Innamorata: A Guest Post by Ava Reid

Prepare to be swept away into the lush Gothic world of Ava Reid’s first book in The House of Teeth Duology. Magic, love and revenge await — if you dare to enter. Read on for an exclusive essay from Ava on writing Innamorata.

Not rare, I think, is the author who is inspired by a niche piece of history or an obscure work of art, unearthed by a deep dive on Wikipedia or dredged up through another fervid research rabbit hole. Such was the case with Innamorata.

But a book with this depth and scope cannot claim inspiration from a single source. Innamorata was born from a somewhat unwieldy amalgam of disparate sources, including but not limited to: an academic paper, a psychological case study, and traditions of both sweeping epic fantasy and claustrophobic gothic fiction.

The core of the book is a retelling of Matteo Maria Boiardo’s Renaissance epic romance, the Orlando innamorato—more specifically a nested story known as the Rocca Crudele interlude. This interlude, paradoxically within an otherwise light-hearted romance, contains some of the most grotesque and appalling violence in all of Western literature. That fact alone was irresistibly intriguing to me, and in my efforts to make sense of this, I found an article by Dr. Natalie Cleaver titled “Humanism’s Other Inheritance: the Brutal Intertextuality of Boiardo’s Rocca Crudele,” which clarified the interlude’s themes and form. So one side of Innamorata’s odd polygon took shape.

For a long time I have been interested in a condition known as selective mutism, in which an individual is physically capable of speaking but does not for psychological reasons. During my research, I discovered a case study from the ‘80s, about two sisters who had been badly traumatized by the Troubles in Northern Ireland, leading the younger one to cease speaking. According to the case study, the two had an enmeshed, codependent, manipulative relationship wherein the power dynamic was often unclear. And so came another side of the polygon—Agnes, the protagonist, and her toxic and complicated relationship with her cousin, Marozia.

By now I’ve had plenty of experience in writing gothic fiction, between Juniper & Thorn, A Study in Drowning, and Lady Macbeth, but with Innamorata, I wanted to go stranger and darker. That strange darkness came from Mervyn Peake’s Gormenghast, one of the most beautiful and immersive works of fiction I’ve ever had the pleasure to read. To challenge myself, I also brought in elements of court intrigue and epic fantasy, inspired by A Song of Ice and Fire, to see if I could maintain the atmosphere of isolation alongside a rich and vast world.

It’s now up to readers to feel the contours of this odd shape—and decide whether or not I’ve successfully assembled these sources of inspiration into something meaningful. It is my dearest hope that you are by turns outraged, horrified, impassioned, revolted, beguiled, and most of all moved.