As a huge fan of Erin A Craig’s “The House of Salt and Sorrows,” I was excited to interview A.B. Poranek, a debut fantasy writer whose novel “Where the Darks Stands Still” has been compared to Craig’s work. Reinspired by “Beauty and the Beast,” Poranek has beautifully crafted a world rooted in Polish folklore with evocative prose in “Where the Dark Stands Still.”
A “New York Times” bestseller, this book follows a girl with dangerous magic who makes a risky bargain with a demon to be free of her monstrous power in this highly anticipated gothic young adult romantic fantasy novel.
Liska knows that magic is monstrous, and its practitioners are monsters. She has done everything possible to suppress her own magic, but it has led to disastrous consequences. Desperate to be free of it, Liska flees her small village and delves into the dangerous, demon-inhabited spirit-wood to steal a mythical fern flower. If she plucks it, she can use one wish to banish her powers. Everyone who has sought the fern flower has fallen prey to unknown horrors, so when Liska is caught by the demon warden of the wood—called The Leszy—a bargain seems better than death: one year of servitude in exchange for the fern flower and its wish.
Whisked away to The Leszy’s crumbling manor, Liska soon makes an unsettling discovery: she is not the first person to strike this bargain, and all of her predecessors have mysteriously vanished. If Liska wants to survive the year and return home, she must unravel her taciturn host’s spool of secrets and face the ghosts—figurative and literal—of his past. Something wakes in the woods, something deadly and without mercy. It frightens even The Leszy… and cannot be defeated unless Liska embraces the monster she’s always feared becoming.
A. B. Poranek grew up in Canada but spent her summers in the Polish countryside, reading under apple trees and helping care for her grandfather’s chickens. Her love of animals led her to pursue a degree in veterinary medicine, though she never stopped writing along the way. “Where the Dark Stands Still,” is an ode to Poland’s wild woodlands, wilder folktales, and the girls who were raised by them.
For this Author Spotlight, I was curious to learn more about Poranek’s experience growing up on the Polish countryside and how it influenced her writing,
Were there any specific Polish fairytales that inspired you while writing your novel?
So many! The general feeling of Polish folktales was a big inspiration for me – they tend to be haunting, spooky cautionary tales, often involving the forest in some capacity. The main one was of course the fern flower, also known as kwiat paproci, which is this frightening story about a boy going into the forest in midsummer to search for the titular flower. I had so much fun playing with this myth and putting a new twist on it since it’s one of my favorite stories from childhood. The book is also full of easter eggs of other iconic Polish fairytales! Readers who are familiar with them might catch them.
Every author has a piece of themselves in their writing. Where do you think you left a piece of yourself in“Where the Dark Stands Still?”
“Where the Dark Stands Still” is the book of my heart in so many ways. It’s a book I wanted so badly to read, but could never find, so I decided to write it for myself. I think it holds a fragment of my past, all my love for my culture and my family and nostalgia for a life I never really had. But it also has my own worries – when I began writing it, I, like Liska, was struggling with my sense of belonging, pulled in one direction by a degree I didn’t want to be doing and in another by a passion for writing I had always been told would take me nowhere. I think that frustration got poured into her character, so it’s just perfectly fitting that this would be the book that helped me find a much stronger sense of identity and come into my own as a person.
What appeals to you about Polish folklore? How do you hope your book appeals to readers who may not know anything about it?
I think Polish folklore lends itself very well to Gothic stories, because it’s often simultaneously whimsical and unsettling. That was a quality I wanted to replicate with “Where the Dark Stands Still”, and something I hope readers might pick up on – tiptoeing the line between fairytale and horror, showing both the frightening and enchanting aspects of the spirit-wood and the creatures that inhabit it.
What were some of the challenges you faced when writing this book that you’re proud to have gotten through?
I actually found “Where the Dark Stands Still” to be quite easy to write, mainly because I was so passionate about it (I wrote it in a frenzy of 3 months!) But if I were to pick a big challenge it would be the magic system – I had to find a balance between a consistent magic system and a flexible one, because I really wanted to keep the magic loose enough to serve the story yet understandable enough that it felt like something that could exist in the real world. It wasn’t until the very final draft that I was satisfied I had nailed that feeling.
What did you take into account when drafting the relationship dynamic between Leszy and Liska?
One of the major things I kept in mind was the power dynamic. I’m a huge fan of the ‘immortal, world-weary being meets plucky mortal girl’ trope, but I know that this trope can easily go wrong if you aren’t careful with how you handle the balance of authority between them. In “Where the Dark Stands Still”, the story starts with Leszy having all of the power and Liska having none of it, and as the story progresses I made sure this balance slowly evened out until they are on equal footing toward the middle of the book. By the end, the scale tips again, and suddenly Liska has most of the power and Leszy has much less of it, as Liska takes on a more active, driving role in the story, instead of simply reacting to challenges presented to her by Leszy and fate. It was a lot of fun writing Liska coming into her own and into her power!
Do you have any summer memories in Poland that you reflected on during your writing process? Are there any that you were inspired by?
There are so many! My maternal grandfather lives in an area of Poland that was once quite rural (it’s much more urban these days) and I spent so many summers there running through fields, going on walks in the woods, stuffing my mouth full of wild blackberries and wading through his pond to catch frogs. I think Liska, with her gentle optimism and self-sufficient nature, was very much born of my fondness for those times and that lifestyle.
Thank you so much to A.B. Poranek for answering my questions! I really couldn’t put down this book. I’d also like to thank Anna Eiling from Simon & Schuster’s Children’s Publishing for sending me this book. Five out of five stars!