Interview with the Vampire (Author): Ladz and Their Political Dark Fantasy THE FEALTY OF MONSTERS, Vol. 1
I’m Morgan, and I write romance, horror, and fantasy. I enjoy gothic lit and vampires. My newest book as of typing, The Saint of Heartbreak, a queer romance in Hell about Judas and the Devil, is available for pre-order. More about my books can be found at morgandante.com. My Patreon can be found here.
For today, I have an interview I did with Ladz, the author of The Fealty of Monsters, Volume I. As someone who enjoys vampires (I know, big surprise) and dark fantasy like George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, I enjoyed reading a dark queer political fantasy with strong gothic horror origins.
I first read Ladz’s lesbian spider monster erotic horror short story “The Lady of the Lair,” and I was struck by their visceral and imaginative prose. I then read their novella Ice Upon a Pier, a thrilling fantasy noir where the lesbian contract killer uses ice magic to kill her targets.
For Fealty, I read an early version without a major character (Ilya), and then I read the version that would go on to be published, and I adore how Ladz deftly handles political intrigue and the balance between beauty and monstrosity. To me, as someone who studied gothic literature when I was in university, Ladz’s works are interesting with how they draw upon literature and history, and I wanted to ask them more about their inspirations and methodology.
So, without further ado, I’m going to hand everything over to Ladz:
When did you first get the idea for Fealty? Did it look much different from the finalized version of Vol. I, or were there massive changes?
In September 2022, I had just finished a revision on a book that I’m still very passionate about but can’t think about until September 2024 for my own mental health. I was run ragged. I was exhausted. At the end of the two years working on the project, I don’t think I even like that version of the book anymore because of how many walls and barriers I put up between the work I wanted to make, the work I think could get me an agent, and the work that I wish I could see more of. So, I metaphorically cleared off the desk and thought to myself, “What do I truly want to read? What do I want to write?”
I began digging into the things I found interesting. There was an incubating brainworm of the fall of the Romanov dynasty through the lens of Rasputin’s biography. There’s the entire microgenre of “fantasy fiction inspired specifically by Don Bluth’s 1997 Anastasia film” that is alive and well despite the problems inherent in the source material. There was Fire Emblem: Three Houses. There has been such a heated debate both in and out of the queer community about how queer characters should behave.
During that time, I had just finished reading Roo Fiction’s Knives in Your Eyes, and I credit that book with saving me creatively. It was weird. It was fucky. Its characterization are deep, and its prose has the kind of weight I enjoy. I wanted to write something like that. I had also gotten into light novels, so I wanted something that could be enhanced with illustrations.
So, the conclusion I came to was: a work that is full of queers behaving poorly and political intrigue inspired by the fall of the Russian Empire.The thing that makes me cackle because of how foolish I was, was that I thought this could be a trilogy. Three books and nothing more. And then I started writing it, and what I thought was going to be a prologue eventually became Volume 1.
That first version of Fealty also didn’t have Ilya Górniak in it (he was supposed to first show up in Volume 2 where I consider the story proper to start), and now it’s hard to imagine that that version even existed because including him fixed almost every single problem my beta readers flagged.Instead of one trilogy, it’s going to be three sets of trilogies because I have fully lost my mind.
What draws you to writing about vampires? When did your interest start?
It all started when a movie called Van Helsing came out in 2004. If someone asks me to name my favorite film unprompted, it’s probably that one and the reasons are myriad. There is such a passion for the universal movie classics that seems to bleed off the screen. Every design choice in that movie also seemed to run on the energy of “What’s the coolest thing we can put in here?” The actors seemed to be having a blast too.
It didn’t necessarily draw me to vampires specifically, but the work that exemplifies the kinds of vampires I enjoy most has to be Vampire Hunter D, both the light novel series and the Bloodlust film. It’s the kind of genre soup that my reading self craves. It’s a Western, it’s a horror, it’s a science fiction, it’s a fantasy. There are vampires. I wanted to chase that high as a creative, so here we are.
What are specific aspects of vampires that appeal to you in certain types of media? For example, the Vilebloods in Cainhurst from Bloodborne or the vampires in Hellsing. Are you drawn to more bestial vampires? I ask because occasionally in the horror community, there are conversations about pretty aristocrat vampires versus monsters ones.
I think for me, it’s the elegance and the brutality. Specifically with Hellsing, because Alucard gets his power from being a vampire made of other vampires and that’s extremely sexy to me. In reading the Vampire Hunter D light novels, there’s a lot of musing on the supernatural beauty of the vampire, where that’s their most horrifying trait (surprisingly, an echo from Angela Carter’s work). The combination of monstrosity, beauty, horror, and love are so captivating to me, and I love being able to explore that on my own as well.
I also return to the quote in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring about “how a servant of the Dark Lord would look fairer, feel fouler” very often, which is the kind of terror I want to strike through my villains.
But then I also wanted bestial vampires. Dracula turning into a sexy bat monster at the end of Van Helsing lives rent free in my mind. It was really cool how that movie pulled off having someone so elegant and aristocratic but with this depiction of a monster, on top of the more psychological monstrosity of seeing his brides strictly as broodmares.
Aleksander “Sasza” Czarnolaski is already an indulgent character for me, so why not make both aristocratic vampires and monster vampires part of the worldbuilding.
There are bat-type bestiapiry, the beast vampires, but the reason I also have the mosquito types is because I didn’t want to stick to just one bloodsucker. So glad I encountered them in Darkest Dungeon: the Crimson Court because there’s also something so transgressive about a person going from mammal to insect.
Currently, with AMC’s Interview with the Vampire concluding its second season, queer vampires are on a lot of minds. In Fealty, Sasza is gay and nonbinary. What is it like writing a queer vampire book? Specifically, what is it about that combination that is compelling?
There is such a rich tradition of queerness in the context of vampire films in itself. There’s the queerness baked into Dracula, brought to the forefront by José Luis Zárate in The Route of Ice and Salt. There’s The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez that span several centuries and decades about lesbian vampires. There’s so much subtextual readings of vampires as a metaphor for otherness and especially queerness that’s particularly compelling to me. What if there were physical consequences to your otherness, like the hematophagy and the severe aversion to the sun? The more contemporary works are also transgressive in a way that they address the politics both in their worldbuilding and the way to navigate the real world as a queer person. It’s a very rich tradition that I love reading about, but for my original fiction, I wanted to do something totally in a secondary world.
One of the things that’s especially impressive with Interview with the Vampire is the way it zeroes in on its intersectional politics. There’s no separating the characters from their contexts, either as vampires or humans, and it’s so interesting to watch both the theming and depiction develop throughout the season and age like fine wine.
One of the things that is challenging is contextualizing the queerness in Fealty. There’s obviously social restrictions for queer people in the Odonic Empire and there are opportunities for queer empowerment, just look at Świetlana as the prime example.
I hesitate to call the work queer norm, however, because there’s an element of queer trauma where the queer characters experience horrors of impending war and imperial power that become integral to their characterization and the plot overall. It’s not exclusive to the queer characters themselves or a result of their queerness. It’s not subtle but it’s not blunt either, making this work very creatively challenging, but also very fulfilling.
What gothic works inspire your own? You’ve mentioned The Monk before. What draws you to gothic literature?
It’s interesting because when I set out to write The Fealty of Monsters, I wanted something that felt more like The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson than Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake, the first book of which I hadn’t read at the time. But what I did know was that I wanted to hire Soren Häxan for the interior art. He’s very passionate about gothic literature, in fact, he’s kind of an expert on the literary theory and history behind the subgene. So, I wanted to both indulge my own curiosity about the subgenre and also make a piece of literature that he wouldn’t be embarrassed to have worked on for so many years.
So, first I wrote the first draft because I just needed to get the story out, and to prepare for revision, I embarked on what I came to call the Horny Gothic Novel Craft Study. As I read, I became more enraptured with how the words felt in my mouth, and the way you need to pause to parse overly complex sentences. It was one of my favorite things about Hiron Innes’ Leech, and I know a lot of Tamsyn Muir’s The Locked Tomb literary fans are also fans of Gormenghast, so in 2022, I finally decided to give it a shot. It’s definitely one of those moments where there was a me before and a me after because that trilogy came to become a new favorite and something I return to when I’m stuck on my craft.
The Horny Goth Novel Craft Study series is still ongoing. Currently, I’m reading Fred Botting’s Gothic, which is a textbook, and I might start The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole next. I’m overdue on a blog post about Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber at the time of answering these questions, but that was part of it too.
Fealty is a fantastical depiction of the end of the Russian monarchy with characters based on real-life figures. It’s a complex and dark political book. What drew you specifically to write about this historical topic? What research did you do? What made you want to write a political fantasy?
What drew me to this political fantasy is the fact that whenever I tried to ask my parents about anything related to Poland before 1994 when we left, I would get stonewalled. Eventually, that led to me doing a bunch of my own reading because I wanted to understand a bit about them, but also a bit about the country I came from.
It started with God’s Playground: A History of Poland by Norman Davies followed by the direct inspiration for Fealty, Rasputin: Faith, Power, and the Twilight of the Romanovs by Douglas Smith. The retellings and depictions that I won’t name that are popularly available don’t even scratch the surface of how batshit the time period leading up to and after 1917 were. The Orlando Figes book, Revolutionary Russia, 1891 - 1991: A History, is what actually cracked open my brain like a geode. Every new thing or context I picked up had been somehow more ridiculous than the one that came before. Some of it works in fiction. A lot of it feels too strange to be made up. But what I can say is that it is absolutely nothing like the kingdoms and democratic politics of places like France, England, or Germany.
The bibliography for Volume 1 can be found at the back of the book, and it will be updated as more volumes come out. I think I practically have something like a doctorate in early twentieth century Russian history, and I know there is so much more to delve into and so much more that I don’t know.
“Rasputin” by Boney M. is still perhaps the most accurate depiction of Rasputin in mainstream media.
For a dark fantasy with so many moving parts, what does your writing process look like? How do you stay organized?
I hesitate to call myself a planner because my outlines aren’t firmly set in stone in a way that makes me identify as such, but there is definitely a lot of outlining involved. There’s a lot of thinking about what I wanted to happen, what needs to happen, and what are just some of the absolute worst choices the characters can make at any given time. There’s a lot of iteration, but I still keep my zero draft from back when this first part was just supposed to be one book as a guiding light.
One of the things that keeps tripping me up between revisions (and why I have restarted Volume 2 three times so far) is that I need to know who the key players are. But sometimes I don’t know that until I start fleshing out my ideas into scenes and suddenly, the plot doesn’t have a narrative thrust to truly work for me, see previous answer about adding Ilya. It’s very much a discovery process.
I keep it all in a physical notebook that is quickly running out of space because it’s where I take notes on my craft books too. The compendium that can be found at the end of Volume 1 is useful to both readers and myself the writer because, damn, there are a lot of people, places, and things with their own plans and ambitions.
Over on itch.io, I’m restocking signed copies for U.S. shipping. There are 20 up now, in additional to the still available international copies. Each price includes shipping and a copied signed by both me and Häxan.
‘old man yaoi’ is crazy