AN ESCAPE PLAN
Sarah J. Maas’s newest fantasy novel can help us all process the harshness of real life
Crescent City: House of Earth and Blood Sarah J. Maas Bloomsbury
Sarah J. Maas was 15 when she and her schoolmates were herded home across Central Park on 9/11. Ask the bestselling U.S. fantasy author what she felt as she saw the plume of smoke rising up into the sky from Lower Manhattan and she has to think about it for a moment. “Powerless,” the 34-year-old eventually says.
“Even before we really knew what had happened, I remember there being this realization that one world had ended and a much darker one had begun. And maybe some part of me needed to write the Throne of Glass books in order to escape to a place where a young woman was so empowered she could save the world.”
It was in 2002 that Maas sat down to write her debut novel, publishing the first few chapters on the online writers’ forum, Fictionpress.com.
Based on Cinderella — the premise being: “What if Cinderella (were) not a servant, but an assassin? And what if she didn’t attend the ball to meet the prince, but to kill him?” — the story instantly became one of the most popular on the site, prompting Bloomsbury to buy the book in 2010, as well as the rest of the trilogy.
Ten years and 13 books later, Maas is Bloomsbury’s second-biggest brand author after Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling, having sold more than nine million copies of her 800-odd-page YA fantasy romps worldwide (think Game of Thrones meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer with a drizzle of E.L. James’s Fifty Shades books). She has been translated into 37 languages and hit the No. 1 bestseller spot in the U.K., U.S., Australia, New Zealand and Ireland simultaneously.
“The interest in fantasy comes in cycles,” Maas says on the eve of the publication of her first book in the adult Crescent City series: House of Earth and Blood. “It was Game of Thrones that really tipped this current cycle into motion. But the last big fantasy cycle was when the Lord of the Rings movies were huge. The Fellowship of the Rings came out a couple of months after 9/11 happened, and my own interest in fantasy really took off after that, too.”
Because it provided the ultimate escape? Yes, “but also because it felt like a way for me as a young teenager to sort out what I was seeing in the real world through a fantasy world, where you had these forces of darkness on the one side — and those trying to save the world on the other. I found that very comforting. I think for many, fantasy is a way for us to process what we are going through in real life.”
Maas’s particular brand of fantasy is more real than most. Set in a modern world of nightclubs, smartphones and skyscrapers, where half-human half-sidhe (fairy) heroines are being forced to deal with the same issues as the author’s predominantly young, female fans — toxic masculinity, inequality, slut-shaming, grief and more — the books might even have spawned a new genre: feminist fantasy fiction.
Because whether it’s Feyre from the A Court of Thorns and Roses books, Aelin from Throne of Glass or 24-year-old Bryce Quinlan in the new Crescent City series, these women are powered by the kind of patriarchy-smashing anger felt by a huge number of women today.
“I do think women have had it with the way things are,” says Maas with aplomb.
“I remember at 12 or 13, men catcalling as I walked down the street in New York, and I knew not to retaliate, but it would so enrage me. Now that same behaviour is being called out and challenged, and I love that.”
Growing up in Manhattan, Maas was also frustrated by the lack of nuanced female characters either in books or on screen.
“The stories I wanted to see being told weren’t really there. There aren’t many women in J.R.R. Tolkien’s books: fantasy is not a genre that tends to be particularly rich in terms of female characters. Like science fiction, it has historically been a domain of masculinity. And I can’t tell you how hard I cried when I saw Rey (played by Daisy Ridley) take up the lightsabre for the first time in Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Because I have waited my entire life to see a young woman do all the things I daydreamed about and play-acted as a little girl.”
One of the only characters Maas felt was realistic in terms of the “complex combination of girlie and kick-ass that is every woman” was Buffy the Vampire Slayer. “Because she was this girlie-girl who loved shopping but also had enormous power and an ability to slay vampires. Her girlie side never cancelled out her strength as a warrior: in fact her femininity only made her stronger.”
Although her books have always been at the forefront of the fantasy/romance crossover, the new Crescent City series promises to up the raunch factor quite extensively.
“I’m a firm believer in having a lot of sex in my books,” Maas says with a libidinous chuckle. “Sex is an empowering thing, and with the new books I was promised I wouldn’t have to censor my content. I want to show women enjoying sex, and not being ashamed to ask for what they want in the bedroom.”
Two things are important with sex scenes, however: “that they’re always part of the plot and the character’s progression, and that there is a form of consent from the characters — a verbal agreement that this is what they both want.”
Despite her huge success, Maas has encountered a wearying number of literary snobs.
“I’ve had people ask me when I’m ‘going to write real books,’” she snorts. “And ‘how all your romance work is going?, as though anything written by women had to somehow be ‘lesser.’ Which made me go on a huge rant about the billion-dollar industry that is romance fantasy.
“And you know what? I think it worked.”
The interest in fantasy comes in cycles. It was Game of Thrones that really tipped this current cycle into motion.
Sarah J. Maas