The Queen of Unreliable Picture Book Narration: A Jess Hannigan Q&A About The Cow in the Dark at Night

Who knew that Jess Hannigan was such a viral video superstar?

If you’re on the old Instagram these days (or, quite possibly, the Tiktok, though I am geriatric and it hurts me head) then you’ve probably seen a recent uptick in videos from one Jess Hannigan. Which one is your favorite? Is it the one where she’s in an alien-abduction blow-up balloon or the one where the clouds start talking to her directly? The general oeuvre of them remind me of when Dan Santat used to make wacky videos for each of his books back in the day (someone should do a film festival of those, by the way… it would kill). It indicates to me, of course, that this picture book creator in question has so much creativity spilling out of her pores that she can’t help but figure out how to sell herself online.

For me though? I just happen to like Jess Hannigan’s latest book. The Cow in the Dark at Night combines two of my favorite things: unreliable narrators and oblivious bovines. Now you can have both! If I try to describe it myself then I run the danger of using weird terms and outdated phrases, as is my wont, so I’ll leave it to the publisher to describe it properly:

It is nighttime and the cow is loose. In this vibrant and silly picture book, curiosity leads to some strange encounters indeed…

The cow has always wondered what goes on when the sun goes down.

Tonight, she will discover it all. Adventures, nocturnal friends, every exciting thing waiting out there in the dark new world.

But these night people may have other things in mind…

It’s a good thing that the moon is very bright tonight.

Pretty standard stuff. But then it goes on a little longer…

Readers who love scaredy cats, Jon Klassen, neon green, X. Fang, and things that go bump in the night will fall in love with this new story from beloved Spider in the Well author Jess Hannigan!

… huh. I don’t know. I think it’s the inclusion of “neon green” between Jon Klassen and X. Fang that kind of threw me. Also, 20 points to X. Fang for becoming the author/illustrator that folks are getting compared to at this point.

Now the happy news is that I am pleased to announce that I got a chance to ask Jess a question or two in time for the EXACT release date of this glorious book! That’s right! It’s out today! And Jess was more than a little willing to answer some of my questions…

---

Betsy Bird: Jess! Do forgive me, but to my mind you are in many ways the Indie Rock Band of children’s book author/illustrators. One of those IYKYK creators. And your latest contains all the weirdness (and humor) one would hope for in an Alt-Pick Creator (new term: copyright me). Before I get into anything else, let’s discuss your latest. Where did the idea for THE COW IN THE DARK AT NIGHT come from?

Jess Hannigan: That’s the coolest thing anyone’s ever said to me, I love it and I feel seen.

The idea started from a drawing I was messing around with just for fun, which is not actually something I do often. I love Tomi Ungerer’s THE THREE ROBBERS, and how he uses super flat blue and black to capture the nighttime atmosphere. I was like “I gotta try that”.

I have no idea why I picked a cow to draw, other than I love cows. I played many hundreds of hours of Harvest Moon in my life so maybe that’s the culprit. I drew my cow, in all black and blue, and wrote “The Cow in the Dark at Night” around her. That looked like a book to me, so that’s how it came about.

I obviously strayed from the edgy minimalist blue and black thing almost immediately, which made me feel less like a cool design guy and like I’d maybe lost my gimmick, but eventually accepted that the initial drawing was just the jumping off point. Plus I really wanted some freaky bright green and reds in there.

BB: Ah! That explains the “neon green” your publisher is bragging about. Now in your first picture book (SPIDER IN THE WELL) your protagonist was smarter than all the other characters. In your second picture book (THE BEAR OUT THERE) the protagonist was willfully misleading the reader. But your third book (THE COW IN THE DARK AT NIGHT) contains a protagonist who is utterly (udderly?) different. A willfully ignorant hero, perhaps too self-deluded to see what is truly happening around them.

This shift between your “heroes” is fascinating to me. Are you conscious of this shift from book to book to book, or does it catch you by surprise as much as it does your readers?

Jess: Not a conscious change at all. I love scheming characters, anything to have a kid almost want to yell at the book, because they SEE what’s really going on.

I love a main character that is a little off-beat, and I think I’d get bored if I had one that was too simple or competent. To keep me interested there needs to be a little extra bite, something funny about them. Cow fits this off-beat bill in that she’s either totally delusional or naive, we never know for sure which. Maybe she knows what she’s doing to the cat the whole time, and is just having fun stressing him out! I think of it in the same way that an adult character becomes more interesting when they have some complicated character “flaw”, even if it’s just their own bizarre brand of logic or something.

BB: Oo. I like that. And if I may be so bold as to point this out, your past books have fallen squarely in the fairytale/folktale genre. With COW, however, you’re branching out. Fantasy (vampires)! Science Fiction (aliens)! It feels like a bit of a shift. Have you wanted to try other genres?

Jess: That’s true! I’m not strictly a folk-tale girl, I think it might have just been up to chance that those two happened to be within that genre. It might be that I like the bite that a fairy/folktale story can have, and that’s why they turned out how they did. I didn’t set out to write them as such though, most of my decisions in terms of genre seem to be pretty subconscious so far.

I am a big science fiction person, though, so it makes sense that this would be something I made eventually! I love so many movies to do with space and aliens, and I’ve been a vampire kid before anything else. Cows and aliens are a no-brainer, too. I love that entire kitschy vibe. I bet as soon as I knew this was a cow book that I’d need an alien in there somehow.

Look forward to an entire vampire book one day, too, that totally has to happen.

BB: Heck yeah. The Hannigan vampire book would be epic. Maybe this guy could get a spinoff. Meanwhile, your cow protagonist is, in many ways, my favorite of your heroes. Oblivious to any and all danger, while a well-meaning cat has several heart attacks on its behalf. Is an unreliable narrator something you wanted to try for a while, or, as you were writing this book, did it just come to you?

Jess: In my head all 3 of my books have kind of had unreliable main characters in different ways, and I’d say this is just the first one to be unintentionally unreliable. To me I’m using all of my characters in a similar way, as a tool to facilitate gasps and protests from readers.

I love each of my books to have a kind of “gimmick”, something twisty. In SPIDER, the twist was the boy was the biggest schemer of all, even though we start by thinking he’s a victim. In BEAR, the girl ends up being a real antagonist despite her promising you’re safe with her. For COW my gimmick was really simple: she claims she totally knows what’s going on, despite obviously misunderstanding every single interaction, and somehow everything works out (mostly).

Each character was totally necessary for each story to be punchy and have a purpose for me. I love when a character is a little clueless too!

BB: Tell us a bit about your process. Did you have a clear outline of THE COW IN THE DARK AT NIGHT from the start, or does your writing process come more in fits and starts?

Jess: This one came extremely easily, for the most part. I had that first idea “cow can’t see but wants to wander around”. So of course she has to narrowly escape fiends while thinking everything is splendid. I knew I wanted it to escalate more and more with increasingly crazy encounters, ultimately being abducted by an alien.

The ending was the main thing I spent some time noodling with. I initially thought maybe she should be abducted and then brought back after her adventure, the cat incredulous on how she managed to pull that off despite how wild everything got. “You’ve got some dumb luck, cow” or something on those lines. That was funny, but felt a little sweet still, so of course there had to be an alternative ending aptly titled “Queen of Mars version”. Most of my books eventually land on a “less-sweet-ending” version that I inevitably end up liking better. Also a too-crazy version. The sweet spot reveals itself pretty quickly.

BB: Hey, man. It’s why we love your books. Finally, what else are you working on these days? What can we look forward to?

Jess: I have a set of 3 board books coming out in October! They’re called WORDS THAT GO OOO, EEE, and AHH, respectively. They’re rhyming books that play with phonetics in a baby-friendly way, for your first ever sounds and then some. They’re also an excuse for me to play with limited palette color combinations, so I hope babies everywhere can appreciate my use of chartreuse and aubergine.

I also have a couple of books that I’m illustrating for other cool authors! Stay tuned for those cover reveals soon, I’m extremely excited about them.

---

Stonefruit Studio, you WILL send me those board books Jess just alluded to! Puh-leeeze??

Oh man. Huge thanks to her, though, for taking the time to answer my questions here today. As for right now, you can get yourself a copy of The Cow in the Dark at Night anywhere fine books are sold. It is out right now and it couldn’t be more fun.

And hey, if you subscribe to her Substack you can see how she made the art for this book (which is pretty neat in and of itself).

Thanks so much for Jess for answering my questions and to Kelly Haberstroh and the team at Harper Collins for helping to put this all together.

Filed under: Interviews