Today we chat with Kylie Lee Baker about her first—and astounding—novel, The Keeper of Night. This debut is an amazing start to a duology and it’s a fantasy story that features a half Reaper, half Shinigami collector of souls searching for her own destiny and acceptance.
In this interview, we talked with Kylie about some of the main themes of the book, her writing process, and so much more! Don’t miss out on this haunting debut or its sequel, which is coming in 2022!
Hi, Kylie! First of all thank you for joining us and congratulations on your debut novel! Could you tell us a bit about yourself?
Thanks so much for having me! By day, I’m a library science graduate student and circulation assistant at a public library, and by night I’m an author of dark YA fantasy and adventurous baker. I absolutely love dark and spooky things (horror movies, haunted houses, etc.), studying languages, and playing the cello. I’m originally from the Boston area but went to school in Atlanta for my BA in Spanish and Creative Writing, studied in Spain for a bit, and then lived in South Korea for a few years before coming back to Boston for graduate school (and partially for candy corn, which I missed dearly in Asia).
What can readers expect from The Keeper of Night?
An exploration of Japan’s dark mythology and chilling folklore, a demon-slaying trio (with a stabby girl, soft boy, and suspiciously handsome stranger), and overall: a story about a biracial girl who bites back at a world that doesn’t want her to exist.
The Keeper of Night is your debut novel. How did writing this story differ from your writing process of other pieces you’ve previously written?
I wrote this book in three-chapter chunks that I sent to my agent for feedback before moving forward, which was great for clearing up any issues before I dug myself too deep into a hole. My first novel was my senior thesis in college, which I wrote by sending larger chunks to my honors advisor, so it was a pretty similar process. That method forces me to polish up chapters pretty quickly, because I don’t like sending messy prose to other people, so it worked well in terms of having a very solid first draft. But now that I’m writing books under contract, with deadlines looming overhead, I don’t write chronologically anymore and don’t polish until all the bones are in place. I’m comfortable enough with this genre that I no longer feel like I need constant reassurance that my work isn’t complete garbage.
What is the aspect that you enjoyed the most writing about? And what was the hardest part about the whole process?
I loved writing Ren’s dialogue because she’s so sharp and unapologetically fierce. It’s still an unfortunate stereotype that Asian women are supposed to be quiet and subservient, so it’s incredibly fun to write about a character who would sooner stab you than kiss you. The hardest part was probably working out the details of the magic system. I swear, I will never write about time control again. Playing with time makes the plot vulnerable to a lot of plot holes that you need to address very early on so that the whole world doesn’t collapse in on itself. I sometimes wonder what it would be like to write non-speculative fiction, because a huge portion of my edit letters are always about inconsistencies with the magic system I’ve created. “I’ll make it simpler next time!” I tell myself, knowing full well that I won’t.
Japanese folklore and mythology are a central part of this book. What kind of research did you have to do in order to tell this enchanting story? And how did you decide which ones you wanted to include in the book?
I read a lot of books, searched online about Yokai, and looked up a few English translations of the Kojiki, one of the major chronicles of Japanese myths. The Yokai were difficult to choose because each one needed to be scarier than the previous one so the story wouldn’t feel anticlimactic. For this reason, the final Yokai I chose is one of the “Three Terrible Yokai of Japan” so called because they most seriously threatened Japan’s existence. I chose the others largely for diversity in climate and geography, because I wanted to take the reader all over Japan. I think people outside of Japan sometimes see its people as a monolith and don’t realize how much there is to the culture beyond anime, so I didn’t want the scenes taking place in Japan’s “real world” to feel one-note or boring.
The struggle to fit in, finding where you belong, and feeling that you aren’t from one place when you are biracial are recurring elements in the novel, which are all real life issues. What do you hope readers take away from your novel?
I hope that biracial readers feel that their struggles are seen and validated. I hope that other readers walk away with a better understanding of how complex, traumatic, and beautiful the experience of being biracial is, and how it differs from the experiences of other monoracial people of color.
There are a lot of creatures mentioned in the book. If you could be one of them, which one would it be, and why?
To be honest, all of them sound absolutely miserable and I’m not sure if I’d want to be any of them! Certainly not a Reaper or Shinigami—their powers are impressive, but their worlds are very cutthroat and hierarchical. I think that because they live for so long, that actually makes them more afraid of their eventual deaths than humans. Ren also spends a lot of the book grudgingly jealous of humans, so I don’t think even Reapers or Shinigami really want to be themselves. The Yokai (at least the ones I mention in the book) also tend to eat humans, which isn’t one of my preferred activities. Living as Neven’s cat Oliver is probably the best option. I’d get to sleep all day and become morbidly overfed. It would be a great life until he… well, you’ll see…
The Keeper of Night is a very visually rich book. If it were to be turned into a movie, which scenes would you love to see represented?
Thank you! It’s so interesting that you say that, since a lot of the book takes place in total darkness. I think the most cinematic scene would be Ren burning on a snowy mountain with Yuki Onna, the snow woman. It’s a very horrific scene cast in a bright, all-white landscape, kind of like Midsommar. I think the scene when Ren and Neven first arrive in the Japanese underworld and try to cross the bridge would be great in a movie as well, because that scene plays with what you can and can’t see in the darkness and is very visual in that sense—Ren and Neven make certain assumptions based on what they can see with their tiny circle of candlelight, not knowing about the terrible things right beside them in the dark.
If you could recommend a book that matched Ren, Neven, and Hiro’s personalities, which ones would they be?
Ren would absolutely devour The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang, probably because she fully supported Rin’s villain arc.
I think Neven is very much like the protagonist of The Infinity Courts by Akemi Dawn Bowman because he has a very strong moral compass even in a world of death and suffering.
Hiro’s personality is hard to capture with a single book. He starts off as Dial A for Aunties and then becomes Iron Widow, which I can’t really elaborate on without spoiling the plot.
And lastly, without giving any spoilers, what can readers expect from the second part of the duology? And do you have anything else in the works?
Ren’s main adversary in book two is someone the readers have already met. Book two will also dive deeper into Shinto mythology. There are a lot of gods in Japan who are aware of what Ren’s been up to and have some thoughts on it. I have another project in the works that involves China, which I’m super excited about because that part of my heritage is so important to me.
