Anna Biller

Don’t be surprised if Anna Biller’s first novel is adapted for the screen, said Julia Glassman in The Mary Sue. The Los Angeles native is, after all, a filmmaker with a cult following, and she wrote Bluebeard’s Castle when Covid shut down all movie production. The story concerns another of Biller’s unforgettable female protagonists: a contemporary Gothic romance novelist who falls into a Gothic romance—marrying an enigmatic baron, moving into his castle, and discovering that her would-be prince has a sinister side. What’s fascinating about this heroine is that she knows she’s living in a Gothic thriller but doesn’t extricate herself. To Biller, that’s because the character is following a common pattern of abuse victims and failing to accept that she can’t fix her tormentor. “Abusers know what to do in that situation,” Biller says. “They give the woman just enough so that she stays. When she’s about to leave, they say, ‘Come back, I’ll let you fix me.’”

Like Biller’s stylish movies, Bluebeard’s Castle is “so over the top,” said Sophia Nguyen in The Washington Post, “that you wait—and wait—for a wink, or some tell, that you’re being invited into a joke.” But Biller pushes back against everyone who interprets the novel or her best-known film, The Love Witch, as camp. “I don’t think femicide is campy,” she says. “I don’t think domestic abuse is campy.” Her intent instead, she says, was to write a novel that gets at the psychology of abuse victims, and she was happy to discover that telling the story in a book gave her more control. “You can actually tell the reader what your book means,” she says. “You can’t do that in a movie. Everybody’s misinterpreting everything for, like, years.”