Inspiration comes from anywhere… and sometimes that inspiration is not directly obvious even to the author. When Alma Katsu set down to write The Taker, she discovered in the process that a classic bit of literature was informing the story that she was building on the pages. What classic? The surprising answer awaits you.

ALMA KATSU:

When I started writing The Taker, first and foremost I wanted it to be the kind of book I enjoyed reading. That meant it had to be big and sweeping, with dark characters that—despite your better instincts—could make shivers of delight run up your spine. It would be set in a time in which women wore long skirts and men wore frock coats, and would be full of delightful period details and flourishes. It would have magical bits, scary bits, and sexy bits, sort of one part old-fashioned fairy tale to two parts early Anne Rice.

The story opens in the early 1800s, in the Maine territory. In that time, childhood lasted until around age six, after which children are treated as little adults and expected to shoulder their share of household duties. Lanore is a young girl from a poor family, in a rush to grow up before she even knows what that really means. She falls in love with Jonathan, the son of the town’s founder and the most desirable boy in town. He is drawn to her, too, but they both know she would not be a suitable match in the eyes of his family. Nevertheless, they act on their feelings, and this leads to Lanny’s disgrace and banishment from town.

In Boston, Lanore meets Adair, a man of great wealth and otherworldly powers, and under Adair’s tutelage, Lanore is introduced to the mysteries of adulthood. She learns about the pleasure and power of sex. No longer subject to her parents’ dictates, she forms her own tastes and preferences, experiences independence for the first time, and takes her first steps toward adulthood—though perhaps on the wrong path.

When Adair offers Lanore the power to bind Jonathan to her forever, she faces a moral dilemma. The life she can give Jonathan is one he would enjoy—it would be filled with pleasure, and enable him to escape his responsibilities at home—but it comes at a price. She could argue too, that Jonathan is in her debt, since he had a role in her downfall. The question facing Lanore is whether she will put her own wishes before those of Jonathan, whether she has made the transition to adulthood, or if she still is as selfish as a child.

If the story seems a bit familiar, it’s because it’s loosely based on the folktale of Pinocchio. Lanore wants to become a woman, just as Pinocchio wanted to become a real boy, but in order to reach her goal, she must deal with temptation. The stakes are higher in The Taker than in Pinocchio, however, and the characters’ guilt or innocence is not easy to determine. Nor is there a Blue Fairy hovering in the wings, ready to set everything right. It will be up to Lanore to fix any wrongs she commits.  And it’s not just Lanore who is tested: all the characters are challenged to take responsibility for things they did in their past and for their current wicked ways. The selfish and wicked aren’t turned into donkeys: they’re given the ‘gift’ of immortality, only to learn that immortality is not what they’d imagined.

When I started working on The Taker, I didn’t realize it was based on Pinocchio. Since novels come from the writer’s subconscious, I suppose this means that the themes from Pinocchio are stuck in the murky dreck in the back of my mind. But I hope it also means that The Taker explores the same universal anxieties addressed by fairy tales and folk tales: what makes us human? Am I worthy of love? If I do bad things, does that make me a bad person? These are the questions I tried to explore in The Taker, albeit wrapped up in a lush, dark, mystical story, and I hope that if this sounds like your kind of novel, you will give The Taker a try.

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The Taker: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt (pdf). Visit the author’s blog. Follow her on Twitter.

It’s always a delight when someone I know as a friend makes her debut as a novelist; I get to point and go “Hey! I know her!” So it is with Merrie Haskell, who I have known for several years and whose first novel The Princess Curse arrived in stores yesterday, to no small amount of acclaim (“With a good sense of humor, an able and empowered protagonist, and a highly original take on this tale, Haskell’s story gives readers much to enjoy” — Publishers Weekly). Now Merrie’s popped over to share her big idea for her novel — which was not only a big idea for the book, but a personal revelation for her.

MERRIE HASKELL:

I’ve always been afraid of the Underworld. And outhouses.

Let’s start with the Underworld.

Like most writers, I started out as a little kid with a big imagination, and while I would have gladly embraced the chance to visit another world–as a long lost princess-wizard-dragon-tamer, preferably–I never, ever, ever, EVER wanted to visit the Underworld. Any version of it. Not the Christian Hell, for certain; I was super-scared of that on a visceral level. But I also hated Hades, Avernus, Annwn, and any other variant I ran across. I imagined the dead as a passive zombie horde, at best. And the monster under my bed not only had long, Grim Reaper fingers, but a portal to the Underworld.

I tried to come to terms with my fear by writing fiction about it, of course. I had a couple of false starts in my teens, when I was first able to think rationally about why this stuff was scary. I kept trying to retell the Hades and Persephone story, because it was enough like “Beauty and the Beast” that it appealed to me (I loved retold fairy tales then as I do now).

Cut to some years later. I was retelling the story of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.” I had boldly set the story in a made-up region of Romania I named Sylvania. (Sylvania, next to Transylvania. Transylvania means “beyond the forest.” So Sylvania is, therefore, the forest that Transylvania is beyond.)

Why did I choose Romania? For no other reason than we suddenly had Romanians in the family, and the stories were interesting. My aunt went for a visit and came back with pictures of vast modern palaces and horse-drawn wagons piled with hay, and my imagination was stirred.

My aunt also came back from Romania with several pictures of outhouses. I must confess, my sense of humor often has a scatological bent, but I’m not a big fan of outhouses; I was very afraid I would fall into an outhouse pit when I was younger (I never put it together with my fear of the Underworld, but I see how they might be related now).

But these Romanian outhouses had history. Ceausescu, the Romanian dictator, was known for housing “improvement” projects that tore down sturdy, traditional Romanian houses to erect grim apartment blocks in their place. Only, he wouldn’t factor in any plumbing improvements, so people were forced out of their homes and relocated to concrete monstrosities with no indoor toilets. They’d still have their outhouses, out back of their otherwise modern living quarters.

The point here is not that things in Romania sucked under Ceaucescu (though they did). Rather, the outhouse story illuminates the country’s history of constantly dwelling between the proverbial rock and the hard place. It may look like a story about a narcissistic dictator’s ambitions versus the realities of plumbing, but builds on Romania’s history as a buffer between the Ottoman Empire and the Hungarians, and on back to the Dacian conquest by Rome. Romania is, in short, conflict. And conflict makes for good story.

Learning about Romania illuminated a gap in my knowledge of the world. I’d never understood that the Dacians had become so Romanized after their conquest that they called themselves Roman from then on–hence the name of the country. I’d never even realized Romanian is a Romance language, more closely related to Italian than anything else. As a long time fan of all things Roman Empire, and as an educated person, I felt like, well, a jerk for not knowing even this much about Romania.

The more I learned about Romania, the more fascinated I became. Romanian fairy tales include a wealth of stories outside the usual “Cinderella” and “Sleeping Beauty”: Fat Frumos (“handsome boy”, a.k.a. Prince Charming) and his Marvelous Horse; Ileana Cosanzeana, the most beautiful of fairies; dragons that steal the stars and moon. But what fascinated me most was the zmeu, a humanoid dragon who woos young women to the Otherworld… Otherworld, Underworld? This all tumbled together so well with the story of “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.” The princesses go dancing underground every night. What if the reason was because a zmeu was luring them there?

And what if the zmeu wasn’t the true villain of the piece at all? What if Lords of the Underworld always get their brides through kidnapping and coercion, because they know no better way? What if Hades, in kidnapping Persephone, was just doing as his subterranean brethren have always done?

What if the Lords of the Underworld choose young women with a connection to plants and life, like Persephone, for a specific reason?

As the daughter of the Earth goddess, Persephone brings rebirth to the Underworld. What if the Underworld dies if it doesn’t have a queen to grant rebirth? I had chosen an herbalist as my main character from the beginning because I thought that would be more interesting than yet another princess. But suddenly, the book changed, and the twelve dancing princesses were red herrings in the quest to save the Underworld. To save the very thing that had scared me throughout my entire childhood.

And that ended up being the crux of the book: what if being scared of the Underworld is the only way to fail?

It’s a big idea, confronting death and rebirth and the Romanian Underworld, but it’s easier to write about these sorts of things when they sneak up on you. When you’re three quarters of the way through the book and only then realize you’re facing your childhood fears–and researching another culture you knew almost nothing about six months before, and whose language you barely speak–it’s too late to stop.

I’m not so scared of the Underworld anymore. Some of that is growing up, and some of that is writing this book. But as for outhouses… maybe I’ll come to terms with those some other year.

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The Princess Curse: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Read the author’s blog. Follow her on Twitter.

There are things that are easy to say or do or believe in some parts of the world, but not in others, as Lewis Shiner learned when he set his newest novel, Dark Tangos, in the violence-scarred country of Argentina. As a result, the writing of the novel took the author down storytelling paths he had worked to avoid before. What was the result for this work? Shiner lays it out for you now.

LEWIS SHINER:

Back in 1991, I edited an anthology called When the Music’s Over. The only condition I placed on my contributors was that they had to resolve the central conflict of the story without using violence. It was a standard I held myself to, starting with my novel Deserted Cities of the Heart (1988) and going right up to Black & White (2008). Once I started to write about Argentina, however, I saw that I was going to have to rethink my position.

The late 1970s in Argentina saw state-sponsored terrorism taken to a level never seen before, a so-called Dirty War where tens of thousands of peaceful, law-abiding citizens were kidnapped, tortured, and murdered. In the aftermath, only a few of those responsible were ever convicted, and then only to be pardoned a few years later. Many of them are still in positions of power in the police, the army, and the government.

So what do you do when institutional justice is not available to you?

I first started to kick these ideas around in Black & White, where a member of a radical black organization says, “King was good at working the media, but the truth is, it was the black people with guns and baseball bats and rocks got us what little we got. Without that fist behind King’s glove, wouldn’t have been anything at all.”

After brooding about that for a while, I wrote a short story called “The Death of Che Guevara“, in which Che survives to bring a socialist revolution to Argentina, leading indirectly to Eugene McCarthy being elected in the US in 1972. When Che begins to flirt with pacifism, one of his lieutenants says, “Where is Ghandi now? Dead. King? Dead. King’s Civil Rights Movement? Dead. John Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Gene McCarthy? Dead, dead, dead….When you put violence against non-violence, violence always wins.”

In Dark Tangos, my new novel, a 50-ish computer programmer accepts a forced relocation to his company’s Buenos Aires office in 2006, where he goes by Beto, the Spanish version of his nickname. His infatuation with a young woman drops him smack in the middle of a new series Dirty War trials that started that year, dragging the never-forgotten ugliness back into the headlines.

His closest friend at work is a Sikh named Bahadur, in exile from his native India. At one point Bahadur attempts to explain the difference between being a pacifist and being passive: “Our scripture…tells us to live in peace with one another. It tells us to work honestly and share the fruits of our labors….Above all, it teaches equality, toleration, and justice. Where there is injustice, we are required to take a stand.” He shows Beto the kirpan, the miniature sword that all Sikhs are required to carry. “We are charged to actively prevent violence to those who cannot defend themselves and the kirpan is a reminder of that.”

Beto also comes to know one of the montoneros, a survivor of the revolutionary movement that the government used as an excuse for the Dirty War. (In fact, the montoneros had been effectively wiped out before the 1976 coup.)  This man, who calls himself Mateo, is as obsessed with justice as Bahadur. As Mateo contemplates kidnapping one of the Dirty War henchmen who has escaped government prosecution, he worries about the morality of his small group putting the man on trial: “There are so few of us. When the montoneros passed judgment on someone, it had authority. When you have so few, it’s more like revenge than justice.” When Beto asks him the difference, Mateo, who is living under a death sentence himself, isn’t sure. “When the government condemns a man to death, is that vengeance too? When it’s a man like me?”

The questions of justice cease to be academic when Beto gets a death sentence of his own, with no recourse to the law or the US embassy or the New York Times.

There’s a certain kind of suspense novel–Ken Follett’s Eye of the Needle comes to mind–whose entire storyline consists of the author driving a gentle, trusting person to murder.  Dark Tangos is not that sort of book. My intent was to ask more difficult questions.

If violence is ever justified, and I believe it is, where do you draw the line? Who gets to draw it? How do you tell justice from revenge? For Bahadur, the answer is simple: “I would chant the names of God and that would free me from attachment to anger or ego or my own personal desires. When I was done, I would see clearly what I had to do.” For Mateo, the answer is having a big enough jury to sit in judgment. For Beto it’s not that simple.

Dark Tangos is a suspense novel, and I have no intention of giving away its ending.  But I will say this much:

I have never killed anyone. I have friends who have. I have been physically injured by other people. I have studied and discussed and thought hard about violence, and I have come to some conclusions.

I think one of the ways this country, and much of this world, has gone wrong is in not talking about the effect that violence has on individuals, the victims and the perpetrators alike. If violence must be done to achieve justice, it can only be done at a terrible cost, a cost we have numbed ourselves to over the centuries.

My hope is that Dark Tangos will start to take some of that numbness away.

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Dark Tangos: Amazon|Subterranean Press

Read an excerpt.