Welcome to Once Upon a Retelling! I'm a huge fan of retellings, and I'm really interested in hearing about authors' own love of the original stories, and what inspired them to retell those stories. And so Once Upon a Retelling was born, a feature in which I interview authors about their versions of well-loved tales.
Today, I'm delighted to have Marcus Sedgwick over on the blog, to talk about his latest novel, The Monsters We Deserve, a story that looks at the writing of a novel, and more specifically, Mary Shelley's writing of Frankenstein.
Can you tell us a little about The Monsters We Deserve?The Monsters We Deserve is neither a retelling of Frankenstein, nor a retelling of its creation, though in small ways it draws on elements of both. It’s really a book about the true meaning of Shelley’s novel, a meaning that has been largely misunderstood from almost the very beginning of its life. So it’s a story about writers, creation, writers’ ghosts and the ghosts they leave behind. It takes the form of an extended mental letter from an unnamed writer, whose initials are MS, holed up in a remote chalet high in the French Alps, to their editor. I didn’t intend it to be read as a ghost story but I suppose it is in some ways.
Midwinterblood by Marcus Sedgwick - Have you ever had the feeling that you've lived another life? Been somewhere that has felt totally familiar, even though you've never been there before, or felt that you know someone well, even though you are meeting them for the first time? It happens. In 2073 on the remote and secretive island of Blessed, where rumour has it that no one ages and no children are born, a visiting journalist, Eric Seven, and a young local woman known as Merle are ritually slain. Their deaths echo a moment ten centuries before, when, in the dark of the moon, a king was slain, tragically torn from his queen. Their souls search to be reunited, and as mother and son, artist and child, forbidden lovers, victims of a vampire they come close to finding what they've lost. In a novel comprising seven parts, each influenced by a moon - the flower moon, the harvest moon, the hunter's moon, the blood moon - this is the story of Eric and Merle whose souls have been searching for each other since their untimely parting. Beautifully imagined, intricately and cleverly structured, this is a heart-wrenching and breathtaking love story with the hallmark Sedgwick gothic touches of atmosphere, blood-spilling and sacrifice. From Amazon UK
