We present part two of our interview with the 2024 World Fantasy Finalists and Winner in the Best Novel category, which was previously sent to our paid subscribers. This section presents thoughts from Tananarive Due, Yael Goldstein-Love, and Catriona Ward! (Part one featured Alix E. Harrow, Wole Talabi, and Martha Wells!) Enjoy!
Tananarive Due
What are some of your favorite works that you consider to be Fantasy and what do you love most about them?
Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred strikes me more as fantasy than horror because the time travel in that novel is based on magic (unexplained magic at that) rather than physics as we understand it. Other than that, my favorite form of fantasy storytelling is definitely horror, and some of my favorite recent horror novels have been The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones, The Fervor by Alma Katsu, and a novelette by Kai Ashante Wilson called The Devil in America. The latter two are historical, which also reveals one of my favorite uses of fantasy – inserting ritual/spells of “magic” in the past to explain a phenomenon that is hard to accept in realistic terms, i.e. mass racial attacks on Black communities, as in The Devil in America.
For you, do Fantasy works do something special, particular, or different from non-speculative works or even from works in other genres?
The idea of “magic” has always intrigued me, so that’s why many of my favorite fantasy novels delve into horror – not just the introduction of magic, but the cost of it, the dangers of abusing it, and the unintended results when a magical wish comes true. My novel in progress, Bear Creek Lodge, is really all about the unintended consequences of a wish coming true.
What are some of your favorite applications or approaches to Fantasy in your own work, whether specifically in The Reformatory, or other titles?
I’ll expand a bit on this idea of reimagining history, which has become one of my favorite uses of Fantasy (through magic, not necessarily just alternate history, which is considered science fiction). When I wrote The Reformatory, I wanted to create a better ending for my great-uncle, Robert Stephens, who died at the Dozier School for Boys in Marianna, FL in 1937. I also wanted to use the trope of ghosts, which readers usually find scary, to reimagine ghost manifestations that might be healing as well as horrifying.
Tananarive Due is an American Book Award and NAACP Image Award–winning author, who was an executive producer on Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror for Shudder and teaches Afrofuturism and Black Horror at UCLA. She and her husband, science fiction author Steven Barnes, cowrote the graphic novel The Keeper and an episode for Season 2 of The Twilight Zone for Paramount Plus and Monkeypaw Productions. Due is the author of several novels and two short story collections, Ghost Summer: Stories and The Wishing Pool and Other Stories. She is also coauthor of a civil rights memoir, Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights (with her late mother, Patricia Stephens Due). Learn more at TananariveDue.com.
Yael Goldstein-Love
What are some of your favorite works that you consider to be Fantasy and what do you love most about them?
I’m not sure whether it counts as Fantasy, but I reread Orlando by Virginia Woolf every five years or so. I don’t mean to do this, it’s not like a timed regimen, but it happens that way. I think it has to do with the book’s blend of humor and gravity, the way it plays with what it means to live in a gendered body in a way that is at once total silly fun and brilliant analysis, and how the play and the profundity cannot come apart, not at all. Reading it always reminds me what the point of fiction is for me, although there is no way I could put in words what that is.
More recently I picked up The Fixed Stars by Brian Conn and it had a similar effect on me. It’s a very strange and wonderful book about – maybe? – disease, vampires, the joys and horrors of embodiment, and what is actually possible within a human society. But the way the language and imagery arise out the story, so that it almost seems like a new language is being written in which to render this book page by page, made me feel very alive and excited to write again at a time when I was struggling to remember why I devote so much of myself to making things up.
Kindred by Octavia Butler is another book that means a lot to me, for not dissimilar reasons. I remember reading it at maybe fourteen or fifteen and suddenly being struck with the realization that my love of fantasy novels was not something I had to give up along with other childish things – that, in fact, there was nothing childish about fantasy at all. It might be one of the happiest memories of my life.
For you, do Fantasy works do something special, particular, or different from non-speculative works or even from works in other genres?
I have a hard time thinking in terms of genre, which is both a blessing and curse as a writer. All the books I love seem dictated by their own urgent internal logic, which means that sometimes they are entirely realist but more often than not they play with reality in some way that is demanded by the material. I think that word “play” is really the heart of it. What I love about fiction is the same thing I loved about playing as a child, it’s a way to get around the big hulking concreteness of the Very Real Things that pretend they’re the sum total of reality – I’m picturing them right now as represented by a bank as it would be drawn in a Loony Toons cartoon – and to a richer vein of things, that dark, illogical, unstable just-as-real reality running through and around us, the real that makes up our internal world and our interpersonal world, that most often gives us our sense of meaning, of wonder. Fantasy has a leg up on getting to this more interesting, harder-to-pin-down reality because it never considers itself beholden to the hulking non-negotiables that make up Realism.
What was the main inspiration for The Possibilities, how did the novel develop, and what, for you, is the heart of the story?
I wrote this book to make meaning out of the rich chaos of my postpartum experience. My son almost died during his birth, and afterwards the utter contingency of life, though hardly news, seemed to me to have depths and dimensions I’d never before grasped. I wanted to tame my feelings about my son’s contingency – he all too easily could have not made it – into a shape I could understand. I had a more artistic challenge in mind as well. Becoming a parent changed how I conceived of the human mind. Concepts that I’d previously thought of as useful theoretical constructs – an unconscious peopled with characters and events (real and fantasied) from our past, through which we filter our present – now struck me as viscerally true. I was awed by this new understanding of what we really are and what we carry inside of us at every moment, and I wanted to do justice to it through narrative. After all, true unconscious material is famously untranslatable. So could I capture the fantasy-esque way I believe our minds actually work in a way that was comprehensible, compelling, even artistically exciting? I knew that if I could then I could also convey an aspect of parenthood I’d never seen depicted to my satisfaction – the existential fear that is woven into so much of the misery and bliss of loving a child.
Your novel, The Possibilities, was a World Fantasy Finalist! But the way authors think of their own work is sometimes different from the way readers see it. What, for you, is interesting or different about this book, especially when considered with your other works – what do you love most about it?
People have classified this book in so many different ways – as fantasy, as sci-fi, as literary, as a book for mothers, as a book that absolutely no mother should read, as difficult, as a page-turner. To me, the lack of any unanimity about even the most basic aspects of a work is the sign that I’ve pulled off what I always want to pull off with my writing, which is to make sure that every piece is only exactly itself as closely as I can manage. I guess it comes back to that phrase I find myself falling back on a lot in this interview – dictated by its own internal logic. I love this book for being so hard to classify because it means I allowed it to be dictated by its own internal logic.
What are some of your favorite applications or approaches to Fantasy in your own work, whether specifically in The Possibilities, or other titles?
This was the first book I wrote that anyone would think to call fantasy, although I’ve played with reality in subtler ways in other works. I didn’t really set out to try my hand at a new genre. There was simply no other way to get at what I wanted to get at in writing this book, which was to capture something about what it really is to live inside the world with the minds we have, and especially to do so during the wildly strange period of learning to exist as a parent, which is a period of learning to be a whole new internal self within a whole new external reality. Like I said, my son had nearly died during his birth. For over an hour they couldn’t tell me whether he would make it and so I just lay there in the recovery room not knowing whether I was going to be taking home a newborn or whether I was in the midst of an unfolding tragedy. In the end he was fine, we took him home, and that’s when things got strange. At home with a healthy newborn, I felt I was existing in multiple realities simultaneously. It wasn’t just a second reality in which my son had died that felt like a shadow world lurking beside my own; there was also a world in which he’d rolled off the changing table, one in which his head slipped beneath the water during his bath, and so on. My mind was constantly split between these possibilities, and the result was so psychologically trippy that I felt there was no way I could capture it in realistic fiction. It was fantasy that gave me the perfect metaphor for the existential strangeness I was experiencing: suppose at the moment a baby is born, the laws of physics briefly change so that parallel worlds not only exist simultaneously but also affect each other. To me it felt almost true. There is something about giving birth—when the universe spores off a new universe, a whole new human, that the preceding one did not have – that seems as though it ought to complicate the physical laws of reality for several months at least. I had this very particular reason for feeling this way – my son’s birth had also been his almost-death – but I later learned that this new sense of reality in which contingency is so much more salient, so swollen, is a common experience for new parents. I don’t think there’s a way to capture what that’s like without resorting to some form of fantasy.
Yael Goldstein-Love is the author of The Passion of Tasha Darsky and the co-founder of the literary studio Plympton. She also practices psychotherapy with a particular interest in the transition to parenthood and is working toward her doctorate in clinical psychology. She lives with her son in Berkeley, California.
Catriona Ward
What are some of your favorite works that you consider to be Fantasy and what do you love most about them?
I grew up in Kenya, Madagascar, the US, Morocco and Yemen. As a family we often took long road trips – days and weeks long. For many years we listened, over and over, to the twelve-cassette unabridged recording of The Lord of the Rings. It was my first introduction to fantasy. Even Tolkien’s source material seemed exotic to me at the time – some of the most beautiful passages in the book are almost nature writing – descriptions of the UK landscape, of weather, of green hills and rain. As a child brought up in warm climates, even this seemed like fantasy to me.
I love Ursula le Guin with a passion. No other writer for me has so much humanity, combined with a terrifying clinical eye. Kelly Link blends genre, particularly fantasy, with realism in a particularly weird and exciting way. Her worlds seem more real than this one at times.
For you, do Fantasy works do something special, particular, or different from non-speculative works or even from works in other genres?
I think all those genres provide a mirror to show us back ourselves. Fantasy in particular throws human nature into relief by throwing it into new worlds. It’s what writing is for, isn’t it? To open imaginative and empathetic worlds. As a species we’ve always understood ourselves best through storytelling and myth. Fantasy seems very much the natural inheritor of these things. Because whatever the story, our human sorrow and fear and love are there all the same. Sometimes you read to find yourself, sometimes it’s to lose yourself. Fantasy lets you do both at once.
What are some of your favorite applications or approaches to Fantasy in your own work, whether specifically in Looking Glass Sound, or other titles?
It can be difficult to let yourself go, as a writer, to allow the world of the book to take over. The more I read the more I feel that all novels have their own worldbuilding, as intricate as any secondary world fantasy. Even in seemingly realistic works supposedly couched in the rules of our world – there is still a specific tone and strict set of rules the novel will abide by. This kind of worldbuilding is essential to plot, to character, to completely immersing the reader in whatever dream or nightmare you’ve created. Nothing can reproduce reality – and if it did it would only be the author’s reality. Writing is building a structure where reader and writer can meet – a world. Maybe all novels are fantasy novels in the end.
Your novel, Looking Glass Sound, was a World Fantasy Finalist! But the way authors think of their own work is sometimes different from the way readers see it. What, for you, is interesting or different about this book, especially when considered with your other works – what do you love most about it?
It’s also about writers and writing which can be a gamble – the physical act of writing is not actually a very dramatic thing to write about. And books about books and writers can run the risk of being self-congratulatory or romanticised. I wanted to focus on the monstrosity of writing, as an almost at times cannibalistic act. And without giving too much away, I have wanted for some time to write a novel where the very nature of the book changes – in your hand – as you read. The structure of this book challenged me more than anything I’ve ever written.
What was the main inspiration for Looking Glass Sound, how did the novel develop, and what, for you, is the heart of the story?
My partner was recovering from a grave illness when I wrote this book, and I think a lot of that fear and care makes its way into the story. Love is at the heart of Looking Glass Sound. The protagonist, Wilder, wants to fall in love – it’s all he wants from the first page of the book. I found as I wrote that books and love came to seem more and more similar. Both start in this passionate heady idealised state. Both change and grow, sometimes into something very different to what you had planned, as time passes.
This book draws deeply from Stephen King – not just the setting, Maine, but from that other great place he explores in so many novels – youth, on the cusp of adulthood. It’s my love letter to all the things that made me a writer.
CATRIONA WARD was born in Washington, DC, and grew up in the United States, Kenya, Madagascar, Yemen, and Morocco. She studied English at the University of Oxford and later earned her master’s degree in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. Ward is a three-time winner of the August Derleth Award for Best Horror Novel: for The Girl from Rawblood, her debut; Little Eve; and The Last House on Needless Street. Little Eve also won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Novel. Ward is the international bestselling author of The Last House on Needless Street and Sundial.