Daughter of Deep Silence Author Carrie Ryan on Why Revenge Stories Are So Sweet

Here’s what I love about a good revenge story: we’re not sure we should be rooting for the protagonist, but we can’t stop ourselves. We feel the same injustice they do, the same rage of loss, and we’re totally on board for whatever it takes to rectify that injustice. Every now and again we may step back and wonder, “Should we really be okay with this? Is the character going too far?” But that doesn’t stop us from cheering them on. Because we want justice as badly as they do.
That’s what a good revenge story does. It makes us identify with the character so wholly that we root for her without question. Then it pushes us toward the razor edge between just desserts and going too far. The phrase I kept returning to while writing Daughter of Deep Silence was, “Make the reader care, then make them complicit.” I wanted to re-create the feeling I had when I first read Stephen King’s Carrie. I knew I shouldn’t be rooting for Carrie once the body count began to rise at her prom, but I couldn’t stop because I understood her. I wanted that revenge as much as she did.
Because isn’t there a small part of us that wishes we could follow in the character’s footsteps? The only difference between us and Carrie White from Carrie or Emily Thorne from Revenge or Edmond Dantès from The Count of Monte Cristo is that we never get the pleasure of enacting the revenge schemes we dream up. We’re able to move on with our lives in a way those protagonists never were. They become stuck, mired in a bog where the only truth is vengeance.
For characters seeking revenge, it’s rarely about simply murdering those responsible. That would make for a very short story. Instead, it’s about punishment—enacting pain equal to the pain the protagonist faced. It’s not enough for Edmond Dantès to kill those he holds responsible for his false imprisonment; he must ruin them first. And he does so in an intricately planned and delightfully thorough way, preying on their weaknesses to make them complicit in their own demise.
The intricacy of Dantès’s plans is part of what I loved about The Count of Monte Cristo, in the same way I loved the web woven in Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and in the TV shows Arrow and Revenge. There’s something a little terrifying about how cold and calculated these characters are — how many times they could have reconsidered their course of action but chose not to, even to their own detriment.
And this is what fascinates me most about revenge stories. So often, in the course of enacting their revenge, the protagonist is given a second chance at the thing they lost, but it will come at the expense of their well-laid plans. This creates a rather delicious conundrum: they can either get over themselves and move on with their lives, or they can stay mired in their rage at the expense of potential happiness.
In Sarah MacLean’s A Rogue by Any Other Name, Bourne finally has a chance to enact the retribution he’s been planning for years, but it will come at the expense of the woman he’s fallen in love with. Getting revenge means losing the girl. In the first season of Revenge, Emily Thorne can have love again, if she’s willing to cast aside her plans and reveal her true identity. Same with Oliver McQueen in the first season of Arrow: being perceived as the useless, selfish playboy gives him cover for his secret identity, but it comes at the expense of his family’s opinion of him.
Whereas before, each of these characters suffered loss at the hands of someone else, now their loss comes at their own hands. What they want is within their grasp, but they refuse to reach for it. This is what I wanted to explore with Daughter of Deep Silence—a young woman who loses everything and rebuilds herself the only way she knows how. Who takes on a new self, dedicated to the pursuit of revenge to the exclusion of all else. And who must ultimately face the question of what’s more important: vengeance, or a second chance?
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