Monstrous Design, the second book in Kat Dunn’s trilogy that began with Dangerous Remedy, was released last month, and Dunn chatted with Paul Simpson about continuing the adventures set during the French Revolution, and the challenges of a second book…

 

Why pick that period and specifically then during the French Revolution?

It’s a good question. I think I really wanted to write about revolutions going wrong (laughs).

When I was thinking about this I felt like I had read a lot of narratives about the germination of a revolution and the start of it and I really wanted to come further along to where the revolution is, in theory, won but now you’ve got this difficulty of the principles meeting the practicalities. OK, you’ve done the idealistic bit, now what? And how trying to avoid complete collapse at that point seems historically to be quite challenging.

I wanted to delve into that period where you’ve got that real tussle between principles and practicalities and that idea of fence sitting. ‘Ugh, both sides are as bad as each other, look how awful this is.’ And it’s like, yes, both sides may be bad but one side maybe wants to have a monarchy and maybe you don’t agree with that so do you have to make a deal with the devil on the side that you still don’t agree with but is more your side than the other side? I just thought it was a really interesting moral quandary at the heart of everything happening at that exact point in the revolution.

I did it right at the peak of the Terror, just before Robespierre is overthrown. I really wanted to look at that exact pivot point.

If you look at the four to five months that followed Robespierre’s death I’m still not sure that we really know exactly what was going on. I remember reading a history book that was written twenty years after I studied the period and I’m thinking ‘Really? OK, I didn’t realise that was happening at the same time.’

That’s quite handy for an author writing historical fiction because you can be like ‘Well, we just don’t know’ and it gives you a little bit of freedom. It’s a meaningful pivot point in the story too, because at the start, as much as Camille and Ada and Guil and Al are somewhat alienated from the revolution and struggle with where it’s gone, at the point Robespierre falls they suddenly have to go ‘Well, alright but did you still actually want the revolution to succeed?’ ‘Yes probably’ ‘Oh God’.

The stakes are upped significantly but I think it puts them suddenly in a very different position in terms of the power balance. They are no longer on the run from people because the regime they were hiding from is no longer in existence. The whole point of what brought them together is disintegrating. No spoilers but maybe they need to reconsider who their allies are.

Since you are sticking with recorded history, are you having to fight that ‘I know what’s going to happen’ element?

In a very basic way, coming up with the end of the trilogy when there is no real winning because you’re just going to have Napoleon and the empire. So there is that very fundamental question of what on earth can the conclusion of this series be? Maybe it’s better if my readers don’t know and they can get to the end of it and take a happy ending from whatever’s there, whereas I’m going ‘I don’t really know’. I don’t know how this can be a happy ending in a grander sense.

How much detail did you plot the trilogy before you started writing book 1?

I had a fair idea in my head of it. Conversations with my editor changed the direction quite significantly. So I always had the clearest view of book 1, pretty strong sense of book 2, and book 3 changed the most while working with my editor and putting some ideas to one side. The ultimate thrust has always been there and perhaps some of the key developments and set pieces, but I’ve found that the further ahead I’ve planned, the more shaky those plans have become as I’ve got there. But I always had that shape of history to give me a structure.

Has the interaction between the characters changed or just more the elements that they can’t control?

I’ve always had a really strong sense of the characters and I think I’ve always had a strong sense of where I see them developing. Sometimes I have to hold myself back and be like ‘Well, I want to get here but I have to start somewhere else and give them room to grow and develop.’

You have to have a crescendo.

Absolutely, so I suppose it’s been trying to find the right plot shape to help that crescendo work. One of my great fictional loves is Buffy. So many shows you watch that have a lot of action and a lot of plot, the characters are never affected by it, they always seem to reset and that always frustrated me so much. So if I was going to do something that was quite heavily action-y and plot-y, I really wanted what the characters are going through to impact them, so perhaps sometimes the plot that I might have originally thought was going to have a certain impact on characters, those plot bits don’t happen but I know where I see the character development going. Sometimes it’s a little bit like trying different screwdriver heads to fit that exact screw.

Have you as you’ve been writing reached a point where you got the equivalent moment of Buffy’s fall at the end of season 5 that you actually wanted to keep for later?

No, because I have it and it’s very strictly tied to the end of book 3. I’ve had it in my back pocket the whole time. A trilogy is easier to manage than an ongoing TV series.

I’ve actually had control over that structure so I have known certain beats. I knew what was happening at the end of book 1, I knew what was happening at the end of book 2 and each is like, if not a fall back into hell, they’re taking a step towards the edge. The great pleasure in writing a trilogy has been having that space to inch closer towards absolute destruction.

What’s been the biggest change that you made to book 2 from your original idea?

On quite a practical level I had originally leaned into the Frankenstein feel more for one of the characters. It was finding the line between the monstrous and then retaining enough humanity for that still to be a character that you had some kind of connection with and relation to. That was probably the biggest thing that I worked on in book 2.

Book 2s are a challenging thing in a trilogy: you’ve got to deliver a satisfying story in and of itself and yet carry book 1 and set up book 3. I had to go beyond what I was thinking, how it worked in book 1, because this had to go a lot more heavy lifting. In many ways a lot of it didn’t change but that’s probably because I thought I had more of it planned than I did. Then when I sat down and you’re trying to write 100,000 words book, you’re like ‘Oh, there’s a lot of space’ (laughs). I’ve only really got ten big bits and I think a lot of those quieter smaller stories in it are where things grew and changed in ways that were unexpected.

What was the biggest challenge for you then in terms of creating book 2?

I don’t want to give exactly the same answer as before but I do think that was the practical challenge. Another side of it was just quite a personal challenge: I drafted it just before the pandemic and I was editing through the pandemic, and my mum died at the start of the pandemic.

The version of me who wrote the book, who’d done the first draft, was different. They died, they were gone. I was a new person when my mum died. I think perhaps if you haven’t lost a parent it’s hard to understand, to imagine the feeling of the entire world shifts, everything changes.

An anchor has gone. You may have another anchor but the ship isn’t quite where you thought it was.

Exactly and so trying to come back and edit the book, I couldn’t go back and be the person I was before. I had to work out how to do it from where I was then. And the things that matter to you change so it was quite a strange experience.

With that in mind, would you have put yourself in a different position i.e. would you have written book 1 slightly differently?

No, I think the series is what it is and I don’t think I would have done it differently. What I want to write now might be different – not wildly, I’m not going to go and write some literary prize winning fiction or anything, I’m going to stay in the SFF world.

Of the character interactions, which one have you found the most interesting to write?

If you’d said enjoyable I’d be able to answer immediately but I suppose interesting is…

Or enjoyable…

No, I’d just never thought about it in that particular way. I very much enjoyed in book 2 getting to have Camille and Al spending more time together because they are just two deeply prickly people who sort of need someone who is a bit more measured to balance them out and yet they have to somehow work together or it’s all going to go wrong. I found that quite fun to write but also quite a challenge for the characters themselves to grow and take a step back from their own desire to be a bit shitty.

I think I also found it really interesting writing Olympe and James talking to each other because they have hugely opposite positions in what they think is the right thing to be doing. The tension between them is vast. Every scene is a negotiation between the two of them.

I love writing scenes between Camille and Ada and the complexity of their relationship, but ultimately they are two people who love each other and kind of want things to work out, so they’re going to maybe try to give each other the benefit of the doubt. They’re going to try to work together. Those scenes where it’s two puzzle pieces that don’t fit and you have to fit to get things going has been really fun, really interesting to work out.

There’s drama in that whereas there isn’t as much drama in ‘Oh we’ll overcome the obstacles together’ ‘Yeah OK, fine, you get on with that over there’.

There’s the romance and the happy bits but then you balance the two things.

These are marketed as YA, would you write them differently if you were not having that banner?

Maybe a little bit, I think when you are under the YA banner there are certain boundaries in terms of practically like language, violence, graphicness. My original draft probably was a bit too out of YA, a certain amount of violence has been cut and a lot of the swearing has been cut.

I think a lot of my growth in writing since starting the series has been perhaps stopping self editing, in sort of limiting myself in where I let myself go creatively because I’m like ‘Oh I couldn’t do that, they shouldn’t do that.’

I think if I took that label off there’s probably different avenues I could explore. But then it might not have that same focus on our gang of core characters who are all thrust into adulthood too young essentially. That’s the thing that’s bonding a lot of them together.

What do you think you’ve learned as a writer working on the trilogy?

Oh, lots and lots and lots of things. I learned very practically that when you’re writing a complicated book, you as the author get way too familiar with it so you think it’s boring so you shove in more and more and more things and then if you’re the reader that is baffling. I’ve learned to calm down and draw back a little bit.

I learned a lot in the way of practical education in how to write. I love the trilogy and I stand by it but I think it’s been a huge personal revelation, combined with pandemics and parental death and things, that’s probably been a weird and unexpected, essential learning curve.

 

Dangerous Remedy and Monstrous Design are out now from Head of Zeus. Author photo © Jamie Drew.