When she learned that one of the victims shared her first name, Tiffany McDaniel knew she had to write about the Chillicothe Six.
“I should say that I call it the Chillicothe Six and that’s what it was originally called for the original six victims,” McDaniel told me. “But there were more victims beyond that.”
Of course, McDaniel’s new novel On The Savage Side is only loosely inspired by the murders and disappearances of several women between 2013 and 2015 in the area around Chillicothe. It is not a true crime novel, nor is it by any means a traditional murder mystery. On The Savage Side is a poetic, dreamlike look into the lives of twin sisters Arc and Daffy as they navigate a rural Ohio landscape scarred by addiction, poverty and violence.
McDaniel—a native of Southern Ohio whose previous novels include Betty and The Summer that Melted Everything—said that while her characters are fictional, they were inspired not only by the real voiceless victims in Chillicothe, but also by people she’s known in her life, “whose lives took them towards the path of addiction and those lifestyles associated with it.”
“You were kind of hearing some talk in the community that, ‘Well, these women were attached to that lifestyle associated with addiction and what did they expect?’” said McDaniel. “And so I really wanted to portray the women as individuals who were unique and had personalities and were mothers and sisters and daughters and represent them more than what I think the headlines were doing at the time.”
Eschewing the traditional police procedural elements of a crime novel, McDaniel’s book always centers the women on the fringes of her Chillicothe, their interactions with one another, and the small, fragile community they build between themselves.
“I really wanted them to have their own language,” said McDaniel. “Of course it still had to be English so that the reader could understand it, but their language was through their imagination, it was through that mythology, and that was really how they spoke to each other in this place where perhaps others in the community would have kind of discounted who they were, discounted their thoughts.”
McDaniel’s roots shine through as she surrounds her characters with the unique mythology and mysticism of Southern Ohio. Her twin protagonists spend much of their childhood with their grandmother Mamaw Milkweed, who raises the girls on tales of witchcraft and hill magic.
“It is a place that carries that folklore and magic,” said McDaniel. “With my mother and her Cherokee father and bringing in those stories that she raised me on, that he had taught to her, that he had carried through from North Carolina when they migrated up, it was really a land that was rich in story and my childhood was rich in that mythology.”
Environmental themes tend to run through all of McDaniel’s work, and the same is true of On The Savage Side. McDaniel continuously returns to images of the stark, natural beauty of Appalachian Ohio, and even explores the thoughts of a sentient Scioto River, who mourns a murder victim as she decomposes beneath the water’s surface.
“When I write about Southern Ohio or Ohio Appalachia that’s really what I want readers to fall in love with instantly,” said McDaniel. “It’s a region…impacted by a lot of environmental concerns, whether it’s mining and that impact on the local wildlife and deforestation…I try to put those environmental threads in the book so hopefully readers care more about the environmental region of this area then they might be more inclined to be involved with those environmental movements in terms of conserving and safeguarding against future and present uses.”
As always, these glimpses of the natural world are seen through the eyes of McDaniel’s characters—who call themselves the “Chillicothe Queens”—proxies for the real women who disappeared and died under circumstances that remain frustratingly unresolved. As she was researching the case, McDaniel found a photograph of a woman who had disappeared from Columbus—a disappearance that might have been linked to the Chillicothe murders.
“When I saw her photograph, I recognized her face,” said McDaniel. “Even though it had changed from her addictions and everything, been altered, I still recognized her face.”
McDaniel realized she had gone to school with the missing woman.
“I hope that [readers] connect to these women, that they see them beyond the mug shots that were displayed in the media and beyond what their personal addictions and lifestyles might have been, to see them as women who were mothers and sisters and daughters and especially in the case of this book, friends to one another,” said McDaniel. “And hopefully through that people can understand what brought them here in this life and not necessarily seeing the crime or the murder overshadow them. But understanding that they had lives and names and voices and I think that that’s important to remember.”
On The Savage Side will be available everywhere on February 14. It is dedicated to the original six Chillicothe victims, along with the promise, “You are not forgotten.”