Catherine Hernandez’s latest novel, Behind You, is not your usual ripped-from-the-headlines story, and the first hint is the book’s opening epigraph: “It’s not about him, it’s about us.” 

The “him” is an unnamed serial killer modelled after the real-life criminal who stalked Scarborough, Ontario, more than 30 years ago, who Hernandez prefers not to name. It’s her attempt to redirect the reader’s attention away from the perpetrators of violence and toward the people they target—the “us,” who in the usual true crime saga would be reduced to one-dimensional victims, but here occupy most of the reader’s attention. 

This shift in focus to the people just behind the bigger, flashier story is Hernandez’s MO as a writer. Her previous three books—Scarborough, Crosshairs and The Story of Us—all focus on diverse characters who might otherwise be overlooked. For her, this is the natural result of “write what you know,” a deliberate decision to fill her books with characters who look like the people she grew up around—which, to be clear, isn’t typically the case in this country’s literary canon, which tends to feature characters who fall neatly into a small range of characteristics (white, male, often rural). Hernandez’s characters, meanwhile, are often the antitheses to traditional Canadiana, though each book is explicitly set here. Through her stories, rooted in specific perspectives and places, Hernandez is rewriting the canon.

She’s also delving into her own history. Behind You looks at the toll of growing up in the shadow of a national news-making crime spree through two alternating timelines. The first flashes back to the late ’80s and early ’90s, when a killer dubbed the Scarborough Stalker terrorized a teenaged version of the protagonist, Alma, and her peers, an experience that reflects Hernandez’s childhood and teenage years. (She moved to the Toronto suburb when she was 10, in 1987, and, like Alma, is queer and Filipino.) The second takes place in the modern day, where Alma is dealing with her son’s dangerous behaviour toward his girlfriend, which includes stalking and possessiveness. Hernandez wanted the book to “explore how we as a society allow history to repeat itself again and again while examining the role we must play to end those toxic cycles,” she says. 

The result is a chilling depiction of a dark time in Scarborough’s history and a thoughtful exploration of the ways cycles of gendered violence are perpetuated…and by whom. As the fear around the Scarborough Stalker intensifies, Alma internalizes messages from her classmates, family and community about how her identity inherently makes her “unsafe”—her age, gender, body and queerness mean she’s a target of violence from a variety of places, including where she should feel the safest: at home.   

“Having Alma sit at the crossroads of body size, sexual orientation and racialized identity allowed me to create a three-dimensional person who is oppressed in some ways, privileged in others,” Hernandez explains. It’s a stark look at the way that rape culture works in society, focused through the prism of one particular character’s lived experiences and how that informs her ideas around consent. 

The decision to use her hometown as the backdrop for this story was a natural one for Hernandez; three out of her four novels take place in Scarborough, which she says is a perpetual source of inspiration both because it’s still the place she knows best and because it remains widely underappreciated. 

“Scarborough doesn’t have many re­markable monuments dotting its sub­urban sprawl,” she says. “When you don’t have sparkly surroundings to distract you, what comes forward is the genuine nature of people, the simple conversations between us.” 

By rooting the story in the perspective of a queer woman of colour—and situating the narrative in a very specific time, place and lived experience—Hernandez challenges the notion that there’s just one Canadian story, making space for new ways of talking about “Canadianness.” But she’s also making a smart statement about true crime, the genre that Behind You dabbles in but ultimately upends, where the perpetrator is often the focus, and “imperfect” victims (namely people of colour and queer people) are ignored by both law enforcement and true crime media. 

“I have a love–hate relationship with true crime,” she says. “Yes, they are exciting to consume, but at what cost. Most true crime series possess the same structure: misogyny shapes the killer, fragile masculinity leads to shoddy investigations, rape culture blames victims [and] tells the targeted to do a better job of saving themselves, then when killer is caught, patriarchy says, ‘We saved you, you’re welcome.’ I wanted to subvert this genre by pulling focus from perpetrators to those who have survived and not survived—those lost and found.”