Author interview: Angela Slatter

Issue four: interview

When it comes to writers working with fairy tales and folklore, Angela Slatter (writing as A. G. Slatter) takes the canon and makes it her own. With more than two hundred stories to her credit and seven novels to boot, Angela knows what she’s doing. And when it comes to tales spun in her Sourdough universe, fairy tale fans will find plenty to talk about. In 2010, Slatter published her first collection set in this world of her own making, Sourdough and Other Stories (2012). She followed this up with The Bitterwood Bible (2014), which won the World Fantasy Award for Best Collection. Her third mosaic collection, The Tallow-Wife and Other Tales (2021), continues the expansion in the Sourdough world.

When reading Slatter’s stories, memories of other characters, other events, and other places permeate the experience. The same holds true with the four novels she’s published as A. G. Slatter: All the Murmuring Bones (2021), The Path of Thorns (2022), The Briar Book of the Dead (2024), and her newest release, The Crimson Road (2025). Here at The Orange and Bee, we had the opportunity to read the newest addition to Angela’s oeuvre, and you are in for a treat!

O&B: The Orange and Bee has a central focus on fairy tales, so it seems like a good place to start. When were you first introduced to fairy tales, and how have they impacted the way you see the world?

AGS: Like many people, I guess, it was in childhood with my mum reading to me at bedtime. It was my favourite thing, and to be quite honest if I could convince her to do it now I would! I think it’s that they put a magical lens over everything and certainly in my case made me ask “What if?” from a very early age. So I was always certain there was something magical or weird or frightening waiting in the dark or behind a tree or under the bed. Life’s a bit more interesting that way…

O&B: Some of the first stories you published were based on fairy tales. How did this source material shape your work? What other influences did you draw from as you worked to create the unique voice that you are known for today?

AGS: When I first started reworking fairy tales I was probably sticking a little more closely to the original outline, but I soon started to pull their substance into different shapes. ‘The Little Match Girl’ became the tale of a girl who’d been tried as a witch and she used the last matches in the telling of her story; ‘Red Skein’ became my version of Little Red Riding Hood and it was the tale of a girl who was wolfish on the inside; and ‘Sourdough’ is a version of ‘The Goose Girl’, I suppose, with lost lovers and betrayals and baking.

I’m also a big reader of crime fiction, so I think that just automatically comes to play in my stories, long and short. There’s always a kind of a mystery thread in my gothic novels, and the old Verity Fassbinder urban fantasies all have that crime noir element to them.

O&B: Your short story ‘Sourdough’ was published in the Tartarus anthology Strange Tales II, edited by Rosalie Parker (2007). When you wrote that story, were you already planning the creation of the Sourdough world, where so many of your stories take place? Or did it happen organically?

AGS: I was talking about this at the Crimson Road launch the other night. ‘Sourdough’, for me, feels like it’s still got its feet in our world, it could be almost a Regency era tale. But as I wrote more and more, the stories pulled away from that place and the world became stranger and very much its own thing: there is magic and there are monsters, and everyone knows about it and no one thinks it’s weird. Witches and women who don’t conform are still persecuted, but they’ve got ways and means of getting their own back. I guess I feel like I’m writing the world as it would be if all those witches who were burned and hung and drowned were in fact real witches and could stop all those horrible fates. If those women were what was claimed, do you honestly think they’d let some idiot burn them? I think that’s probably a very firm undercurrent in all of my work.

O&B: What made you decide to make the move from short fiction and novellas to full-length novels in the Sourdough world, and how has that journey shaped the way you write?

AGS: Essentially, it’s very hard to make a living from short stories alone! I love short stories, they were my apprenticeship and I’ll never stop writing them – I’ve just slowed down a bit because novels take so much more time and ‘braining’. I feel like novellas were my steppingstone between short stories and novels, and I think it was a good way to learn the difference in forms. A novella isn’t just a long short story (no matter what some people might think), it’s got its own shape and pace and rhythm. So, I think from each form I learned new skills.

Initially, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to make the transition to novels in the Sourdough world, but I gradually learned how to shape them. Writing novellas like Of Sorrow and Such and The Bone Lantern was a very effective training ground for continuing to write the longer works and (hopefully) improving them. When I went back to do the final mosaic collection The Tallow-Wife and Other Tales, it was a strange experience because the short stories were not as ‘separate’ from each other as those in the first Sourdough collection and even Bitterwood. Tallow-Wife, which pulls together threads from the first two collections, feels more like a novel itself.

O&B: Even in your first Sourdough novel, All the Murmuring Bones (2021), you were incorporating settings and characters from your many short stories and novellas. In your newest novel, The Crimson Road (2025), characters from your previous three novels play major roles. How do you keep it all straight?

AGS: Lol! I try my best! One of the things that helped me shift to writing novels in this world was the decision to use some of the short stories I’d done previously as my own mythology in the novels. I’d created a bunch of fairy and folktales, some based on recognizable stories, others written fresh and new, so why try to then go and do another whole round of worldbuilding? I love the idea that the stories and histories that come from the collections are the stories and warning tales that my heroines in the novels were told growing up.

I’m also fascinated by how rumour and gossip work in storytelling, and how legends and tales change over time, new elements added, old ones dropped, for whatever reason – memory, spite, shaping a better tale. So, something I love doing across stories is to sometimes change some element a little – so in one tale, a character is a villain, in another from a different point of view they become a hero. I like playing with the idea that your reputation is often what other people choose to make it – so the mad woman in Mr Rochester’s attic is actually a woman who’s been locked up there so her husband can steal her fortune and prevent her from living the life she wants.

O&B: Violet Zennor, the protagonist in The Crimson Road, is forced to undertake a terrible task: to save her stillborn baby brother from a terrible fate among the Leech Lords, vampiric-like creatures who are confined to a territory called the Darklands. She is helped along in her quest by major characters in the previous three novels, which lends a sense of rising tension as the events in the Sourdough books continue to become tightly interwoven. This might just be wishful thinking on our part, but can we look forward to more of these connections in your forthcoming novel A Forest Darkly?

AGS: Lol! I kind of did the ‘wrap-up’ in The Crimson Road – what I’ve been calling ‘Gothic girls, assemble!’ – because I felt like these first four books are closing off a chapter. Not that they won’t reappear but for the moment there’s a little caesura, a pause. A Forest Darkly heads into the deep woods to meet a grumpy witch with a dark past that she ultimately has to face and to then start atoning for the things she did when younger and overcome with the power she could wield. This leads into the next two books, Our Lady of Battles and The Scarred Queen – after that, there’s a vague plan in my head to bring things back to what I’m thinking of as ‘The Witches’ War’. I’ve also got a novella to revisit Asher and Eli from The Path of Thorns. So, it’s kind of a drunken path through plotting!

O&B: Your fairy tale novels often lean into the realms of horror and gothic, perhaps even more so in The Crimson Road. Did the move from fairy tales to folklore in The Crimson Road pose any interesting challenges along the way? Do you have any advice for writers when it comes to writing to suit specific forms?

AGS: I think I’ll always have fairy and folktales at the heart of everything I do – they were the stories I was first told and they’re the ones I still constantly read. With The Crimson Road, because I was dipping into vampire lore, I did a lot of reading to pick out elements of vampire stories that were more rare and hadn’t been overdone. But vampire lore is also folklore and I’ve read a lot of that too, so I didn’t find much that was ‘new’ to me, which meant it was a process of adapting what I knew and choosing what to leave out because it felt too hackneyed or cliched.

The other thing with this novel is that the leech lords – my version of vampires – are kind of confined in one location. So I had to figure out how to keep the pace going, to ensure there were threats apart from the one Violet is constantly moving towards (when she finally decides to heed the call). So, that’s a challenge!

As far as writing for specific forms or genres, I think you need to be cognizant of the recognised shape of a genre and what the reader’s expectations are likely to be. I think it’s perfectly fine to not meet readers’ expectations in some place as long as what you replace them with is even better than what they were expecting. And I think you should definitely be open to including elements of other genres in your work since it can lead to some really fascinating combinations – gothic and crime pair nicely with a heavy red! Romance and fantasy with a decent pinot gris!

O&B: In The Crimson Road (and your other gothic fairy tale novels), you interject other characters' voices in epistolary threads such as diary entries and letters. Can you give us some insight on how these alternative forms add new layers to your heroine's tale?

AGS: As I mentioned above, I loved the idea that the stories I’d already written were actually the childhood tales my characters had been told, so I’ve kept it up in all the novels. It’s just another way of adding to the worldbuilding and lore, of including books and researching and reading and “history” in my stories. The model for this is probably Eco’s The Name of the Rose, one of my favourite books and so clever – same with Foucault’s Pendulum – I love that idea that you can find answers in a variety of disparate locations. And especially in the Sourdough world, there are all these legendary collections by a purported monk called Murcianus – except the actual chronicler was Murciana, who was one of the Little Sisters of St Florian at the Citadel in Cwen’s Reach, which was an order devoted to preserving knowledge (this history is in The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings). So that engages with ideas of women’s work and women’s voices being taken away from them – all my books have a theme of reclamation in them.

O&B: Do you have any advice for writers seeking to follow in your footsteps when it comes to building an original world?

AGS: One of the reasons I did what I did was because I couldn’t find it in me to create a whole new world. Full respect to anyone who can – you’ve got a greater attention span than I! – but personally I’ve found the best way to get a reader in is to make sure they get a sense of familiarity with the world before I smack them with the weirdness. It’s like luring them – in a loving way – into a trap. It’s one of the reason’s GRRM’s world works so well: it’s a recognizable version of a medieval world, so we don’t have to learn the entire shape of it because we have a sense of familiarity with its elements. What I do is work with a recognizable world that seems a bit historical from the setting descriptions, clothing, social structures, etc. Essentially, it’s the world inside my head.

The big bits of advice are:

1. Don’t spend too much time on your world and not enough on characters and plot.

2. Don’t make your world so complicated that a reader will close the book because they just can’t follow it. Any Adventure Time fans, think Jake and Card Wars.

3. Make sure your world feels convincing but doesn’t overwhelm everything else – if the most interesting thing in the world is how you elect the space emperor, then you need to rethink your plot.

4. Read widely and see what other writers do. Don’t copy them, but do learn from them and recombine elements into something that’s your own.

O&B: Is there anything else you’d like to share with our readers? What can we expect next?

AGS: In October 2025, a contemporary folk horror novel called The Cold House will be out from Titan. A Forest Darkly will be out in February 2026, and in June 2026 the three Sourdough mosaic collections will be reprinted by Titan and will be available once again! And the film rights to The Path of Thorns (and the Veritys) have been optioned, so fingers crossed that comes to fruition.

About Angela Slatter

Angela Slatter is the author of seven novels, including All the Murmuring Bones, The Path of Thorns and The Briar Book of the Dead, The Crimson Road as well as twelve short story collections, including The Bitterwood Bible and The Tallow-Wife and Other Tales. She's won a World Fantasy Award, a British Fantasy Award, a Shirley Jackson, a Ditmar, a Premier Ignotus Award, three Australian Shadows Awards, and eight Aurealis Awards; her work has been translated into multiple languages. She has an MA and a PhD in creative writing, occasionally teaches creative writing. She’s collaborated with Mike Mignola on a new series from Dark Horse Comics, Castle Full of Blackbirds, set in the Hellboy Universe. Online at angelaslatter.com.