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- [00:02]
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- [00:13]
Cameron Sullivan
And without fans like you, there'd be
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Cameron Sullivan
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Cameron Sullivan
Download TikTok now. This episode is brought to you by Redfin. You're listening to a podcast, which means you're probably multitasking, maybe even scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving homes without expecting to get them. But Redfin isn't just built for endless browsing. It's built to help you find and own a home with agents who close twice as many deals. When you find the one, you've got a real shot at getting it. Get started@redfin.com own the dream welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:15]
Angela E. Lanier
Hello and welcome to New Books and Fantasy. I am your host, AE Lanier. Today I will be speaking with Cameron Sullivan about his new novel, the Red Winter. The Red Winter is a story comprised of the reminiscences of Sebastian Grave, a centuries old monster hunter, recounting events that occurred largely in the woods of Gevaudan during the years leading up to the French Revolution. The story centers around a terrible beast that hunts the local people and cannot be stopped even by the resources of the French Crown itself. Sebastian is drawn in not just by the promise of slaying the beast with whom he has something of a history, but also by his attraction to Antoine, a young French aristocrat who Sebastian, for all his experience and better judgment, cannot quite seem to get over. The book is, among other things, a retelling of the legend of the Beast of Gevaudan, but the novel winds through many years and centuries, allowing us to trace political and magical developments and to examine the ways that success, failure and longing can fester over decades. Cameron Sullivan is an Australian writer and copy editor who grew up in Perth and currently resides in Melbourne. The Red Winter is his debut novel. He's here with us now. Hi Cam, it's great to have you.
- [02:31]
Cameron Sullivan
Hi Angela, thank you very much. It's lovely to be here.
- [02:33]
Angela E. Lanier
I was wondering if you could start by telling us a little bit about the legend of the Beast of Gevaudan and sort of what drew you to that story.
- [02:42]
Cameron Sullivan
Yeah. The legend itself is. I've always found it fascinating, even from the first time I heard about it when I was a child. I guess the short version is there was a mysterious, as you just described, a mysterious animal that was attacking people in a particular region of France, gevaudan, in the 1700s. So just before the French Revolution, and starting in 1764, it attacked over 200 people in the space of a few years and killed over a hundred of them. This is an incredible amount of death from one mysterious animal. So many witnesses, so many official documents of this time. As he was saying, the crown got involved. The church was also issuing edicts around people praying and coming together to get rid of this kind of devilish scourge on the country. So that I found incredibly fascinating already. Just by itself, it kind of reads like a horror movie, scary movie already. And from there, it was not too much work on my part to turn it into a kind of monster hunter narrative.
- [04:03]
Angela E. Lanier
Absolutely. At the heart of that narrative is our protagonist, Sebastian, who by this point has been around for a very long time and has a lot of experience and powers that come in large part with a relationship that he has with another being. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about Sarmandel and that relationship and sort of how you think about that.
- [04:27]
Cameron Sullivan
So Sebastian, I think, is. So in terms of where the story came from, where it excited me, one part was the history and the other part was Sebastian. And he acts as a kind of historical tour guide in a lot of ways through this really interesting period. And the relationship with Sarmadel, who's this spirit demon that lives, shares his body with him, is such a central part of who he is. It's why he can live forever. It's why he needs to sort of kill things and eat their hearts to survive. And it's also where a lot of his power comes from, their relationship. For me, it's interesting. A lot of people sort of describe the romance of the book and there is a love story at the heart of the book. But for me, the main love story, the central kind of relationship with the book is Sebastian and Sarmadale, because they're stuck together. That's the relationship that's going to be there when the dust settles. And playing with that sort of the tension for Sebastian in the moment, the decisions that he's making are often quite selfish. But he knows that when the dust settles, when all of the events are done, he's going to be left with Samadel still, even if Everything goes well, everybody's going to die in 40, 50 years and he's still going to be standing. So those kind of decisions and character motivations were so interesting to write. Apart from the fact that Sarmadale is just the worst, the absolute worst person you could have living in your head. And he was a lot of fun to write. Just I would, I would think of the worst thing you could say in any situation and then just put that in his mouth. And that's usually like, that's how I wrote 90% of his character. And yeah, as I said, so much fun.
- [06:24]
Angela E. Lanier
Multiple consciousnesses in one body is, I think, one of my favorite tropes in speculative fiction, sort of regardless of how that happens. And this is just such a fun, messy, queer, like, intimate depiction of that. And it is truly, it's so immediate. And then also you get this really long sense of legacy that is really enjoyable as well. Time and reminiscence are really important parts of this book. We are going to sort of between three different time periods. Our two sort of main ones are 20 years apart in the 18th century, but we have an earlier one. We also have a very brief frame story centering us in 2013. That also means that the version of Sebastian that is narrating things has much more sort of modern references as well. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about the ways that you thought about sort of time and reminiscence and that layering as the novel developed.
- [07:24]
Cameron Sullivan
That was one of the trickiest things to write. Just in the sense, as you said, he is writing from essentially a modern day perspective due to that framing narrative and a lot of what I'm trying not to stray into spoilers territory here. A lot of what Sebastian remembers is also he's aware that it's not accurate in the sense that he often doesn't enjoy some of the memories and can give them up to Sarmadel if he wants to. So the idea of him as a kind of immortal narrator who still has a broken heart after 200, 300 years is kind of at the core of the novel. But I think, again, I'm trying not to get his point. I think it's what his character wise, the fact that he should be by now incredibly wise and really above all of these concerns. And yet he still falls in love like a teenager and has this wild summer winter of love in the mountains of France. The fact that he still does that is owing largely to his long life, essentially being raised by this demon in his head. So there is A. A continuity to his character that is rooted in his worst impulses a lot of the time with Sarmadel. So I think the kind of sort of world weary, sardonic part of him that comes out particularly in the footnotes and from that, from our understanding of him as a present day character. I think a lot of that comes from it's his vulnerability. In a way, he's doing it to protect himself because he's been through wars and personal devastation and just the. What I would say would be the quite unbearable condition of living forever. So those things, I think they inform those different sides of him we see as you go through. He's narrating himself from a particular period and also from a particular period.
- [09:38]
Angela E. Lanier
This is definitely a novel that has a lot of trauma and violence in it. It's certainly earning sort of that grim, dark moniker for sure, but it's very thoughtfully done as well. You do, I think, an excellent job of. There are characters that are cynical, but the story itself doesn't necessarily feel cynical. It is often very violent and gory, but has this human center and this empathy and curiosity for everyone throughout. Which is a very difficult tone to sort of balance. Especially when you consider the elements of humor in the novel, the elements of romance in the novel, which I think are really central parts of doing that kind of balancing. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about violence and gore and the ways that you thought about bringing that into your work or the
- [10:28]
Cameron Sullivan
ways that it showed up there, the violence and the gore. I'm full disclosure, horror and dark fantasy. Absolutely my first love, even when I was growing up. But the violence and the gore in the book, very. I mean, true to life, I would say obviously it's a fantasy, which I have leaned very hard into the fantasy over the historical. But there's a lot of. Because the book deals with themes of mythology and religion and folklore and I think we have sanitized a lot of these things. Our worship is very clean. It's very. It's very. No matter which kind of sort of organized religion particularly, we forget that traditionally the experience of the supernatural, if you will, or the another dimension to the world has always been linked to violence and darkness. There's a real, you know, the mortification of the flesh from sort of Judeo Christian traditions. There's a real visceral nature to how we experience the divine or the otherworldly. So that part of it actually came quite naturally with the events of what was happening in the book. Also, obviously the history is about a Beast that's killing and eating people. So that was a part of the story that was already there. And I think the. Those elements are kind of the romance and the humor, as you were saying, which are kind of the motivations for the characters. They kind of cast the shadow in a way where the violence lives. You kind of care about the love story because it's under threat. And the humor, I think work. That was not the reason the humor was hard to write. The juxtaposition with the darkness and the gore made. I think people do have a tendency to make light of, you know, that kind of gallows humor that we all share. So those things, I think worked really well together and I think would be in some ways the only way, if you were to live through all of this trauma. To be able to look at it with a bit of black humor would be the only way to serve to keep yourself sane in a lot of ways.
- [12:53]
Angela E. Lanier
Absolutely. The role of class in this novel is really interesting as well. There's a lot of violence in terms of giant beast eating people and their organs, but there's also a really thoughtful portrayal of the ways that wealth and poverty can result in violence. Of course, we are building towards this moment that I think in a lot of people's minds.
- [13:15]
Cameron Sullivan
Right.
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Angela E. Lanier
If we're thinking about 18th century France, we're thinking about the French Revolution. Sebastian is having a very intense fling with a French aristocrat and also has. Because we see Sebastian at different points in time, we also see him with different relationships to wealth, with different sort of relationships to stability. And I was wondering if you could speak a little bit to sort of the role of wealth and class in building a novel. Especially when there's also were sort of rooting for a romance with a French aristocrat, which is always something that's interesting, I think.
- [13:53]
Cameron Sullivan
Yeah. So that was. It was initially very difficult when I was writing it because all of the things we think about in terms of that period of history in pre revolutionary France, it's all the aristocracy. So the wigs, the corsets, the incredible food, the art, the. That kind of rococo aesthetic, all of those things, you know, the court of the Sun King, Versailles, these are very evocative. That's the almost stereotypical images of France at this time. And setting a book in France at this time, these things are inescapable. And that's. And it's part of what makes it so beautiful to write about as well. It's a very. Just in terms of the sensory descriptions of things there's so much beautiful. Art, food, all of those things, clothing. But at the same time, all of those things are the reason that the French Revolution happened. The excesses of the aristocracy and the. The church, the king, they were the. The classic pillars of French society at the time. And the poor people underneath were getting crushed and making it all happen. So writing a story in which the lead character is involved in all of that in a really sort of complicit way. And then I think we all know where the French Revolution happens at the. Immediately after the events of the book. Having to kind of turn that around a little bit on the reader and say, this was absolutely lovely, but to have these things, everyone else was in sort of abject misery and they came for blood. So Sebastian experiencing this kind of over 20 years, or in sort of real time over 20 years as an outsider, because he's always a bit of an outsider, given that he lives forever. He doesn't really belong in any one place. Um, it was interesting for me to write that character knowing that it was going to flip at the end. He couldn't be really on the side of the aristocracy, because that's unconscionable. But he also wasn't really on the side of the. Of the common people because he had nothing to do with them, really. So I think he is a survivor in a way. And I think that's partly why he clings to these relationships, because they're the thing that means something to him rather than necessarily his taking aside. In the. And he mentions it, he's like. He ends up in war. Whichever way, whichever way we turn, we end up killing each other. So that was once I had that kind of, I guess, kernel of wisdom, his perspective on that. Everything else made more sense in the way that I could shape his perceptions around those things.
- [16:55]
Angela E. Lanier
The magic in this world is very rich and also grounded in a time and place without feeling overwhelming. I didn't always understand what was happening, but I trusted that Sebastian, or at the very least Sarmadal did, which is, I think, always a lovely thing to have in a fantasy protagonist, is this sense of arcane depth. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about what you wanted to include in the magic in this world and how you sort of went about the building and drawing off of things to create that.
- [17:25]
Cameron Sullivan
So the magic. The magic system, I think, is. I wanted it to be just as you said, a powerful tool in. In Sebastian's arsenal. He can do things that we don't understand, but there's enough familiarity to it from, you know, kind of Western occult religion, Wicca, pagan, all of these things that we have kind of in the collective unconscious. There's a level of familiarity with what's going on where you can kind of see that it's familiar, but also understand that he's doing something almost inexpressible with the way that he's describing it, which I think is what it would be like if you were that powerful. How would you talk about it? I also. When you're saying it's kind of tied to a time and place. One of the hard rules that I made in terms of the history was that none of the supernatural and magical elements could change our understanding of the world and the history as it happened. So I couldn't do anything to too outrageous or too kind of world breaking in a way, because that would be. It would ruin the immersion. I guess it would. That kind of suspension of disbelief that you need for something like this can't stray outside those bounds. So the magic system was always. There are. I had to make very strict rules around it. And also in the sense that Sebastian does have a lot of power, but not all the time. He needs to be able to consume the power that he needs before he can then do anything with it. So there's a real delicate balance to maintain with a character like that because you can't just have him walking into every room with a load of gun. So it's delicate. It's a little dance I had to do so that he was never all powerful at the wrong moment.
- [19:35]
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- [20:47]
Angela E. Lanier
You do a really excellent job of that sort of vulnerability and that kind of glass cannon element, which, as you're saying, is such a difficult sort of needle to thread and is so much fun in especially, you know, like a monster hunting fantasy book, that this is also, in addition to being a really thoughtful historical study and a very engaging romance, it's also just like a very fun mystery adventure story. And I think that that power level is such an important part of that. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit more to the influences of imperial Rome and Christianity, which are obviously important things in France at the time. Important things in the way that Sebastian has moved through the world over time as well.
- [21:37]
Cameron Sullivan
Yeah, that side of. Somebody's asking me, like, what's the thing you want people to take away from the book? And I think the correct answer is I want them to fall in love with the characters. But what I really want people to take away is that sense of the kind of sweep of history. There's the. From ancient Rome through to. Even through to the present day and even further back than ancient Rome, there's a. And in your introduction, you kind of mentioned the continuity of politics, magic and religion all moving alongside each other. And that's the sense that I want to convey that there's no. We tend to think of history in terms of these little compartments. So there's ancient Rome, then there's the Middle Ages, and then there's the sort of Enlightenment years and so on and so on and so on, where these things all float into each other. And people's culture. There are some. Obviously some serious ruptures, like the French Revolution, where there was a wave of cultural change that kind of crested and broke at the same time. But these things all flow into each other. So I wanted to sort of connect with even as far back as the Greek and Roman gods, and then moving through into the Christian sort of resurgence in the. In the Middle Ages and then the Enlightenment, when that all kind of came crumbling down. I wanted to establish a continuity of the supernatural, of the spiritual side of life that was consistent with the magic system that I'd made. That was essentially that thing where you say everything's true. So all of the mythology, all of the folklore, all of these things, they can all be true. And they can all fit together because they do. Like our cultural story is much, much longer than what we're living in now. Which is why there was that kind of meme lately, or that sort of trend where people were saying how many times you think about the Roman Empire in a day? And that's not something people were saying every day. And that's not surprising to me at all, because it is. It's around us all the time. The way we structure our society, our laws, all of our, you know, most of our important buildings, at least in the west, those, the columns, that very iconic Roman architecture. Our history informs us, informs who we are now in ways that we don't really understand without a long view. And that's one example, I guess, in the kind of political, civic sphere. I wanted that feeling in the spiritual, magical sphere. So it's all progressed alongside us, and nothing comes from nothing. So all of these ideas and these entities and these spiritual things have all changed and sort of mutated alongside us as we did.
- [24:45]
Angela E. Lanier
That question of sort of schema or reference point is, I think, such an important part of building a historical realism to a piece. Obviously, there's a huge amount of history that we don't know. Right. There's a ton that is conjecture. But figuring out the ways in which people in the past had reference points with history, had their own relationship with time, is, I think, one of the most important ways that we can ground something in the sense of time and the passage of time. And that is so challenging to do, particularly in fantasy. And this is a novel that I do feel like has that weight, which is really fun. Could you speak a little bit about the process of research and that balance of sort of bringing that knowledge in, particularly with a debut novel where I feel like when you don't have those deadlines, that kind of research and realism and depth can kind of devour a project in a way that can be challenging to make it ever actually come to completion.
- [25:48]
Cameron Sullivan
Yeah, absolutely. And the research never was. Never really done. Even now I'll be doing something and someone will ask me a question. I'll just say, I just. I don't know. I'm gonna have to look that up. But the. I think I studied, and I'm certainly not a historian, but I did study history at university. And I think it's important, if you're writing anything about historical periods, to understand how little we know in terms of, as you were just saying, so much is conjecture. And also to understand that people in the past are essentially aliens. Like they weren't like us. And they like Mary Beard, who's the famous ancient Rome historian. She says this all the time. She's like, the Romans were not like us. You can't put any of our kind of social, political class, any of those paradigms onto them. It's just a completely different beast. So remembering those things going in was kind of critical, which is also why having Sebastian as a kind of current day narrator let me off the hook a little bit, because he could have a kind of contemporary opinion about something in the footnotes, but at the same time, I couldn't have him talking like a sassy millennial in the moment. Like, it would just feel very jarring. So the research was largely around authenticity because, as I said, that image we all have of pre revolutionary France and Marie Antoinette, Beauty and the Beast kind of pop culture references are often inaccurate, as they usually are. And getting behind those preconceptions was the main thrust of the first research, just to kind of sort of pick those things apart and see what the truth was. And that is very difficult to do, particularly because a lot of the sources, the primary sources are very good, but the sources that come even after that sort of in the 1800s, already lose a bit of accuracy. So you're kind of getting a reflection of a reflection over reflection in some ways. And on top of that, there's a lot that just. People didn't record that work that much because it was part of their everyday life. So small details like what poor people's clothes were made out of, how they spent their day, how did a peasant in Gevaudan spend their day? Were women and children working on the farm? Was their leisure time? How old were people when they died? How much money did they make in a week? What would that buy them? All of these things are really critical, particularly when we're talking about class in this period before the French Revolution, setting up the differences between the rich and the poor and what that meant to somebody like Sebastian, who's coming in, not coming in cold, but he's coming into this kind of simmering, pre revolutionary feeling, what would he have noticed? What were the things that would seem strange to somebody at the time or would seem concerning to somebody at the time. So those things where I would spend two hours looking up how bullets, shot, pellets were made, how long it took to load and fire a gun, like these things which I think make it feel more lived in, like it feels real, because these things are so, so different to what, like no one's just walking around Shooting, Shooting muskets. Like there's a real. There's a real process that goes into it. Those things were the hardest. I would spend hours doing that in a day. Which, yeah, as you said, for a first time novel, you've got the time. You can do what you want.
- [29:37]
Angela E. Lanier
The footnotes are so fun too. I feel like footnotes can be a kind of polarizing thing in fiction. But I love a footnote book and they do allow you such a space and such a fun place to play. Was that something that was a part of the project early on or is that something that came later?
- [29:56]
Cameron Sullivan
No, that was definitely part of it from the outset. I loved the idea of this kind of bookish, know it all giving his little asides on, as I said, like a kind of tool guide through this historical period. And it also for me gave me a little outlet where I could add historical detail in an interesting or a funny way or add those. Something happens in the magic system or something that Sebastian would be familiar with and would not explain in the moment. Like that People don't do that. One of the biggest challenges of fantasy writing is making it all seem natural without having characters talk about the magic. It gave me a way to explain that to the reader in a really short snippet. Having said that, you could read the whole book, not read a single footnote and it would all make sense. Like there's. I'm. I wanted it to be just because I know that there are some people who are allergic to footnotes, which I totally understand. Not, not, not everyone's going to love it. But I, yeah, I, I couldn't imagine doing it any other way. It was. And just fun like you don't get to. And I believe me, there were a lot more footnotes that did not make the final cut. I think, I think my editor was like, we've already got quite a big book here. Why don't we cut the word count a little bit with the footnotes? But that's where I think, because I'm quite a perfectionist when I write in terms of I won't move on until something's got everything I want in there. The footnotes are a bit of a pressure valve for me as well. I can just put something in a footnote and then move on and then come back later and look at it and go, that's not necessary. And cut it out. But I can't move on until I've done that. So, yeah, definitely, definitely part of the process for me.
- [31:49]
Angela E. Lanier
I'd love to speak a Little bit too, about sort of the hunt as an entity. Obviously, hunting as an aristocratic pastime is a very specific thing that has to do with wealth and class and masculinity and is both highly performative and also dangerous. And so we have sort of that veneer over also a community desperately trying to solve the problem where a monster keeps eating people. And that is in many ways right the heart of the novel. And we have sort of both this historical element and this long legacy. And then also what I think perhaps to contemporary audiences feels a little bit more familiar. Right. Where you also have like a monster hunter that is solving a mystery and there's a high body count.
- [32:34]
Cameron Sullivan
Yeah. The hunt itself is obviously the history itself is the hunt that happened. All of the king putting the bounty on the beast, all of the hunters of France coming together to try and sort of win it. That was very real. And it is in terms of demonstrating those kind of class tensions before the French Revolution. It was brilliant for that because everything was expensive. The horses, the dogs, the hunting gear, the weaponry. Just even sort of feeding and funding these expeditions. These hunters was incredibly expensive and they were failing. So the poor people were there going, hey, we're getting eaten. And very few rich people got eaten. I will put that out there as well. Was all the poor people getting eaten in the fields. So it was such a. Even reading the source material, it was. You could see, you could feel how desperate and futile the whole thing was for these people. They were throwing everything at this problem and losing it. Or they were. The power from the violence of the. You know, they were losing hounds and horses and people to this scourge. It was such a. It almost was sort of like the universe was sort of thumbing its nose at them. They were. They were not able to. No matter what they did, they couldn't get it together. The hunt itself in the book almost becomes two layered. So Sebastian understands what's really going on. The kind of secret occult history that's happening in the background. And obviously the regular people don't. They just. They think there's this strange animal that's been killing people. So the monster hunter narrative kind of superimposed on history in a way that's still consistent with how we understand that history that was. I know. I still find that so interesting. Like, it's such a. Because we don't have at least that. I know of any other examples in history that are so well documented of an actual monster hunt. Like where. Where I can't think of any officially documented examples of people Saying there's this strange thing here. There's wanted posters, there's letters from hunters, there's incredible newspaper articles about this hunt. So as a. As a. An event to base a story around, incredibly rich. And I got lost even just in that history for weeks. Just absolutely fascinating. But it's also, I would say, and I'm not the definitive. Though I wrote it, I'm the definitive. It's secondary in some ways to the character journeys that go on. So the love story is much more important to Sebastian than the hunt itself. The identity of the beast is much less important than what happens to Antoine, his lover. So those elements, that was a. That was a tricky dance to kind of get right in terms of what's motivating people. Most of the time they're out to kill the beast and get the money. And Sebastian's motivations change at some point. So getting that balance right and making that believable was, I guess, the main challenge of that storyline.
- [36:09]
Angela E. Lanier
Well, and for Sebastian at least, there are a lot more monsters that he has hunted or fought than there are beautiful boys in the woods that have seen. Sort of messed him up in a really profound way. Could you speak a little bit about that relationship with Sebastian and Antoine? And we don't have to get super into it, but, like, what were some of the dynamics that you wanted to play with? Especially. Right. As you already mentioned, Sebastian is a person that already has a very intense and very defining relationship in his life in Sarmadal. So if you could just speak a little bit about those dynamics or that relationship.
- [36:45]
Cameron Sullivan
Yeah. I think what I wanted with Sebastian, as I mentioned earlier, is like that love story with Antoine is it takes him by surprise. He's had, you know, he's had countless lovers throughout the centuries. He's not someone who just kind of falls in love at the drop of a hat. He's very aware of his own. Of what he brings to a relationship as an immortal monster hunter possessed by a demon. But I wanted this to be his sort of Achilles heel. He still falls madly in love with the wrong person at the wrong time and then will make terrible decisions based on that feeling and at the same time knows that this person will eventually die and he will have. He'll be left with Sarmada, who is again, that. That overriding, eternal relationship. So to be described as a kind of buddy cop dynamic, which I'm not sure I would agree with. I would say more like an old married couple. But the. What I wanted with Antoine, and I hope I've achieved this Successfully is that example of just that person who just by being who they are, kind of breaks through your defenses. Sebastian's had his experienced noblemen and incredibly intelligent professors. He's had experience with lots of people who are kind of on his level over the years. And he meets this nobleman's son who's not really that interested in any of that. And he's a libertine, he's drunk all the time. He's just enjoying his life. He's oblivious to how his actions are affecting the poor people until right up until the end. So I think in some ways it's a really ill advised little fling that he has. Particularly given that they're supposed to be hunting the beast and Antoine's father is kind of sponsoring the hunt. So there's a little conflict of interest there as well. But it's also, that's very human. He fell in love with someone who's kind of the antithesis to him and ends up again without, without any spoilers, ends up being responsible for him in a way that still haunts him.
- [39:12]
Angela E. Lanier
I have, just as a person, very little tolerance for pining over messy rich boys. And I was so invested in the pining over messy rich boys in this novel. It was very impressive. It was a lot of fun. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit too about. This book is very queer. Lots of the characters are queer and sexuality and gender are really deeply understood within historical contexts. So I wonder if you could speak a little bit about sort of that process of writing a queer romance at a very specific time and then also writing with a protagonist who, who is not from that place in time as well and who has lots of other secret things going on interpersonally, romantically, all of that.
- [39:58]
Cameron Sullivan
So that was. I always wanted it to be a queer protagonist. I think that was one of the main. I, you know, I'd written things before just as little passion projects and I'd never been brave enough to do that. So this was the first time that I was like, no, I'm going to write a story with a queer love story and a queer protagonist. Like, that's, that's what I want to do. Historical context is really interesting because Sebastian obviously has come from the ancient world. And there was a very different perspective on queer relationships back then. Not necessarily better or worse than anything that came after it. There was a lot of as in all relationships, there was a lot of very questionable behavior around consent and those kind of things. Like, definitely not something to emulate. But Sebastian's had an experience of queer love for hundreds of thousands of years before any of this even happened. So he comes in with that perspective and I do mention it a few. He mentions it a few times in the story in some footnote form where he answers questions that the contemporary reader might have about queer relationships at the time. And they were very as, from what we can gather from the sources, they weren't approved or like you couldn't, in that period in 1700s France, you couldn't be in a same sex relationship, but everybody kind of knew about them. And even people's marriages, their kind of state sanctioned relationships were very much about property and inheritance and wealth. And outside of that, people kind of did what they wanted as long as no one kind of mentioned it. There's a very funny story actually. When the king was very young, Louis XV or 16th was very young, a child, there was a group of courtiers who were out in the gardens in Versailles and they were obviously having quite a rowdy evening and they were arrested for indecent conduct in the gardens of Versailles. And as a weird kind of euphemism to explain this to the king who was a child, they said, oh no, we arrested these men because they were, and it's obviously 1700s French, so the translation's a bit weird. But they said they were shaking the railings in the garden and so that was why they were being untidy. So they took them away. So there was obviously an understanding that this was something not to be spoken about in polite company. At the same time, having a queer relationship in the 1700s, Sebastian and Antoine couldn't have been open about that in just an everyday kind of context. And I also didn't want to make that if they had done that and had to stand their ground and say, no, we're here, we're queer, it kind of becomes the story, it becomes about identity rather than the events of the story. And I just think from what I've read, it was unthinkable at the time. Like you wouldn't have had two men living together like that openly. Nobody would even have wanted that. It was just such a strange arrangement to them. They wouldn't have thought about queer or gay or bisexual or pansexual in any of those terms. So I wanted to convey the real emotional and, you know, the lust and the all those things of the relationship without making the fact that it was a queer relationship a big flag that they were waving around saying, this is, we're doing something subversive and people are coming for us. I didn't want that to be the heart of the story.
- [44:01]
Angela E. Lanier
Well, and there is also, I think, just this natural tension in terms of this is for much of the time or eventually the primary motivator for both of them in the moment. And yet this is never. They both have other priorities and other responsibilities. Right. Antoine will go on to has a very clear sense of what his life will be and what his responsibilities will be as he replaces his father. Sebastian, of course, could not stick around even if he wanted to, being, you know, an immortal monster hunter. And so I think that those tensions as well nest in a really fun and thoughtful way in what overall is just a truly enjoyable novel. Before we wrap up, would you like to speak a little bit about what you're working on right now?
- [44:48]
Cameron Sullivan
Sure. I am working on the next Sebastian Sarmadol and Livia book. Without giving too much away, I'm doing research on Renaissance witch hunts and the Spanish conquest of the Americas. So 1500s this time.
- [45:05]
Angela E. Lanier
There you go, moving around in the timeline. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I've really enjoyed it.
- [45:13]
Cameron Sullivan
Thank you, Angela. It's been fantastic. Thank you.
- [45:16]
Angela E. Lanier
I've been speaking with Cameron Sullivan about his novel the Red Winter, out now from Tor. Thank you for listening and please consider supporting the show by subscribing or leaving a review. I will speak to you soon. And for now, happy reading.