Interviewing AG Slatter
Helloo!
Last week I returned to the wonderful world of the Sourdough novels when I reviewed The Crimson Road by AG Slatter (reviewed https://www.runalongtheshelves.net/blog/2025/2/13/the-crimson-road-by-ag-slatter ) this tells the tale of the amazing Violet Zennor who is trying to outrun the father father has required her to do and battle The Leech Lords (vampires!). It’s a fantastic story full of surprises and for fans of the series some catch ups with other characters. It was a pleasure then to invite Angela back to the blog to talk about how this book developed.
How do you like to booktempt The Crimson Road?
Oh, gosh. Witches, vampires, bad dads, found families, sisterhood, a touch of Buffy, and a bit of spice!
I loved meeting the lead character Violet. How did you find this character?
I’d been thinking about how oldest children are frequently given responsibility for their younger siblings, and how it often goes beyond “Watch your brother while I go to the mailbox” and extends to “Feed them after school, make sure they do their homework”, and especially if you’re a first-born daughter you’re kind of forced into the pseudo-maternal role. I know why it happens – mothers are frequently overworked and overstimulated and overburdened, so they look for help from the closest person to hand, which is frequently an oldest child. Often you’re made responsible for the siblings’ behaviour, which is fraught because a 5 year old doesn’t want to be told what to do by a 6 year old! So, you have this oppositional, combative relationship being set up even if it’s not intended because you’re being made into the free childcare.
And I was thinking about what happens if this is carried to an extreme: your sibling is going to destroy the world, make sure you stop them because mother/father are busy making dinner. I’m a first-born daughter (no surprise there!) and a writer, so naturally I wanted to explore that. When I hit that point of thinking, then Violet showed up and started talking so I had her voice then. I’m also interested in turning ideas about “chosen ones” on their heads, so I wanted to look at what happens if you definitely do not want to do your chosen duties – can you get out of them? So I ended up with this young woman who’s very much been moulded into a shape she didn’t like by a bunch of old guys and she was finally in a place where she thought she was free.
What drew you to this time highlighting the leech lords and what did you want to do differently to other vampire tales?
Well, every story needs a monster! It links back to the fact that I wrote the Sourdough mosaic collections and they’ve basically become the base code for this universe, along with the novellas (Of Sorrow and Such, The Bone Lantern and the short story “No Good Deed”), so I thought that the leech lords, which I’d first written about in The Bitterwood Bible, would be a really interesting monster to examine further. One of the limitations with them is the fact that they are confined to the Darklands in the north, they can’t pass the boundary held by the Briar Witches – so I had to figure out how to keep the story moving until Violet could encounter these creatures she’s been trained to kill, without ever having fought one! I thought it was an interesting challenge to pair with the idea that a battleplan never survives contact with the enemy – so all her studying and training might not be much help to her.
The main thing I changed is that the leech lords are fine with ordinary silver – but there’s still the famous O’Malley silver from All the Murmuring Bones that can affect them – but then the O’Malleys and their silver have, for all intents and purposes, disappeared from the world… which adds another challenge for Violet.
As Violet starts to cross paths with other characters from the Sourdough novels a common theme seems to be women defying the fates drawn out for them. Is this something you enjoy exploring?
Absolutely! It would seem foolish to keep doing something if I didn’t enjoy it. 😊 I also think that these books and this theme are especially relevant for women today. Resilience, independence, bravery, standing up for yourself and not giving away your time or influence or self-worth are all incredibly important – and supporting each other.
The Sourdough novels all take place in the same place with the same common legends but this time we have a lot more crossover with the previous novels what made you this time make these links more explicit and did you enjoy showing us what happened next to the cast?
It was something that occurred to me when I was writing All the Murmuring Bones, that there was all this existing material that I’d already created and I loved the idea that those stories were the fairy and folktales my characters had been told. Such stories were always warning stories and so I loved the idea of there being an echo of how I was told the old versions of Grimms’ fairy tales with how these protagonists were told versions of them or newly made ones in this world.
And I had other characters from the collections that I really wanted to revisit because they’ve been living rent-free in my head for literal years. Finally, they got the chance to say “We’re ready! It’s go time.” With The Crimson Road, it was a matter of reaching really far back into the “history” of the world because I loved the idea of this dark skein having run through the world for so long. The threat of the rising darkness, something so old that memory of it had largely been lost – which fits nicely with another of my favourite themes: the preservation of knowledge and books.
What else can we look forward to from you in the future? In this weird world of social media where can we find out more?
I’ve just handed in edits on a contemporary folk horror novella called The Cold House (with Titan), and I also submitted the next Sourdough world novel at the end of last year, A Forest Darkly, which is basically a grumpy witch in the woods tale mixed with some Hansel and Gretel elements, some Herne the Hunter inflections, and the idea that past sins never stay buried no matter how far you run.
I’m currently in the middle of the next folk horror novella, Fichter’s Birds, and then I’ll be back at the novel after that, Our Lady of Battles. There are also a couple of secret projects around that I hope to announce in a couple of months.
Social Media:
Website www.angelaslatter.com
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/angelaslatterauthor/
Instagram angelaslatter
Threads angelaslatter
Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/angelaslatter.bsky.social
What great books have you read recently?
T. Kingfisher’s A Sorceress Comes to Call, AI Jiang’s A Palace Near the Wind, Sarah Manguso’s Liars, Lauren Groff’s Matrix, Annie Neugebauer’s collection You Have to Let Them Bleed, and Shannon Morgan’s Grimdark.
