

Callie Sue Schiavone. Yes. She is an author recommended by the one and only Abby, who came on for Girl Without the Gifts and also was on recently for Cotspaces.

So Lavone, why don't you give us a quick background of Callie and I am going to do my best with the Italian last name and then we'll move into the story. Callie Sue Schiavone is a creative alchemist using multimedia to distill the adventure of reality into the art of fiction and entertainment. As a musician, she is an award-winning songwriter, rock and roller, and bass player, having performed with Gleewood, Jed Black, and The Clee Alum.

Grown up as a ranch kid from New Mexico, her stories, songs, films, and audio dramas capture wide open spaces, grit, and the importance of persistence. Her audio epic has stepped out as the behemoth project launching her into the audio drama world and her recent signing with 20 Hills Publishing will see her speculative fiction come into a bookstore near you, which I'm excited for because you guys know how much I like speculative fiction. Callie Sue lives with her husband, Jed Black, and Springer Spaniel Clancy in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where she can be seen hiking, riding in her local coffee shop, serving you a pint of ale at their music venue and listening room called The Woodshop, or performing in one of many venues in town.

That is our author, Callie Sue Schiavone. A quick note, the audio epic that she's working on is audio-epic.com and on YouTube. It started, I believe, in June of this year, June 2025, but there's actually 31 chapters.

Oh, no, this is when the playlist was made. 31 chapters at the moment for this audio epic. Okay, because I only found one chapter, but I didn't look that hard.

When I was preparing my notes for her yesterday, I did a quick search, but hey, 31 chapters. Awesome. The first one that I listened to is great, so if there's 30 more, let's go to it, audience.

Yeah, there's anywhere from 15 to looks like some of these are an hour long, so definitely go and check that out. But back to the story here, she had glass eyes, so in case you wondered what her eyes were like, they were glass. That's what I felt.

I felt informed. It just came out. It started shipping two weeks ago, three weeks ago.

It was October 20th or something, I believe. I believe that's right. Give or take.

She had glass eyes, her first published work, and it's not a long read, so you're not going to get Sanderson Stormlight Archive vibes from it. That's 1,000, 1,200 pages. It's just shy of 100 pages, but it's a page turner.

It is. I remember a couple episodes ago, Slava, you said that there's a line on the first page that you read. I actually think it's the first line, so if you want to read that again, you said it just grabbed your attention.

You knew you were in for a good time. I hadn't started yet. Slava, because he commutes to work here and there, and I have to drive pretty much everywhere, he gets the opportunity to read books while traveling to work, whereas I have to set aside time.

It's not just first page. To me, I think it was the first 15 or 20 pages, if not every page, where there's always at minimum one line that I'm like, oh man, that's good. That's a great piece.

Slava, share that opening line with us. This is Act 1, England, 1846. With all the festivities surrounding the wedding in Buddingford this summer, I deemed it necessary to give it a wide berth.

Quaint rural gatherings are indeed charming, but I can only stomach so much charm and so much quaintness before my countenance falls ill and I am tempted to commit atrocities. I love it so much. Dude, such a good opener.

It was a good opener. One of the better ones I read in a long time, even the books that we both gush over and have read and fanboyed out and loved. I think this one takes the cake for me in a long time.

In a long time, I haven't read something this good for a first line. Yes. It's two sentences, so the first two lines of the book.

Yes. Well, and the other thing is the ability to stay in style for your book. This book is Victorian Gothic Thriller Novella, October 20th.

Yep, that's when it shipped. So staying in style with your writing is when you're doing something this... Man, words are hard this morning.

What is the word for... It's not genre, but like... Peace.

Historical... I'm going to wave my hands around until you answer. Historical fiction.

Okay. Yes. Thank you.

Great. Yeah. I did it.

I cast the spell, guys. That's what... That's...

All you have to do is puppeteer the person in front of you. Ah, there it is. There it is.

Yes. Well done. You pulled the right string and Slothonia spoke.

Can you show us your eyes, Slava? Are they made of glass? No, they're made of molecules and sinew.

Do eyes have sinew? I don't think they do.

Yeah, they do. I don't know. I'm not a doctor.

I believe it's just like a muscle connector. It's not like a big muscle itself. It's just...

Yes. So can you define sinew for us, Slava? I cannot.

I cannot. I think I just did. Anyway, back to Victorian Gothic Thriller.

I'm going to use my hands a lot today because puppeteering. I wish I actually had a puppet here, but... We're all puppets.

Don't... This is not a political podcast, Slava. Shut up.

She did such a great job staying in her genre, staying in the historical time period, the words she chose, the cadence, the shortened sentences, the thought process that the main character had, Dilly. And I had to ransack this book because it's been a busy week, but I want... So that first line, right?

I'd be tempted to commit atrocities. It ends with that. I want there to be maybe not a series.

No, probably a series. But just I want to see her commit more atrocities. It's really...

I want like an anti-Sherlock Holmes style thing where she's just going around... I just want a serial killer series. I guess that's what I want.

I would love it if Callie Sue wrote a series where Dilly is a serial killer and she goes around committing mayhem, right? Total mayhem in England. And Sherlock Holmes can't catch her.

She bests him at every corner. That would be... I think that'd be a good read.

That'd be sweet. Yeah. It'd be a lot of fun.

But yeah, while I was reading this, to just double down on my point, word choice. Super important if you're going to write in style of a historical context, specifically Gothic in this instance, and Victorian, where you can't... I would read a sentence and I don't know if anybody else struggles with this, but when you read a sentence because your mind has processed it, you read it modern.

And I'm like, that's not what it says. And so I have to go back and read it again. And I'm like, oh, that's a great...

Because it's different. It's not normal. It's outside of our modern...

It's outside of modern... Modernity.

Yeah.

Outside of writing that we would see in modernity here, modern times, right? And it was great. It was refreshing.

It was tasteful. I really enjoyed it. Just a lot.

Again, it's a short book, but five out of five to get ahead of ourselves. Absolutely. All fives.

Can you shepherd me through to the next section? I sure can. So the story is from a first person perspective of a young woman named Dilly, who is a mortician.

And I like the way she becomes a mortician. They go into a morgue or a mortuary to rob bodies, like pilfer what they can from dead people.

Grape robbers.

Yeah. And the mortician catches her, because all her friends scamper away, and gives her a new chance of life and teaches her all the things she needs to be a mortician. And she becomes a mortician.

But shortly after her career is taking off, she becomes obsessed with an automaton named Euphonia, created by a Dr. Joseph Faber, or Faber. And she finds her so attractive on all the levels, like the concept of Euphonia, the way she looks, the way she looks too. Yeah.

And she becomes obsessed with her. And she meets Dr. Faber. And he tells her, hey, I'm coming to your town, you know, next month, next year, whatever.

And when he does show up, he is absent from the parade. And when she finally gets to the exhibition, the circus where he's supposed to perform with Euphonia, he's drunk, Euphonia is all in disarray. It seems that he's not taking care of her.

And the crowd starts throwing food at the stage, because it's a horrible performance, everybody's booing them. So she faints, pretends to faint, and takes away the attention from the stage. They close down the performance.

And she becomes obsessed with trying to fix Euphonia. And clean her up and give her the proper presentation, if you will, on stage. But Faber is a drunk, and he's a loser.

He seems to have some sort of mental instability, where he's in love with his creation, he hates his creation. And, and Dilly convinces him that we need to get her to my house to fix her. But that goes all awry.

He destroys Euphonia. This puts Dilly into a rage. She kills him.

And because she's a mortician, she knows how to dispose of a body. She disposes of the body. She dismembers him.

Yeah, she fixes Euphonia to the best degree that she can. And then they just have tea together and look out the window of her apartment as they do. So that's kind of a little clunky plot.

But that is exactly the story. So I didn't do it a lot of justice. But the story itself is amazing.

Those things by themselves might not sound too appetizing to people in our audience. But if you like Poe, if you like Lovecraft, very much. This is on par with their style and their quality.

Like Jonathan said, it was a page turner. I finished it in three days. And it only took me that long because I only have about 45 minutes a day to read on my commute.

It would have taken me, you know, a morning to read if I just sat down and read it from cover to cover.

Yep.

Schedules don't allow that. But it's a fascinating story, especially Dilley's, like the way she describes herself and what she's thinking and feeling and how she interacts with her neighbor, the chicken lady. No, no, the lady is not the neighbors on the chicken lady.

No, the person she's in a taxi with the equivalent of a taxi. Yep. In the 1800s.

And then the way she describes her neighbor. Yep. And even Dr. Faber or Faber. I'm going to I'm going to butcher this person's name. And the way she describes Dr. Faber. It is engrossing.

And I kind of saw debating even. Yeah, I kind of saw the end. This is not a knock on the book, but I guess the end.

I'm like, she's going to kill this guy. And the automaton and her are going to be best friends. And lo and behold.

And very, very good at subtly pointing out the madness of Dilley.

Yeah.

And her obsession, how that obsession drove her to a little bit of madness. It also reminds me of Frankenstein. Yeah, there's a Frankenstein adjacent, if you will.

Right. Yeah. Because she doesn't invent the automaton, but she does steal it.

Yes, she does abscond with it. She starts out as just, you know, a street kid with a hard background who was saved by the kindness of this mortician. And she's definitely not your typical girly girl from Tudor.

So she's this interesting character, a little bit hardened. And then this one thing drives her mad. This obsession with euphonia.

And that played out really well throughout the whole, the whole story for me. Yeah, it was excellent. Are you enjoying today's SideQuest?

Make sure you're subscribed so you never miss an episode. We are available on YouTube and all major platforms so you can listen to us anywhere. Now, back to the show.

Absolutely. Love the book. And I kind of feel like we fanboy out sometimes, but I don't mind.

No, if it's deserved, no.

It's well done.

Right. Exactly. Because there's just, and you and I have both written, there's just so much drivel out there.

And look, you and I are both guilty of that too. Like, this isn't, you know, hey, look at those people. But like, good writing's hard.

It is. It just is. So I want to punch in real quick on the structure of the book.

Again, this is a shorter piece. Like I said earlier, she chopped it up into three different acts. So act one is Dilly giving us a little bit of her backstory.

We get to understand who she is as a character. And she went to London to just see because her curiosity got the best of her. Right.

Act two is the longing starts to grow in her and starts to go, I have to see this automaton again. I just can't wait. Because at the end of act one, she invites the creator, Dr. Faber, to come to her English countryside. Right. And then act three is when she's so fed up with the inventor that she needs to rescue Euphonia from him to keep her safe and let her grow. Because he, as a drunk and being overworked by Barnum, has just like not taken care of her.

And that's not acceptable. And so she, uh, not asphyxiates. What's the, uh, word for focus?

Obsesses. She fixates. It's close, isn't it?

Because the words are close. Asphyxiates is a different thing. Yes.

But she does that to him. Anyway, uh, she fixates on Euphonia and the need to rescue her and restore her and basically have a friend. Uh, but each act is defined.

Well, each act gives us a little bit more of who the character is. It develops a little bit better, which is like, again, hard to do when you're doing genre pieces that are like not modern genre pieces that we, we, we read regularly. But one of the, one of the quirks, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this too, that I enjoyed in terms of Callie's writing is she quickly shows us that Dillie lies to everybody.

She's a liar. Uh, because she doesn't want to actually explain what happened to her voice. And we get, we get what happens to her voice in act three when she's about to kill Dr. Faber. But, um, that struck me the first time I was like, oh, wow. Uh, the story seemed a little implausible with what she describes early on in act one where she's like, oh yeah, my, my throat got run over by a, a wagon wheel. And I was like, you'd be dead.

You'd be dead. Right. Yeah.

I was thinking, well, uh, you'd be dead. So, but that was one of the quirks that I liked about the character that we get to see early on in act one. What about you?

I made a note by the time we got to the second version of that story, I made a note in my Kindle because I could, I had the Kindle scribe, so I could actually write into the book itself. And I made a note at that point in the book saying unreliable narrator, comma. I love this because it was, that's what struck me as Poe and Lovecraft-esque about this.

Not only the genre, not only the good writing, not only the writing in the style and the language of those times, but the narrator herself is unreliable and she is also going mad. So it's not reliable narrator to unreliable narrator because of said madness. She's already unreliable and then she goes mad in the book.

So I thought that was well executed by Callie Sue. So what questions did you have while you were reading the story in general? But in my mind, the thing that comes up because we're talking about Dilly, Dilly herself, the main character.

I did want to know more about her family because we got different stories about where she came from and how she got to where she was. I wanted to know more about her adventures as a street kid for lack of a better term. How did they pick that mortuary?

If I was able to get into her head during the training by that mortician who showed her some, call it love or grace or whatever it was, some care. I would want to know more about those things. Who the hell is this mortician?

Why did he say to this girl who's obviously robbing him or desecrating a body, robbing his body, what made him extend some kindness to her? Those are the questions I had reading it. Yeah.

The mortician's backstory. Yeah. Yeah.

Makes sense. So one of the questions that I'm curious about because we don't get this is what does she do for work right now? She used to work.

She doesn't work anymore. She lives in the Buntingford countryside. She doesn't do anything every day.

She used to work. She lives alone. There's this gap.

We get the anchor. She's 14. She does this stuff.

She becomes a mortician. She's now older than 14. The other details that we get are she is above marrying age basically because she and Victoria are similar in that, where they're on the verge of spinsters.

So whatever age that is. So what does she do for money? Those places are not cheap.

There's an implication that she has not a fortune, but made some money. Is it from grave robbing? Is it from the mortician life?

And then when she was a mortician or becoming a mortician, she still lived at home for a while. So what was that like? She was six other kids and her dad, the implication there to me when I was reading it was sexual abuse in the story, implied sexual abuse or physical abuse, maybe both.

Does she have any sisters? She mentioned that her brothers held her down and had her eat a glass sharded caramel apple, which is why her voice is the way it is. So just unpacking more of her, how did she become who she is today?

And she does a great job at sprinkling in little bits of history while not giving away, I'd say to the untrained eye, like the average reader, not giving away the, hey, the narrator's unreliable, right? We think that she's just an introvert. She doesn't want to spend time with people, which is also true, but isn't necessarily the whole truth.

Yeah. I think Kelly Sue did a good job of that too, because the length of the book also, I don't know if that's purposeful, but it probably was. So we'll just go with that.

That seems the most logical conclusion. There's only so much you can unpack without losing something else. Like if all of act one was just her childhood and then all of a sudden she's an adult and killing a guy, that'd be jarring.

So I'm on board with you. I a hundred percent agree. The way Kelly Sue gave was just insights into her history and why she's the way she is, was well done.

And I found myself in the same manner as I'm attracted to other female characters we wrote about, like Siri. Oh, here we go. I'm like, this is my girl.

I know she's mad. I don't know what that says about me. As a person, but I'm like, this is my type of girl.

From the atrocities she wishes to commit against quaint and charming people. Because I also feel the same way at some of these events that we are forced.

The longtime listeners know.

Yeah, they know. To the way she describes the chicken lady. I was thoroughly enjoying that section.

That was masterfully done. Slava doesn't see red flags. He just sees opportunities to fix people.

I don't want to fix her. I think she's perfect. I don't want to fix this girl.

Slava's red flags for book characters. Yeah, I'm not attracted to girly girls. I just don't find it attractive at all.

Well, that's good, because Victoria's almost a Spencer. So, you're good there. Yeah, forget that.

In 1847, you were a Spencer by 21, which is just mind-boggling, but it is what it is. Well, when you live to 30. Well, touche.

What's that horde of rats that the Pied Piper's bringing in? Oh, it's the bubonic plague. Oh, great.

What does that mean? You'll find out in a week. To your point, to fix people or rescue girls, hell no.

I do not need damsels in distress. I need somebody that can commit atrocities with me. You want mental instability.

And then you'll come alongside them and be like, you're so interesting. You've got all my attention. You're misunderstanding me.

I don't want mental instability. I'm not misunderstanding. I'm just telling the audience what you've explained to us.

You are telling them lies. Unreliable narrator.

Fits to the book.

Let's go with your assessment, but correct it. If it's mental instability, I want us to be both mentally unstable together. I don't want to fix anybody.

I'm not in that business. I don't understand guys or girls who want to fix their partner or whatever. I do not want damsels in distress.

The reason that I love my wife, and we've been happily married for 19 years, is because she has a brain and she's not a damsel. Because, gag me. So, that fits into the book too.

She probably would. Her and euphonia. Would gag?

Okay. Let's not ruin this episode. Let's just say this.

I would help get rid of Dr. Faber if we're going to help this woman. I would enjoy tea with euphonia and Dilly. We'll just sit tea and look out in the street and make fun of the chicken woman.

And make fun of the chicken woman. Right. So, who's she going to kill next?

Who's Dilly going to kill next? Whatever, man. That's her game.

I'm just here for the ride. It's Dilly's world. We're just living in it.

Buntington Ford. Yeah. This book feels like it was released at the apt time in history.

And the reason I say that is because Dilly is obsessed with humans die, but one day maybe humans can create something that will act human, but not be human. So, it doesn't deal with the decay. And AI is kind of like that.

Did you have any inclinations while reading this that this kind of felt like it was a historical piece kind of talking about AI? Or is that just me? I think that's just you.

What I thought about is AI adjacent. Maybe it's AI more than adjacent. But what I think of AI and the way you're describing it is, you know, Notebook LM, Chad GPT.

What I thought about are the robots that clean for you that are coming out now. Or the crap that Elon Musk is working on where he's creating like androids or wants to create androids. Or at least that's the stuff that pops up in my algorithm is people commenting on supposedly, allegedly, Elon Musk working on creating humanoid androids.

Yeah.

So, that came up from time to time as I was reading this, especially when Dilly is talking about transcending human decay, the eventuality of human decay, transcending that and being more like euphonia that's perfect, that still has human qualities, but will never smell the putrid... Putrid human smells. Yeah, like putrid human smells, all that stuff.

And Dilly's obsession, if you will, with this thing that humans can overcome. And it's the thing is death, right? So, I thought of that, but I didn't think of...

AI in particular? AI in particular. Yeah.

I could see Dilly's madness evolving into a few different scenarios. One of which is she loves euphonia so much, she wants to become one with her. And it becomes like a bionic.

She starts to cut off her arm or create a contraption that's like steampunk-esque that she and euphonia are one now. I could see her becoming Frankenstein-y where she's like, I need to make more euphonia. So, I'm going to take people from my neighborhood and they're going to disappear.

And I'm going to create... Because she knows how to fix euphonia, right? I'm going to create something similar.

She's going to chop off their arms to help people escape the decay of death, which would be ironic because she's dismembering them to do that. But... Yeah, but you got to do what you got to do.

It's the next level of evolution. Yes. And Dilly's helping us get there.

Well, this gets back to your Sherlock Holmes-like ideation. Then there needs to be, you know, from this perspective, an anti-hero who's trying to come and stop Dilly, right? Yeah.

And so now it's just a Victorian superhero show. Yeah, that could work. What came to mind when you said steampunk was this could be kind of like a biodome thing where Dilly's now the new doctor, whoever was the main evil guy in Biodome.

Not Biodome, Bioshock. Bioshock, there it is, yes. But I do think a biodome could be interesting in the Victorian era.

It'd be a little like a mixture of Bioshock where it's like older time frame, mildly advanced technology. Yeah. Right?

Because a biodome is well beyond Victorian era.

Yeah.

As is steampunk and things like that. But yeah, there's a lot of opportunity here, or to tie into some of Callie's other work is what if, I mean, you and I are just riffing now, this is good fun. What if She Had Glass Eyes is like one of the narratives from her time travel epic thing, 2032, that- 1232.

1232. What did I say? It's 2032.

They go back to the future. Or not. Future, future.

Back to the future for the present. Yeah. But having like- Think, McFly, think.

I'm doing my best here. I don't even know where I, you messed me up. Down with Slava.

Biodome. It doesn't matter. Bioshock, agility, dismembering your neighbors.

Multiverse. Oh, okay. I'm going to have literary Tourette's.

I'm just going to shout terms at you. Excellent. But I think this is it for this episode, but good book, great book, actually.

Loved it.

Yes.

From page one to page 70, Callie Sue. Excellent work. Nice work.

And I'm saying that not only is the guy that reads a lot and critiques books, online, whatever that means, right? Or for what it's worth. But as a Poe and Lovecraft fan- Yes.

This gave me the vibes in the best way for those. It reminded me of the Lovecraft story where he's on the submarine and he descends into madness. Don't remember the name of it off the top of my head.

Yeah. But I know what you're talking about. I got the same vibes.

Yep. Great work, Callie. And for the audience, she will be joining us next week on the show to discuss all of her creative projects, more of where the story came from, the inspiration, and probably a couple hidden things here and there.

So be sure to tune in. And until next time, here's a slogan. Excellent.

We'll see you next week. Your Tourette's going to help us there? You know, because normally people will be like, until next time, blah, blah, blah, whatever the slogan is, but we don't have one.

So that's- What would Dilly say if she was closing out a podcast? She would just breathe heavily like euphonia. Ooh.

No, no. I don't... Nah.

Let's not. See you next week, guys. I have a favor to ask you.

If you like what we're doing, the simplest way to support the show is to hit subscribe. In return, we'll keep leveling up and we'll listen to your feedback and read authors that you suggest. And of course, we'll take side quests along the way.

Thank you for joining us and we'll see you next time.