Interviewing Angela Slatter

Hellooo!

I recently reviewed the excellent fantasy novel The Briar Book of the Dead by AG Slatter — Runalong The Shelves another entry in the excellent Sourdough series of stories that are all set in the strange magical yet not particularly safe world where in this case magic and ghosts are both real. I was delighted to have the chance to ask Angela a few questions about he novel and a few other things

How would you like to booktempt people into reading The Briar Book of the Dead?

Oh, gosh! I’m terrible at this! Witches! Family secrets! Murders! I saw one reviewer describe it as “a cosy with witches” and that’s probably pretty close. If you’ve ever felt like the black sheep in your family, and unsure of the direction of your life – this is the book for you! Plus: magic!

We are so used to stories where witches are the enemy to be feared but here you’ve got a town that’s quite proud of its witches? Was that a deliberate choice?

Absolutely. I just thought “What if they got a chance to be appreciated for the good they did, rather than always being persecuted for the rumoured evil they were supposed to have done?” Witches, especially old women, are a convenient target because who’s going to defend them? But as one of the characters in Briar Book observes these witches have lived with nothing near the same sort of fear and repression that most witches have to contend with – I wanted to imagine how they might grow without that sort of limitation. And hey, what a nice change to see witches valued!

With Ellie we have a person for whom magic is not how they’ve learned to navigate the world, which is unusual in fantasy. What led you to her being the main character?

Part of that was writing against the idea of “the chosen one” – having the character who appears ordinary, but actually her strength comes from being able to do what seems boring and mundane to others – which is basically administration. Don’t worry – it’s not a novel about pushing papers across a desk! But rather anyone who’s worked in an organization which doesn’t have a good administrator will know that it’s an outer circle of hell. What Ellie does is care for an entire town by ensuring that everyone’s got a sturdy roof over their head, that everyone’s got enough to eat and access to the communal stores if needed, that there’s a program of civic maintenance to keep wells clean and clear, that old people in their homes alone are checked on. She makes the sure the community is sound and healthy.

But she was also really interesting to me because in quite a few ways she’s discontented with this life she has kind of imposed on her. She’s also the black sheep of her family – the first non-witch born to the Briars in 300 years – we all feel at some point that maybe we don’t belong in our family, but it’s quite extreme for Ellie! My friend Kathleen Jennings observed that it’s not a coming-of-age novel (and it’s not written as YA), but it is a stepping-into-power novel, which I think is a good description. Also, I just really like her as a character – I love them all, but I just really, really like and empathise with Ellie.

Throughout the book we get little folk tales used to explore history, and folklore of this world. How has this evolved in the Sourdough tales and where did it come from?

Before I wrote the novels in this world (All the Murmuring Bones, The Path of Thorns, The Briar Book of the Dead, and the one I’m working on right now The Crimson Road), I’d done three mosaic collections, which were interconnected tales, and I either wrote my versions of old tales (like “Little Radish”/”Rapunzel”), or wrote new tales with some recognizable elements (like “A Good Husband”) – and they all weave across time and the landscape of this fairytale world. When I came to write the novels, I thought “I’ve already done so much worldbuilding just through those short stories – so how about I make some of those tales into the stories that my characters in the novel were told as children? And how about some of those stories form the basis of solutions to the plot problems in the novel?” I’m fascinated by fable and rumour and gossip, how old stories travel and change and adapt – so this was my way of playing with that very real thing that occurs with fairy and folktales. For example, in The Crimson Road the plot has links back to the character of Murciana in the mosaic collections, who was a scribe in the Citadel of Cwen’s Reach, and to whom many many volumes of folklore and myth and history are attributed (and a lot of those books appear on the shelves of characters in the first three novels). An exciting Easter egg for really deep readers, and an interesting bit of story for new readers (hopefully!).

Hidden and forgotten secrets are a key part of this story. Did you know all of them prior to writing or did the plotlines evolve in the process?

Some I did and some I did not! I knew that I wanted to have a link to the novella Of Sorrow and Such, but at first I’d chosen the wrong character. It was only after I’d introduced the ghosts in the first draft that I knew who’d be a perfect guide and foil for Ellie. There’s always an evolution as you write – sometimes a plot problem seems insurmountable, but then I’d often say “Okay, what did I write in a previous story/novel?” and that process sometimes helped to sort things out.

What is the Australian sf&F/horror scene like and are there any authors you would like to recommend?

It’s very active and healthy! Check out Aurealis Magazine, which is a very long-running spec-fic mag, or Speculative Insight which is a new online journal of writing about speculative fiction.

A non-comprehensive list of authors to look for: JS Breukelaar, Joanne Anderton, Kathleen Jennings, Eugen Bacon, Alan Baxter, Aaron Dries, Freya Marske, Sam Hawke, Shelley Parker-Chan, Grace Chan, Geneve Flynn and (in NZ) Lee Murray, Octavia Cade and Tamsyn Muir!

And so many, many more! Google!!

What else can we look forward to from you in the future can we look forward to from in the future?

As I mentioned, The Crimson Road is out in 2025 along with a novella The Cold House (modern folk horror, not the Sourdough world). I’m contracted to write three novels and three novellas for Titan over the next couple of years and am looking forward to sinking my teeth into those. I’ve also got the audiobooks of my supernatural crime Verity Fassbinder series coming out in a couple of months, and a new edition of Black-Winged Angels from PS Publishing (which has a new tale in it and my MA thesis included). There’s a Spanish translation of The Bitterwood Bible (Dilatando Mentes) out now and next month a Spanish translation of the novella Ripper, as The Fifth Witch (Duermevela)! I’ve got one and a half short story collections looking for a home. Hopefully there will be a few other things in the wings!

What great books have you read recently?

Alix Harrow’s Starling House and Kell Woods’ After the Forest are a couple of the standouts!