Sarah Monette and Katherine Addison are the same person. She grew up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, one of the three secret cities of the Manhattan Project. She got her B.A. from Case Western Reserve University, her M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Despite being summa cum laude, none of her degrees is of the slightest use to her in either her day job or her writing, which she feels is an object lesson for us all. She has published more than sixty short stories, eight solo novels, and four collaborations with her friend Elizabeth Bear. Her most recent novel is The Grief of Stones (Tor Books, 2022). The Goblin Emperor (Tor Books, 2014) won the 2015 Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel and was a finalist for the Hugo, the Nebula, and the World Fantasy Award. She is adjunct faculty for Ashland University’s low-residency MFA program. “The Kingdom of Darkness” is her seventh appearance in Uncanny, a beautifully crafted mystery with witchcraft and demons.
Uncanny Magazine: In a previous interview, you mentioned that your first drafts are generally discovery drafts. What did you know about “The Kingdom of Darkness” before you started writing? Which elements did you discover as you went along?
Sarah Monette: I’d had the idea of witchfinders using captive witches as sort of Bloodhounds for a while, but could never find a story to put it in. Then I had the idea of a witchfinder being murdered, and somehow that cross-connected with the actual Salem witchcraft crisis, which gave me the whole setting. The rest of it was all wrestling to get the story to stay inside the lines of the plot.
Uncanny Magazine: This novella takes place in an alternate universe that is based on Salem in 1692, and does an excellent job capturing the feel of that time and place. What research did you do for the story?
Sarah Monette: I have read so many books about Salem. None of them was read intentionally as research; the witchcraft crisis is something I’ve been borderline obsessed with since I was in high school and read Boyer and Nissenbaum’s Salem Possessed. I now think that book has serious flaws, but at the time it was amazing. So I’ve collected a good shelf’s worth of books about Salem (my favorites: Mary Beth Norton’s In the Devil’s Snare, Stacy Schiff’s The Witches, and Marilynne K. Roach’s massive day-by-day breakdown, The Salem Witch Trials, which is far more readable than any description of it can make it sound), also a range of other books about witchhunting and about Puritans. (I highly recommend Kenneth Silverman’s The Life and Times of Cotton Mather.)
Also, The Crucible is a great play, but as far as historical accuracy goes, it is a fairy tale.
Uncanny Magazine: What was your favorite part about writing this novella? What was the most challenging thing?
Sarah Monette: It was satisfying to be able to use all my reading, even if writing this story isn’t why I read the books.
The most challenging thing was figuring out who the murderer was. I keep writing mysteries, but I’m actually not very good at them. I keep writing set-up without first figuring out pay-off, and that is not a good way to write a mystery. It works much better if you know the end before you know the beginning, which is generally not how I write. So my first drafts are all mystery mystery MYSTERY and then, oh heck how do I get out of this hole I’ve dug myself into?
Uncanny Magazine: I like the way “The Kingdom of Darkness” is structured to include brief descriptions of witches of New Albion interspersed throughout the novella. Between these descriptions and longer scenes that involve a large number of townspeople, the novella has a fairly large cast. How do you come up with your characters? Do you have any particular system for naming them?
Sarah Monette: For this story, I was trying to keep fairly close to what happened in Salem Village (up until the witchfinder appears), so many of the characters were sort of half created already when I started. This is not my usual practice. Mostly I make my characters up the same way I write, which is to say I have no idea.
I was trying to model the names on the names of the Puritans in Massachusetts in 1692 without actually using a real person’s name. That’s why there’s more than one John, which ordinarily I wouldn’t do (really, there should have been more Johns, but I had to draw the line somewhere).
Uncanny Magazine: Who are some of your literary influences? What is something you’ve read recently that you really enjoyed?
Sarah Monette: I don’t know if I can claim her as an influence, but I really like Shirley Jackson. Definite influences are Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, J. R. R. Tolkien, Ellen Kushner, Joan D. Vinge, C. J. Cherryh.
The thing I’ve read most recently that I really enjoyed is Martha Wells’s Network Effect.
Uncanny Magazine: What are you working on next?
Sarah Monette: I’m currently in the middle of revisions on The Tomb of Dragons, which is the third book in the Cemeteries of Amalo trilogy (the first two being The Witness for the Dead and The Grief of Stones).
Uncanny Magazine: Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us!
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