Waterstones Loves… The Sin Eater’s Daughter by Melinda Salisbury
One of our Waterstones Loves books for February is Melinda Salisbury‘s The Sin Eater’s Daughter, the first book in a new YA fantasy trilogy. Below the cut, Melinda writes for us about her ideas and inspiration behind the book from the historical link between royalty and religion to a short story by Margaret Atwood.
So I wasn’t surprised to find myself writing a fantasy novel, because what else would I write?
Writing any kind of novel is a little like being a god. We imagine our characters into existence, giving them hair and eyes and smiles, developing lives for them: hopes and habits, friends and foes. They become our playthings. We give them lovers and then rip them apart, poking at their grief with our fingers. We let them come close to their dreams and then flip a coin to see if they’ll come true or not, pulling emotions from them and pouring them onto the page.
When I began the first draft of The Sin Eater’s Daughter, I knew the world I was creating would be a violent, merciless and dangerous place. I knew the action would centre on a young woman brought to a castle, believing her life was changing for the better, only to find she was terribly wrong. I knew the queen would be her nemesis: a real nasty piece of work, dismantling her hopes one by one. The basics of the world were easy to create: the classic struggle of good vs. evil. But the intricacies were more complex. How to make this place real? How did the kingdom work? What was the foundation Lormere lay on? How it could be possible for this woman – universally cruel and disliked – to stay on the throne without her people rising up against her?
I knew the era in our history that matched closest with that of my world was the 1400–1500s, because it’s my favourite – the tail end of the War of the Roses and the beginnings of the Tudor dynasty, the last of what we know as the medieval era and the beginning of something entirely new.
To fully realise the awfulness of the queen, I took inspiration from a variety of sources. The horror and revulsion Britain felt when Margaret of Anjou ruled while her husband, Henry – son of the hero of Agincourt – drifted in and out of madness. From Richard III supposedly murdering his nephews and planning to marry his own niece to keep the country from civil war. From Margaret Beaufort’s increasingly desperate and dangerous schemes to get her son on to the throne, and her belief that it was what God wanted from her. From Beaufort’s grandson, wicked, lustful Henry VIII going through wives like other men went through bread, defying the church and setting up one in his own name. It still wasn’t dark enough though, so I delved further into history and read about Ancient Egypt, taking a leaf from the Ptolemaic dynasty’s habit of marrying brother to sister; the Spanish Habsburgs and their famed insistence on preserving the royal blood through incest; the increasingly inventive cruelty and madness of Emperor Nero. I searched history for the maddest and baddest and then I made my queen worse than them.
But I still didn’t know how to keep her on her throne. What did all of these historic rulers have that she was missing?
The answer was religion. All of them worked under the protection and benevolence of their gods. All of them wielded the scythe of eternal damnation.
Faith is – and has been since the dawn of time – one of the cornerstones of all cultures: the great unifier or divider. Civilisations have risen and crumbled in the names of gods. Countries have been invaded, populations decimated – all for the fear and love of deities. For any world to be fully realised, whether we like or not, it needs some kind of higher power or purpose, a rallying or rebellion point.
And kings and queens are traditionally the gods’ representatives on earth, regardless of the century, country or people. Gods and kings (or queens) are inextricably linked.
So I created my gods: the female aspect, Næht – death, darkness, temptation – and her counterpart Dæg – life, light and strength. Two gods, locked in an endless struggle against each other, mirrored on earth by their flesh and blood counterparts. I can’t say, without revealing part of the plot of the next book, why there are dual gods, and how they came to be worshipped in Lormere, but that mythology exists, and will be revealed. Going back to The Sin Eater’s Daughter, the world was finally becoming something close to what I felt when I first thought about that young woman – Twylla – in the castle. She’d ended up in that place because she was running from something. But what could be worse than what the queen was putting her through?
A few months before I’d started writing The Sin Eater’s Daughter, I’d been reading a short story collection by Margaret Atwood, one of which was called The Sin Eater. I read it because I liked the title, and afterwards couldn’t get the term ‘sin eater’ out of my head. I looked it up, my fascination turning to horror when I realised it was real, and not from the distant past like Nero and Cleopatra – just over a century ago it had still been practised here in the UK. I shivered when I thought about a person taking on the sins of the dead in exchange for food and coin; the idea that someone would pawn their own soul to offer absolution, in order to feed themselves on earth; the way the exchanged sins would taint them, mark them as something abhorrent and unholy. And I knew I’d found the real darkness I was looking for.
I altered the lore of the sin eater, turning it into a woman’s role to fit with the story of Næht, expanding the meaning of the foods and making it Twylla’s original heritage. She became the future carrier of sin – someone who could only be absolved by passing on centuries of horror and pain to her own child, unless she could somehow escape it. And escape she did – entering a world of betrayal and power and greed and madness instead. Be careful what you wish for, the old fairy tales say, because you might just get it.
And just like the old fairy tales, there is a kernel of truth in The Sin Eater’s Daughter. That kernel is our very real history and heritage. The foundations of my world are built on our past. I wish I could live long enough to read in the future the fantasy that will be based on the lives we live now.
