On the first page of Aaron Starmer’s new young adult novel, Night Swimming  (Penguin Workshop, April 29), a character says, “As I watch you sleep, I sing to myself, soft and mournful, a calming melody that laps against the shores of my addled mind. I doubt you can hear it, but it’s our song, the one you sing to me. The lyrics mean so much more than you might realize.”

The song is “Nightswimming,” from R.E.M.’s 1992 album Automatic for the People, and it’s a fitting one. Starmer’s novel follows Trevor and Sarah, recent high school graduates in the fictional northeastern town of Sutton; Trevor is in love with Sarah, but she has a boyfriend who attends the college that she intends to go to.

Sarah proposes an idea to Trevor: Before college starts, they should swim in every pool in Sutton, at least 30 of them. When they and their friends take an unauthorized dip in one of them, they are met by a mysterious woman who tells them about a natural pool nearby, which they immediately investigate—but the pool turns out to be a much stranger place than they bargained for.

Starmer discussed Night Swimming via Zoom from his home in Vermont. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How did the idea for this book come to you?

I’ve had the idea for years—even back when I was a teenager, the summer after senior year, when I was with a group of friends, hanging out, philosophizing about what we wanted to do with life. There may have been a couple of times that we snuck in and swam in some pool. There’s a reference in the book to the John Cheever story, “The Swimmer,” about a guy who travels across the suburbs, swimming in the pools in all these different neighbors’ houses. It takes a somewhat surreal turn. I always had that in the back of my mind as well, but I didn’t sit down to write it until a few years ago.

The title is a reference to the R.E.M. song “Nightswimming.” Was that song an early inspiration for you when you started writing the book?

That definitely pushed me forward. That song has a very particular mood and a very particular set of lyrics that are obviously tied into the book, but it’s almost that idea of instant nostalgia. I remember when that song came out, I was the age of these characters, and we might’ve been listening to that song. It feels like you’re in it as a teenager, but you’re also immediately looking back on what it meant to be a young person at that time. So while I’m in my late 40s writing about teenagers, even back then, songs like that evoked an instant nostalgia for me.

The novel has an A-side/B-side structure, and you have chapters named after songs by musicians like Mazzy Star and Guided by Voices and Slint. When you were writing the book, did you turn to the music of that era to help you evoke the setting?

Yeah, I went through all the albums that were influential to me and certainly focused on indie rock and alternative rock. I thought of putting in some rap songs and other things that were popular at the time, but I wanted to capture a certain mood. The first half represents stuff that I was listening to at that time, and then the second half is stuff that I’ve gone back to in my 20s and 30s and 40s, either rediscovered or that I never paid much attention to at the time. It did make me revisit a lot of stuff I haven’t listened to in 20 or 30 years and also led to a few new discoveries.

There are a few chapters named after songs from different eras, like “Purple Haze.”

Certainly, during the ’90s, kids were listening to a lot of classic rock from the ’60s and ’70s. I was listening to Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin and the Beatles, and I thought about including more of that. For instance, the Jimi Hendrix song is very specifically tied to one character, and it foreshadows what might happen later. And then there’s a couple of songs at the end that sort of reveal a little bit of what’s going on. There are a lot of easter eggs—song lyrics and album covers. I had a lot of fun with that.

Do you see the mysterious pool as a metaphor for that liminal time between high school and whatever comes next?

I first wanted to be like, All right, let’s do a summer book that’s quick and fun about this mission to swim all these pools. Then I felt it needed something more. I came upon the idea from old Luis Buñuel movies, The Exterminating Angel and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Both of them are about dinner parties, one a dinner party where no one can ever leave and one a dinner party that never starts. I remember seeing those movies years ago and thinking, Oh, those are interesting hooks; I wonder if I could use them somehow. And when I was writing Night Swimming, I also was thinking a little bit about Stephen King— these high-concept horror books, these spooky ideas, but more grounded in the emotions of this particular time in life. So I found I had that hook, that twist, and then I was like, How do I bring out the metaphorical nature of this? It was pretty natural to set it at that particular time. Obviously, I could have set it during the summer after junior year, but it’s not the same as the summer after senior year.

Have you gotten any feedback from young people who read an advance copy of the book?

Right now it’s only in the hands of people my age. But I’m curious how young readers will react to it. I remember these revelatory books or movies that I experienced in the late ’80s or early ’90s, where the characters were a lot like me. They were going through a lot of the same things, and it connects you to your parents in a new way. A big influence behind it was the Richard Linklater movie Dazed and Confused. There’s the line where they’re all hanging out and one of the characters says, “The ’60s rocked, and the ’70s—oh my God, they obviously suck.” That movie came out my senior year of high school, and we all went to see it at the local art house movie theater, and we were like, That seemed like the coolest time in the world. The ’90s obviously suck. So I was playing off a lot of those vibes.

You have another YA book coming out in 2027, The Swans. Was that also inspired by your hometown?

That is directly inspired by some incidents in my hometown, which are somewhat infamous at this point. [Ed.: In 2023, a group of teens in Manlius, New York, killed and ate a swan from a town pond.] It’s set in the modern day, so there are flashbacks to different times. I have no idea how my hometown will react to it, but it’s definitely influenced by real events.

Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.