For fans of Wilder Girls and Ninth House comes a dark, twisty, atmospheric thriller about a boarding school haunted by its history of witchcraft and two girls dangerously close to digging up the past.
We chat with author Victoria Lee about their latest book release A Lesson In Vengeance, along with book recs, writing, and more!
Hi, Victoria! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
Hi! I’m the author of the sapphic dark academia A Lesson in Vengeance, as well as the queer dystopian science fantasy book The Fever King and its sequel The Electric Heir. I live in Queens, New York City, where I work as a researcher at a local university and write books about queer people and trauma recovery. I am an avid cook, have a border collie and a void cat who mysteriously love each other, and a small army of house plants that I talk to (they don’t talk back).
Your latest novel, A Lesson in Vengeance, is out August 3rd 2021! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Gothic murder lesbian dark academia.
What can readers expect?
ALIV is a slow burn gothic psychological suspense with no male representation in any way (seriously, even the authors/composers/fashion designers referenced are all female or nonbinary). There’s lots of teenage pretension and literary references, because let’s be real, it’s a dark academia, pretension is the name of the game—but it’s also got ghosts, witches, and psychotic depression rep.
Where did the inspiration for A Lesson in Vengeance come from?
A friend and I were on the phone talking about our love for The Secret History and its author, and about how dark academia needed more queer women, what Donna Tartt would have been like as a teenager, and how dark academia would look if it featured only women instead of only men. And thus ALIV was born.
Can you tell us about any challenges you faced while writing and how you were able to overcome them?
A Lesson in Vengeance was beyond my skill level when I first started writing it. Multiple times I thought about quitting, because I was pretty sure it was just too challenging a book for me, but then I remembered how my agents had pretty much demanded the draft midway through my pitching it to them, and ambition won out. So I pushed through. And I discovered, as I wrote, that I was developing the skills I needed to write the book well. So working on a project that was too difficult for me ended up teaching me a lot about craft, and the pressure helped hone my technique in new ways.
I also struggled with being in my dissertation year of a Ph.D. while writing this book. I’m still not sure how I managed to survive that…. Lots of time management tricks and handfuls of antidepressants, pretty much.
Were there any favourite moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
I loved writing Ellis. She kind of consumes any scene she’s in. I also loved exploring how, although she puts up this façade of being super mature and brilliant and pretentious, she’s just an insecure kid at heart.
A Lesson in Vengeance explores an array of topics including mental health and gender identity. What’s your process when it comes to delving into them?
There’s not a process so much as an excavation. I wrote about my own experiences with psychotic depression, and as a nonbinary person, I generally have a ton of gender feels. Writing this book, for me, was a matter of trying to tell those stories as honestly as I could, educating myself on ways I might still have my own internalized mental health and sexist/heterosexist prejudices, and trying to challenge those. Especially with psychotic disorders, which are heavily stigmatized and poorly understood—even by people who experience other forms of mental illness themselves—I felt an immense responsibility to do right by it and tell a true story while also trying to avoid conflations of mental illness+violence, for example.
Is there anything you hope readers will take away from A Lesson in Vengeance?
I hope readers will come away thinking carefully about how much they are willing to sacrifice of themselves to their art/obsessions. I also hope people will have a new lens on psychotic depression and more sympathy for people suffering from psychotic disorders as human beings with complex interior lives, who share the same wants and hopes and dreams as anyone else. If this book reaches just one person with psychosis who feels seen and represented by it, that will be enough.
Quick lightning round! Tell us the first book you ever remember reading, the one that made you want to become an author, and one that you can’t stop thinking about!
The first book I clearly remember was the Chronicles of Prydain series by Lloyd Alexander. I was writing stories from a young age—I wrote my first novel (albeit a very short and shitty one!) when I was eight. But I think the first time I decided I wanted to do this professionally was when I encountered the books of Amelia Atwater-Rhodes, who published some really great vampire novels as a teenager herself. That made me feel like my dreams might actually be achievable, something that a ‘real person’ could accomplish with enough focus and dedication.
What’s the best and the worst writing advice you have received?
Best writing advice: writing is rewriting. Revision is so important for storytelling, and even if you don’t end up actually rewriting a story, going in with the attitude that it’s okay if that’s what’s necessary for the book can help you feel prepared for the overwhelming tide of revisions. It also can help you feel less married to your darlings and more willing to murder them if that’s what it takes. Maybe another way of putting this would be that when it comes to editing a book, be prepared for anything.
Worst writing advice: anything overgeneralized like “show don’t tell” – generally, there are right times and wrong times for everything. There is a time in a book when you should show and not tell. There is a time in a book when you should tell and not show. Advancing your craft is about learning how to tell the difference, rather than parrot trite sayings as gospel.
What’s next for you?
I’m working on a YA book that’s like the Umbrella Academy with murder lesbians, and hopefully that will come out in 2022. (More soon!) I’m also playing around in the adult category with an angsty romance and a dark fantasy.
Lastly, do you have any book recommendations for our readers?
In YA: Some of my favorite recent/forthcoming YA books include Six Crimson Cranes by Elizabeth Lim (literally the platonic ideal of YA fantasy in my opinion!), How We Fall Apart by Katie Zhao (AAPI dark academia), The Inheritance Games sequel by Jennifer Lynn Barnes, Grown by Tiffany D Jackson (I cried), Jade Fire Gold by June CL Tan, and All Of Us Villains by Amanda Foody and Christine Herman.
I’m also highly anticipating The Dead and the Dark by Courtney Gould, the next Legendborn book by Tracy Deonn, and the third book in the Good Girls’ Guide series by Holly Jackson.
In adult: I loved She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan, Sorrowland by Rivers Solomon, For The Wolf by Hannah Whitten, Detransition Baby by Torrey Peters, The Fifth Season by NK Jemison (a classic!), and The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton.
For forthcoming adult titles, I’m super excited for the upcoming books in the Baru Cormorant series by Seth Dickinson, Portrait of a Thief by Grace D Li, and the next book in the Good Daughter series by Karin Slaughter.
You can find Victoria on Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and Tiktok, and also at their website.
