Page 16 of Grimdark Magazine Issue 48

Author of Ten Thousand Doors of January, One and Future Witches, Starling House, and The Everlasting, Alix E. Harrow is a multi-bestseller author and has repeatedly been reviewed here at Grimdark Magazine. Her stories blend the hard edge of darkness with cores of strength and hope in a way that makes her work catnip to our reviewers. Her latest novel, The Everlasting, has recently been announced as being in development for a Netflix adaptation, and our reviewer, Krystle Matar, was honoured with an ARC of Harrow’s upcoming short story collection The Slantwise Histories. Harrow kindly sat down with our magazine editor Beth Tabler, and feral superfan Krystle Matar, to talk about short stories, Ancel, spite, and a love of storytelling.

[KM] Thank you so much for chatting with us, Alix, and congratulations of course on the big Netflix news for The Everlasting! I can’t wait to see Owen and Una (and Ancel too, because I am a sucker for a beautiful but toxic man) come to life on the screen. Has the news sunk in yet for you?

[AH] Oh, absolutely not. I sort of wriggle out from under this kind of thing, so that it slides off me without leaving anything but a thin, giddy film.

[BT] Krystle has already mentioned that she is a sucker for a beautiful but toxic man, so I feel morally obligated to follow up: what makes a terrible man compelling on the page rather than merely exhausting?

[AH] I’m so glad to know that someone loves Ancel the way I love Ancel. Someone recently asked me what my unfulfilled publishing dreams were, and I thought, but did not say: problematic Ancel fic. Anyway, I don’t know if my internal barometer is properly adjusted for this question, because I am compelled by so many terrible (fictional!!) characters. I’m much likelier to be exhausted by a cheerful, morally upright character, honestly. But I do think the awfulness is most powerful when it’s a thin scab over a deep wound. A wound can be healed, after all.

[KM] Thanks to my position as a reviewer here at Grimdark Magazine, I got my grubby little hands on an eARC of Slantwise Histories. As of writing these questions, I’m at about 80% (there are three stories left and I’m panicking because I’m not ready for it to be over) so first and foremost I need to ask you, how dare you? Who gave you the right to hurt me this way?

[AH] Oh my goodness! I’m so glad! There’s nothing like publishing a short story collection to test the tolerance of your audience. Even my own husband–he hates this story and I love this story–recently commented that he doesn’t care for short story collections. And then, after a pause, “EXCEPT YOURS, OF COURSE.”

[KM] I know some of the stories in Slantwise Histories were previously published on their own—Six Deaths of a Saint and The Knight and the Butcher Bird at least were on my TBR before Slantwise came into my hands—so I can imagine this collection has been a long time in the making. Do you remember which of these stories you wrote first? And can you tell me a bit about how the whole collection came to be?

[AH] Four of the stories are new, but the others were written over the last ten years. “A Whisper in the Weld” was, I think, the third short story I ever finished in my life, and the first I published (god bless Shimmer Magazine and its patient editors). It’s very strange to revisit them, and the person I was when I wrote them. I could tell you the ages of each of my kids while I drafted each one.

My agent had told me early on that nobody got to publish short story collections anymore unless they had a virally successful New Yorker story, which is true and funny. But then, to my astonishment!, over ten years she built me the kind of career that could sell a collection. I’m very grateful to her.

[BT] What can you do in a short story that you cannot do in a novel? Are you more ruthless with the reader when you know you only have a few thousand words?

[AH] I think I’m more ruthless with myself. I’d never kill a darling in cold blood, but I’m strict with them. I think of Alexander Chee’s comment that a novel is an idea too big to hold in your head at once; a short story is an idea small enough that you think you can hold in your head all at once. You can’t, quite, but it’s small enough that too many words will ruin it.

[KM] I’m at 90% now, in the midst of Roadside Attraction which is at least the second story about time travel within the collection (the other being Six Deaths of a Saint of course) but other stories have at least the perception of time being bent and skewed by either magic or at least by the telling of the story. It reminds me of your interview with the fantastic folks at SFF Addicts podcast, where you talked about how good writing can very much feel like the manipulation of time. The whole collection of Slantwise Histories are broken into various expressions of time. We get sections labeled ‘Almost’, ‘Always’, and ‘Again’ which makes me think you were hoping to underscore the timelessness of storytelling. Can you tell us a bit about how you sorted the stories into each section?

[AH] Oh! I love this question! I think a lot about writing itself as a careful manipulation of time (the time that passes in the narrative, and the reader’s literal time). A sentence might sweep casually through decades (“for the first twenty years of his life…”), or whole paragraphs might be tucked into a single fraction of a second.

And then, too, I tend to move backwards and forwards through time in the settings of my stories. My first thought was to move chronologically in this collection from ancient/mythological stories to historical to contemporary to the future; but this made the whole book feel vaguely like a social studies project. The current arrangement—reached after many, many emails with my editor—is an attempt to imagine little alternative histories, from the past to the future. Imagine an unreliable narrator pausing at each section break to say, “Or maybe, it was almost like this...”

[KM] Thinking of time travel draws a natural connection between Six Deaths of a Saint and The Everlasting. At their core, they are very similar with the Saint of War and Una the Everlasting and their respective time loops, but the execution of each story is quite different. Were the differences intentional as a way to set Una apart from the Saint of War? Or are those changes just kind of a natural byproduct of telling a longer story?

[AH] It’s funny, isn’t it, that I wrote multiple iterations of a story about multiple iterations? I had The Everlasting outlined and then, in a fit of nerves, panicked and wrote “Six Deaths.” It was a tonal experiment, I guess, and a structural test of looping narratives. I never pictured the characters in the same way, but they were both stuck carrying around the same thesis.

[KM] My first experience with your work was Starling House and what struck me most profoundly was how you managed to play with some comforting and familiar aspects in the SFF world–a sentient/haunted house, a mysterious boy with a sword, etc–but you breathed fresh new life into those concepts with hard-hitting emotional core of reckoning with the past. You achieved the same magic with Una the Everlasting, where you brought that hard reckoning again with the core theme of the power of stories and the cost of Empire. As I read Slantwise Histories, I see the same balance between you delivering stories in a way that feels familiar but with a sharp, almost confrontational edge. It feels often like the stories you tell are in conversation with the rest of storytelling as a whole. Your stories both honour our storytelling traditions, but they also seem to challenge the defaults in brilliant and compelling ways. Una herself is of course the most obvious example, but in Slantwise Histories I think the story Do Not Look Back, My Lion underscores that confrontation most blatantly by flipping the entire gender politics of warmongering on its head. Do you approach your stories with the intention of paying homage to the familiar while confronting the assumed norms, or is it something that comes to you kind of accidentally?

[AH] I think that’s just my personality, for better or worse! A little bit confrontational, a little bit nostalgic. It’s something many of my favorite books and movies share, though—this deep, palpable love for their genre, and this deep, unresolved argument with it. I’m thinking of fairy tale retellings like Robin McKinley’s Deerskin, or Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird, or a superhero movie like Spider-Verse or an album like Hadestown. All works that tell us stories we’ve heard before—which find meaning and resonance in the very act of retelling!—but refuse to let us draw the same conclusions.

“Do Not Look Back” is one of my favorites, mostly because I can still remember the feeling of writing slightly beyond my own skill level, at the time. And because I think of it privately as an ode to Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite, or at least the author’s note where she explains her answer to the question “what would a world of women look like?” Exactly the same, she said.

[BT] Myths can preserve truths that official history erases, but they can also make violence, conquest, and hierarchy seem noble or inevitable. When you return to an old story, are you more interested in rescuing it or putting it on trial?

[AH] Good question! But I hope the answer is neither. Old stories are, by definition, stories that we have retold over and over again, a thousand times for a thousand different purposes. The peasants of rural Europe told their children stories to entertain and educate them; the Grimms edited them into fables that would create a collective cultural identity for the burgeoning German state; the Victorians repurposed them as moral fables for children; Disney reproduced them for profit, as part of their invention of a magical white American childhood. None of that makes fairy tales evil; it makes them powerful, imbued with five hundred years of intention and aspiration. It means even a girl in rural Kentucky in the mid-90s knows what a spindle is. I don’t want to rescue them or put them on trial—I want to be the next person who picks up these familiar pieces and moves them around the board, full of her own intentions.

[BT] The title Slantwise Histories suggests stories told at an angle rather than from the official centre. What can fiction recover that conventional history tends to leave out?

[AH] The title, like all good titles, is stolen from someone much cleverer (“tell all the truth but tell it slant…”). I’m not even a huge Dickinson reader, but there’s something about that poem that explains to me why I’m a novelist and not a historian. I always wanted to impose some kind of narrative meaning on the past; I wanted things to end better, or at least to end, which history never does.

Just today I was in the library reading a collection of old Maine newspapers. One of the stories was about a captain’s wife who successfully navigated their ship around the Horn of Africa while she was heavily pregnant. She was a minor celebrity, briefly, but she and her husband were both dead before their child was four. I wanted them to have lived. I wanted there to have been fifty more of her. I wanted the whole journey to have some higher purpose than profit. I wanted the truth—but angled, softened, transformed. Made bearable.

[KM] Welp, I’m done Slantwise Histories now and I’m not okay. Ending the collection with The Last Archive was devastating, I’ll be suing you for emotional trauma post haste. (I won’t, the devastation was consensual, I loved every moment of it.) I felt especially seen and represented by the note you made about being spiteful in your acknowledgement, and I think spite is an important theme within Slantwise since a lot of the stories are about resistance and queerness. Gender, sexuality, and the bravery of love in the time of fascist censorship is a huge throughline and I just want to take a moment to applaud you for celebrating such things in our current reality. These stories are important. Would it be fair to say the spite that made you write so many gorgeous short stories is the same spite that keeps you coming back to writing stories of queerness and existence?

[AH] Oh, thank you. Spite is the easier emotion to name, but there’s just as much earnest, cringe, heartfelt love. Have you seen that E.B. White quote? “All that I hope to say in books, all that I ever hope to say, is that I love the world.” It’s embarrassing even to type it, but it’s true! I wrote “Up in Flames” because I read about Eve Addams, the trans lesbian who wrote what may have been the first published lesbian erotica in America, and who was deported by the U.S. government and murdered in Auschwitz. And then I read Ann Bannon’s 1962 Beebo Brinker, a massively popular entry in the lesbian pulp industry. And I listened to Lucille Bogan’s “B.D. Woman’s Blues.” And I was just—in love with them all! Particularly in a moment when I’m watching my friends and family fight all the same old battles, against the same old enemies.

[BT] Your work can be brutal, but it rarely feels nihilistic. What does hope have to survive before it feels honest to you?

[AH] Well, it’s easy to be hopeful when you’ve never really been scared or lonely or poor or hurt—but hope that’s hard-won? Hope that soldiers defiantly on? Be still my heart! It’s what a good romance novel does with love—tests it, betrays it, misunderstands it, puts it through every grief and obstacle, so that when the characters finally confess their feelings at the very end, we believe them.

[KM] I’m going to be especially cruel and ask you to pick a couple of favourites, but I’ll phrase it in a way that leaves you some wiggle room: are there any stories in the collection that you’re especially excited to see people react to? On the flip side, were there some that were especially difficult to bring to life? There are some really bold swings in Slantwise Histories and I’m in awe of each of them on a craft level so I’m curious if they came to you easily or if you had to fight some of them to get them into shape.