Corrupted Romance & Gothic Desecration: A Conversation with Ava Reid
Novel Suspects: Starting before even the first page, you quote “Gormenghast.” A series that explores the struggle for individuality, the decay of power, and the rise from mediocrity. What drew you to that particular epigraph, and how does it serve as a thematic key for INNAMORATA?
Ava Reid: I’ve spoken often and extensively of my love for the Gormenghast books, and to me one of the most interesting and salient themes of the series is the base vs. the sublime. If we look to Mervyn Peake’s own epigraph, a quote from the preacher John Bunyan (Peake’s parents were missionaries), we see that he lays this out succinctly:
Dost thou love picking meat? Or woulds’t thou see/A man in the clouds, and have him speak to thee?
Gormenghast is indeed about rising from one’s ignominious circumstances (Steerpike’s striving toward vengeance, which he sees as justice), but it is also about the failure of such idealism. While Gormenghast represents to Steerpike despotism and oppression, to Titus, as a literal child, and to Fuchsia, as a figurative child, it is the pinnacle of the quixotic and sublime; its grand towers might as well be that man in the clouds.
Yet not for long. Innamorata’s epigraph comes from one of Gormenghast’s most pivotal scenes, when Titus witnesses the death of the ‘Thing,’ and along with it, his own romantic ideas of boyhood, of inheritance, of home. To quote the book directly, the death of the ‘Thing’ is also “the death of [Titus’s] imagination.”
Innamorata, too, is about the death of imagination, about the perversion of romance, about the base eclipsing the sublime. That is very much the thematic key for the story.
NS: Many of the names used in INNAMORATA echo historical figures or places. How do these allusions contribute to the overall story? Do you see them as quiet Easter eggs for readers or structural pillars?
AR: Innamorata is partially a work of metafiction, and names are a way to break the fourth wall. This is most obvious with the leeches, Truss and Mordaunt (named after the similarly sinister-yet-bumbling Liz Truss and Penny Mordaunt), and later on with the Offal-eater, who calls them Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (Stoppard’s versions), they are obsessed with games of chance, and they flit in and out of Agnes’s story, affecting little of its course—at least, until the very end. In conceiving of Innamorata as metafiction, it was mainly to explore the themes of fate and free will, very much as they are explored in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. So they are both Easter eggs and structural pillars for the book’s larger themes and ideas.
The Offal-eater is the most obviously fourth wall-breaking character—he also refers to Agnes as Stella and Liuprand as Marchino, their counterparts from the Orlando innamorato. He, Truss, and Mordaunt are kind of my comic relief characters. Maybe it’s morbid of me, but I find them funny. I think there’s humor to be found in Innamorata, especially when it’s read as metafiction.
The other names are all chosen for their symbolic resonance, and often hint at the characters’ fates. Agnes is named after Saint Agnes, the Roman martyr. Marozia is named after Marozia, a woman who (as part of a mother-daughter duo) once ruled as the “senatrix” of Rome and a mistress of the Pope. Liuprand is named after the famed Lombardic king. I’ve been telling readers who are curious about where the sequel will go to pay particular attention to the names of the characters from the House of Blood.
And, of course, there is our dear Pliny, with his Naturalis Historia of Drepane…we may find out what else he has been at work on in the sequel, too.
NS: “Innamorata” translates to “a woman in love.” At what point in the writing process did you choose the title? Did the story grow toward that word, or did the word itself shape the book?
AR: Innamorata was always the title. I never even considered anything else. Before I started drafting, because I was reimagining elements of Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato, I knew I wanted to gender-swap the word to have it refer to Agnes.
The title also refers to the innamorati, stock characters from the commedia dell’arte, who are blessed—or doomed—to play, over and over again, the same archetypal romance. Interestingly enough, the innamorati are some of the few characters who are aware of the audience, and so they know that, at least for the duration of the show, they define for the viewers love. Here again we see the themes of fate and free will, individuality and destiny.
Agnes and Liuprand are equally confined by their roles; love strips them both of their agency. As we near the end of their book, as their romance grows even more all-consuming, their choices also grow more and more constrained, the gyre tightening and turning inexorably toward tragedy.
NS: The use of body parts to structure the different houses. Such a striking and unsettling aesthetic which adds to the moody, gothic tone of the book. When did that imagery first surface for you? And what role does it play within the novel’s central themes?
AR: I can’t remember precisely when I came up with the idea to have each house possess one body part. I do know that I wanted to do something with the broad and widely used concept of “death magic” that felt fresh and unique. I also thought of the varied cultural customs surrounding death and mourning and wanted to create a tradition that perverted all of them.
I spent a lot of time thinking about what words I wanted to use to describe these practices, and eventually landed on, as you see in the text, “anatomization” and “desecration.” There is no respect paid to the dead on Drepane, because the people of the island do not have any sense of spirituality that typically guides such customs in the real world. Agnes uses the term “posthumous existence” to describe the lingering presence of her deceased grandmother, which is supposed to sound a bit stilted and technical, because she doesn’t have the more romantic concept of a “soul.”
A lot of my work has been defined by stories within stories, myths of nation-building, nested narratives, and fictional literature (the worlds of The Wolf and the Woodsman, Juniper & Thorn, and A Study in Drowning all have rich literary or mythological traditions), so I was interested in the idea of creating a world that was anti-literate. A world where old tales have been forgotten, libraries burned, religious practices snuffed out. A world where its inhabitants don’t have stories to make sense of the past, present, or future. I think this adds to the turbulent, almost anarchic sense of gothic unease that pervades the book.
This book is also about the death or failure of romance, and what could be less romantic than the ugly, grueling, repeated desecration of the dead? (The book both begins and ends with the abuse of a corpse). It’s once again the theme of the base vs. the sublime, the contrast between our accepted, idealized practices in the real world and Drepane’s hideous customs, born out of violence and cruelty.
NS: For many writers, music can be a powerful creative anchor. Is there a song, playlist, or artist that helped set the mood while writing INNAMORATA?
Music is a big part of my writing process. I don’t listen to it while actively drafting, but I find there’s nothing more helpful in brainstorming or unwinding a book’s thornier plot points than to walk around my neighborhood for a few hours with my headphones on.
My full playlist for Innamorata can be found here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6oow2F9lV6u0vKNFKRCMFH
NS: Your work often marries intense romanticism with visceral horror. How do you balance that tension so that the beauty never softens the terror, and the terror never overwhelms the emotional heart of the story?
AR: That tension was particularly important with Innamorata, because one of the major themes of the book is the perversion of romance. I had to write a love story between Agnes and Liuprand that the audience would root for yet simultaneously begin to feel was harmful and destructive as the story went on. I had to write a relationship between Agnes and Marozia that was able to perfectly telegraph their childhood dynamics without relying on the crutch of numerous flashbacks. So much of that comes down to very deliberate, small-scale, often line-level choices, the particular wording of a metaphor of a simile.
There’s a moment in Book I, chapter thirty-three, “Gray for grief,” where this tension is spelled out very directly for the audience. Agnes is looking out the window of her new chamber, admiring the strange environment of the bog, pondering what shape her future might take:
But she thought the stillness was beautiful, like an oil painting. Such a one that she could pass every day and be reassured that it would never change. Such a one that was lovelier than whatever scene it portrayed, because all the grueling little details—the white feces of birds on dark branches, the brown of dying grasses, the flowers where there shouldn’t be flowers—were taken away by the stroke of a dreaming artist’s brush. None of life’s painful mushrooms grew.
Here we see precisely the contrast between the sublime, the romantic (a dream, art, unreality) and the base (the ignominious minutiae of reality). I was always trying to contrast these two elements everywhere that I could. And we see that this painting that Agnes imagines being metaphorically destroyed a few chapters later:
Blood soaked her shoes, and something else died in that corridor. The beautiful, immortally frozen canvas, the work of art she had imagined her new life to be, was torn up, ripped from its frame and shredded into irretrievable pieces. Set alight, and stamped to ash.
Something else that helped bolster this tension was to never go for the easy, expected symbolic language. A slightly “off” metaphor or simile is enough to unsettle the audience. Returning to the House of Blood, its waters are described as “lime-green” (another subtle shoutout to Gormenghast, as well), which I think reads as a bit strange. It’s not a color typically associated with water, nor does it feel particularly beautiful or romantic. When language like that sits beside something more typically dream-like, “moths [rising] in white clusters, like souls fleeing the underworld,” (even using the romantic term “souls,” which Agnes did not previously have access to) it creates a sense of unease.
NS: Research plays a powerful role in your work. What did your research process for INNAMORATA look like? Were there particular historical periods or artistic movements that shaped your final work?
AR: The research phase of a book is always very exciting to me—particularly with this book, because there were so many disparate sources of inspiration. I read Boiardo’s Orlando innamorato, of course, as well an article that helped me make sense of specifically the Rocca Crudele interlude, upon which Innamorata is actually based: “Humanism’s Other Inheritance: The Brutal Intertextuality of Boiardo’s Rocca Crudele,” by Dr. Natalie Cleaver. This article is available for free online and I would encourage everyone interested in the metafictional elements of Innamorata to read it!
Perhaps unexpectedly, though, the first seed of inspiration actually came from Agnes and Marozia’s relationship. After publishing A Study in Drowning and Lady Macbeth, two works of gothic fiction where the protagonist is a woman alone in the world of men, I was interested in writing a gothic book about a relationship between two women. I wasn’t sure precisely what shape it would take, but around this time I happened to also be reading about a condition called selective mutism, where an individual is physically capable of speaking but does not for psychological reasons.
One particular case study stood out to me, about two young girls who were badly traumatized by the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The younger one had become selectively mute, while her older sister spoke for her. This relationship was difficult for the clinicians to treat because they couldn’t quite understand the power dynamic: was the younger sister in control, the older acting as her little toady, or was the younger sister being brow-beaten by her older sister into silence? An enormous degree of manipulation is often present in cases of selective mutism. I couldn’t stop thinking about this as I was creating Agnes and Marozia’s characters.
World-building wise, I knew I wanted a Renaissance-era setting to reflect the inspiration I took from Boiardo and from other epic romances and revenge tragedies. There are elements of Romeo & Juliet in there, as well as the Oresteia, so I wanted to represent both the early modern Italian and Ancient Greek aesthetics and styles. The island of Drepane is based off Venetian-occupied Crete and Corfu.
There were so many other sources of inspiration, from epic fantasies like A Song of Ice and Fire to grimdark video games like Dark Souls and Bloodborne, but if I were to list them all we’d be here for hours! So consider this just a brief—though hopefully interesting!—survey.
Discover the Book
A conqueror’s blade brought them low, burning their libraries, killing their lords, and extinguishing their eldritch magic.
But defiant against the new order stands the House of Teeth and its last living members: beautiful Marozia, the heiress to the House, and her cousin, the uncanny Lady Agnes.
Though she has not spoken a word in seven years, Agnes is the true carrier of the House’s legacy. And she has her orders. She must recapture the secrets of death magic and avenge her family’s fallen honor. She must arrange the betrothal of her beloved cousin Marozia to Liuprand, heir to the conqueror’s throne, for access to the forbidden library in his grotesquely grand castle.
Revenge burns in Agnes’s heart but so do stranger passions-and it is Liuprand, the golden prince, who speaks to her soul. This passion is as treasonous as it is powerful, poisoning the kingdom’s roots and threatening to tear the already shattered realm in two.
