Guest post written by The Dark Fable author Katherine Harbour
Katherine Harbour was born in Albany, NY, where she attended the Russell Sage Junior College of Albany and wrote while holding down jobs as a pizza maker, video store clerk, and housekeeper. She then attended the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and, after moving to Sarasota, Florida, sold her paintings in cafes and galleries. She now lives in upstate New York, where she works as a bookseller. She’s a lover of nature, folklore, and ancient things. She’s the author of the Thorn Jack series, an adult contemporary dark fantasy threaded with Celtic myth.
Releasing on January 30th 2024, The Dark Fable is a heart-stopping, seductive fantasy with magical heists, deadly secrets, and so much more…perfect for fans of Six of Crows!
When I wrote The Dark Fable, I didn’t have a true name for my thieves, modern incarnations of a secret society begun in Medieval France. Since the thieves’ powers took the forms of strange animals, I wanted a name that reflected this element. I also considered what might be the most important value among criminals: Truth.
When Evie is invited to join the society of thieves, she’s told she’ll eventually learn their stories—but they already seem to know hers. After she hears the histories of Dev, Mad, and Queenie, in individual conversations, she becomes one of them. Their pasts are their truths, free of the artifice that makes up so much of their lives. In the outside world, they wear facades—but, amongst one another, the masks are off. The thieves’ stories are a figurative unmasking for the newest member of their crew, a tradition begun when the thieves’ society originated in Medieval Paris, with an aristocrat’s daughter-turned-courtesan, a vigilante highwayman, and a student of medicine. These three told their histories to one another and became a formidable entity.
As Jason, the young private eye hunting the thieves, tells Evie: “I know all their stories. Those broken pasts are what make them so dangerous.” Even the private eye has his own tale.
When we read stories, we become a part of those worlds. We empathize. We feel we’ve been given an invitation that isn’t extended to everyone. Stories are more than a form of escapism—they are a means of communicating to one another. It’s believed storytelling dates back 30,000 years, with cave drawings discovered in Chauvet and Lascaux, France, the oldest tales involving humanity’s covenant with natural forces, usually represented by animals. Stories make us feel there is order to the world, that the good will be rewarded and the bad punished. Stories were shared information that helped humanity survive; tales involved weather occurrences, how animals acted, the properties of plants . . . and those tales honed our knowledge of the world around us. How did one explain a frightening occurrence when humanity had no scientific knowledge? Give it a story. Give something frightening a history of its own and it becomes understandable, something to be reasoned with rather than reckoned with.
From drawings, to oral storytelling, sharing stories has been a way to experience other lives. And it instills within the psyche a form of belief that transforms the ordinary. But storytelling, once the realm of spiritual creators, changed when it turned to the written form. From symbols in stone, to words written on expensive paper (often with the need of an education), stories shifted to those with power. And those with power were able to change history in their favor.
This transition helped me decide the name of my secret society, part of their motto being “We are the ink spilled over the stories of tyrants.” I decided to call the thieves La Fable Sombre, the Dark Fable. What better word for thieves whose stories are talismans of faith than the term that originates from ‘fabula,’ Latin for ‘story?’ And, because the Dark Fable’s powers manifest as animal spirits, sometimes malevolent, always eerie, I also liked another aspect of the word ‘fable;’ it was a term used for the tales of the Greek storyteller, Aesop, mainly featuring anthropomorphic animals teaching a moral lesson.
After meeting La Fable Sombre, Evie’s entire worldview changes. As a foster child struggling to make a living, she always felt unseen. She only learns the truth of her uncanny talent when Ciaran, the leader of the Dark Fable, reveals it to her. So, the story Evie has told herself all of her young life—that people don’t see her because she has no value—changes when she becomes a vital part of the Dark Fable. And Evie finds her power. Her own story.
