Guest post written by The Kingdom of Sweets author Erika Johansen
Erika Johansen grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. She went to Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and eventually became an attorney, but she never stopped writing. She lives in England.
Releasing on November 28th, bestselling author of the Queen of the Tearling series, Erika Johansen, journeys to a new kingdom in this brilliant stand-alone novel—a darkly magical take on The Nutcracker where two sisters, cursed from birth, are forever changed one memorable Christmas. . . .
I wrote my first fantasy trilogy because I couldn’t find enough fantasy novels that gave me what I needed as a reader: strong, tough heroines whose courage came from sources other than being good-looking or good with a sword. Physical courage is easy to find in fantasy novels, but I really enjoy fantasy for the quiet moments of moral courage, the small decisions with epic consequences. Perhaps it’s this love of small moments that dictates my own approach to writing. When I want to learn how to do something, I figure it out piece by piece, taking my inspiration from one author’s individual scene, another author’s tone, and yet another author’s incisive understanding of a particular human dynamic.
In fictionalizing The Nutcracker, I’m pleased to say that I took almost nothing from E.T.A. Hoffmann’s soporific yet oddly unpleasant The Nutcracker and the Mouse King, the story that inspired the ballet. Rather, I pulled inspiration for much of the setting from the visual effects of the ballet, and turned to the great writers below to teach me how the rest of it should be done.
The House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons
Like The Nutcracker, The Kingdom of Sweets begins with a party, but not a sweet and lovely party like that of the ballet. I re-read The House Next Door for very a specific form of scenecraft that Siddons wields like a scythe: the party gone wrong, drunken revel culminating in nightmare. Even Poe’s Masque of the Red Death can’t compare to Siddons’ work here.
Mama Day by Gloria Naylor
This is a novel I’ve always loved, an ostensibly small-town story that veers into outright horror toward the end. In writing The Kingdom of Sweets, I looked to Mama Day for guidance on integrating magic and even terror into the commonplace of a small community, so that both remain believable to the reader.
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
My favorite of Bradbury’s works, in which he takes a carnival – usually a pleasurable and magical experience for a child – and turns it into a place of utter despair. This is not an easy trick, as I quickly found when I was trying to decide how best to corrupt the ostensibly charming Kingdom of Sweets. So I returned to Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show and let it scare me all over again.
Carnival Lights by Jill McCorkle
In my opinion, Jill McCorkle writes the most realistic teenagers out there, capturing all the heartache and deep suffering of adolescence without ever descending into mockery. McCorkle respects her teenagers, takes them seriously. Their hearts break, and mine breaks with them. So whenever I have to write the voice of a teenager, particularly a lovelorn one like my Natasha, it’s McCorkle I look to first. This is one of her best short stories, sad and sweet.
The Firebrand by Marion Zimmer Bradley
It’s hard to take a piece of history (or, in the case of The Nutcracker, a piece of art) that everyone knows well and make it your own. Bradley’s historical retellings are some of my favorites; in The Firebrand, her version of The Iliad, she manages to take heroic events and characters and give them realistic causes and motivations. I tried to do the same.
Usher’s Passing by Robert R. McCammon
Cursed and haunted families, like my version of the Stahlbaums, are common in horror, but they present a narrative problem: how do you explore haunted history without losing the momentum of the present? This book is one of McCammon’s forgotten gems, a check-in to see what Poe’s infamous House of Usher might be up to in the late twentieth century. But first he has to cover what the Ushers have been doing ever since. All eras have to work, and they do.
Here on Earth by Alice Hoffman
Hoffman is known as a magical realist, but this book, one of her darkest, is all too grounded in reality: a relationship that once looked and felt like true love breaking down into hatred and coercion. Here on Earth is a fascinating story of the devolution of love into abuse, and its lessons were invaluable in painting my own heroine’s slowly unraveling relationship with the boy she would once have died for.
