Jason Sanford is joining us today to talk about his novel, We Who Hunt Alexanders. Here’s the publisher’s description:
Amelia is a ripper, a monster who feeds on violent people who have so thoroughly forsaken love that they’ve burned away their souls. Unseen and unnoticed by most of society and living as both hunter and hunted, the only emotion rippers feel is anger. But Amelia is different from her fellow rippers and also feels happiness, sadness, fear, love and every other emotion. To her mother, Danjay, that makes Amelia the strangest of all monsters.
Driven from their home by religious zealots, Amelia and Danjay must learn to survive in the city of Medea, where violent men rule and kill anyone who opposes them. Worse, Amelia has never hunted on her own, and her mother is ill and growing weaker by the day. Only a chance encounter with a human who can see Amelia gives her any hope that she might be able to save her mother.
To succeed, Amelia must learn to hunt in an increasingly dangerous city brought to the brink of war by the corrupt, rich and powerful. Amelia will also have to discover if her differences from her fellow rippers makes her weak, as her mother believes, or if she can instead be a new kind of monster that the world has never seen before.
What’s Jason’s favorite bit?
We Who Hunt Alexanders is a gothic dark fantasy that follows the life of Amelia, a young neurodiverse monster dealing with both her mom’s wrong expectations for her life and the religious extremists hunting them down. Amelia faces a lot over the course of her story including trying to understand how she fits into the world as a ripper, a type of monster whose purpose is enacting bloody vengeance upon violent people.
Fortunately for Amelia, she has something to help her out when the going gets rough: penny dreadfuls!
When I started writing Amelia’s story, I knew I had to make penny dreadfuls something she loved to read. Penny dreadfuls were cheap pulp publications popular in Britain in the middle of the 19th century. These publications serialized stories across multiple issues, bringing readers back over and over for lurid, sensational and often bloody stories of monsters and criminals. Some of the first fictional depictions of vampires appeared in penny dreadfuls, as did famous characters such as Sweeney Todd.
Penny dreadfuls were very popular at the time, with hundreds of publishers selling over a million copies each week. And like anything popular – and similar to how 20th century societies would experience their own freakouts over video games, Dungeons and Dragons, and comic books – penny dreadfuls were also blamed for corrupting the minds of the young.
Or as The Simpsons famously immortalized, “Won’t somebody please think of the children?”
With We Who Hunt Alexanders set in a gothic 19th century city, of course Amelia loves to read penny dreadfuls. Which is both ironic and fun since she’s one of the monsters who could have been written about in these pulp publications. She even complains to her friends that there are no penny dreadful stories featuring rippers like herself, only lesser monsters like ghosts and vampires.
And when Amelia encounters extremists wanting to destroy all the penny dreadfuls in the city, let’s just say that people burning her favorite reading material pushes our monster into making some major changes in how she deals with wrongdoers.
One of my favorite scenes in the novella is set in a bar with several of the various monsters in the book reading penny dreadfuls. One of them – I’m trying to avoid spoilers here, but a different monster than Amelia – complains about how his type of monster is illustrated in the pulp publications.
“Absolutely unfair,” the monster complains. “These portrayals are hindering my attempts at a normal life.”
Another monster responds with a wonderful retort to that comment, which made my day when I wrote it. And that entire scene was due entirely to the beauty that was penny dreadfuls.
As a former archaeologist, I deeply love being able to work aspects of history into my stories. And the inclusion of penny dreadfuls in We Who Hunt Alexanders is definitely my favorite bit.
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BIO:
Jason Sanford is an award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer who’s also a passionate advocate for fellow authors, creators, and fans, in particular through reporting in his Genre Grapevine column (for which he’s been a finalist multiple times for the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer). He’s also published dozens of stories in magazines such as Asimov’s Science Fiction, Interzone, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies along with appearances in various “year’s best” anthologies and The New Voices of Science Fiction. His first novel Plague Birds was a finalist for both the 2022 Nebula Award and the 2022 Philip K. Dick Award. Born and raised in the American South, Jason’s previous experience includes work as an archaeologist, journalist and a Peace Corps Volunteer.