Spotlight: Crafting The World Of “Bonaire”
Author Ishan Sharma walks us through the research, mood boards, and writing rituals that shaped the psychological thriller everyone is talking about.
Psychological thriller fans have been buzzing about Bonaire, the mind-bending debut from author Ishan Sharma. The story opens with a single misplaced coffee mug and escalates into a conspiracy of institutional gaslighting, narrative warfare, and the fragile nature of memory. In this in-depth interview, Sharma walks us through the meticulous research, cinematic mood boards, and ritualistic writing practice that made Bonaire such an addictive mystery.
An Interview with Ishan Sharma, author of Bonaire
Interviewer: Ishan, thank you for joining us. Let’s start at the beginning. Bonaire is built on a chillingly unique premise—not just a conspiracy, but a “narrative contagion.” Where did the initial seed for this idea come from?
Ishan Sharma: It started with a simple question: What if a story could make you sick? We live in an age where narratives—true or false—spread like viruses and can fundamentally alter how people see the world. I wanted to take that idea to its most extreme and personal conclusion. What if a narrative was not just an idea, but an active, invasive force? It began there, with the concept of a story that does not just want to be read, but wants to rewrite its reader.
Building a Fog-Drenched Campus of Paranoia
Interviewer: The setting is a character in itself—a bleak, foggy, unnamed university town in the early 2000s. Why did you choose that specific atmosphere and technological era, with its dial-up modems and CRT monitors, to tell this story?
Ishan Sharma: The early 2000s is a fascinating and terrifying transitional period. It is an era where information was becoming easy to copy but remained incredibly difficult to verify. There were no cloud backups, no constant GPS, no social media timeline to prove where you were and what you did. A record could be a single piece of paper in a filing cabinet or a file on a server that could be altered without a trace. That technological fragility creates a unique kind of dread. It is a world where a person could genuinely be erased, and the fog--both literal and digital--was the perfect atmosphere for that quiet, clinical horror.
Neva Sen and the Logic of Survival
Interviewer: The protagonist, Neva Sen, is a brilliant analyst who is forced to question her own sanity. She is not a traditional action hero. What was most important for you to capture in her journey from meticulous investigator to the subject of a campus-wide myth?
Ishan Sharma: The most important thing was her intelligence. Neva’s greatest weapon is her analytical mind and her obsessive need for order and documentation. The horror is not just that strange things are happening to her; it is that these things are a direct assault on the very logic she uses to define her reality. I wanted her fight to be an intellectual one. When she sets a tripwire made of a single human hair, it is not an act of a paranoid victim; it is an analyst setting up an experiment to test an impossible hypothesis. Her journey is about what happens when the smartest person in the room realizes the rules of the room have been secretly rewritten.
Designing the Case File Narrative Structure
Interviewer: The structure of the novel is incredibly ambitious, presented as a case file with interstitial fragments, redacted memos, and audio transcripts. What inspired you to tell the story this way, and what experience are you hoping that unique format creates for the reader?
Ishan Sharma: I wanted the book itself to feel like an artifact, a piece of evidence. The reader is not just a spectator; they are an investigator who is piecing together a story from a collection of compromised, conflicting, and sometimes clinical documents. The Analyst Notes and other fragments give the reader a glimpse behind the curtain, a view that Neva and her friends do not have. This creates a specific kind of suspense: the dread of knowing the trap is closing before the characters do. The goal is to make the act of reading feel like an act of surveillance.
Maya, Jonas, and the Anatomy of Trust
Interviewer: Neva is not alone in her fight. Her friends, Maya and Jonas, are crucial to the story. Can you talk about their roles and what they represent in Neva’s fracturing world?
Ishan Sharma: Maya and Jonas are the story’s heart and mind, respectively. Maya is all fire, loyalty, and emotional truth. She is the one who will kick down a door while Neva is still analyzing the lock. Jonas is the opposite; he is the quiet analyst, the archivist who is more comfortable with data than with people. They represent two different ways of responding to a crisis: Maya with raw, human force, and Jonas with cautious, intellectual rigor. Their belief in Neva, even when her story sounds impossible, is the anchor that keeps her—and the reader—grounded.
Defining the Threat: Ezran Hale vs. the Pattern
Interviewer: The story introduces a mysterious figure, Ezran Hale, and a faceless entity called the System or the Pattern. How do you want readers to understand the threat in these early chapters?
Ishan Sharma: In the beginning, the threat is designed to be ambiguous. Ezran is the human face of the phenomenon; he is the ghost you can see. He is the observer, the man in the margins, and for Neva he becomes the logical focus of her investigation. But the Pattern is something larger, colder, and more insidious. It is in the way records change, the way handwriting is mimicked, the way the university itself seems to bend its own rules. The central question for Neva, and for the reader, is whether she is being haunted by a man or targeted by a machine.
When the University Becomes the Monster
Interviewer: The institution itself plays a huge role, moving from a neutral setting to an active antagonist. What is it about institutional power that you wanted to explore?
Ishan Sharma: The most terrifying monsters are not the ones that roar; they are the ones that ask you to fill out a form. I was interested in the horror of bureaucracy—the way a large, faceless system can erase a person with a quiet keystroke or a misplaced file. The horror of the university in Bonaire is its calm, paternalistic, and soul-crushing indifference. It does not need to use violence when it can wield a wellness check or an academic probation hearing with the precision of a scalpel.
The Question That Lingers After Part I
Interviewer: Finally, without giving anything away, what is the central question you hope readers are asking themselves as they finish Part I of Bonaire?
Ishan Sharma: By the end of Part I, the reader has witnessed a complete, and in many ways a tragic, story. The question I want them to be left with is not “What happens next?” but a more unsettling one: “Was that the whole story?” I want them to feel a sense of finality, but also a deep, nagging suspicion that the truth is far larger and far stranger than what they have just seen. The real story is not about what happened to Neva; it is about the pattern she left behind.
Psychological Thriller Takeaways
- Readers looking for cerebral psychological thrillers will find high-stakes mind games anchored by emotional truth.
- The novel blends institutional horror, conspiracy fiction, and academic espionage into one relentless narrative.
- Authors can study Bonaire as a blueprint for integrating multimedia storytelling into long-form fiction.
Continue Exploring Bonaire
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Curious about Ishan's wider creative philosophy and studio rituals? Read our companion conversation,Designing Fictional Systems: An Interview with Ishan Sharma →
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