Q&A With Ry Herman
About Love Bites

Ry Herman’s debut fantasy novel, Love Bites, is coming out from Jo Fletcher Books on July 9. Filers know the author here as Kyra, contributor of myriad reviews and curator of 770’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Brackets.

Love Bites centers on two people trying to rebuild their lives – one in a very literal way.

…Two years after a painful divorce, Chloë is still struggling to leave the house, paralysed by anxiety and memory. So when she’s bullied into a night of dancing by her busybody aunt and finds herself in a goth club, on her own, in a strange part of town, she isn’t looking for anything more than to pass the time until she can leave.

Then she meets Angela, a smart, beautiful astronomy Ph.D. student whose smile makes her heart pound. In Angela’s eyes, Chloë can see a future. Suddenly, home alone is the last place Chloë wants to be.

…Angela and Chloë might just be perfect for each other. But how do you build a life together when one of you is already dead?

About the author: Ry Herman, born in the U.S., is now a permanent Scottish resident, and has been writing theatrical plays for most of his life. He acts and directs, and performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2019. He is bisexual and genderqueer. Hobbies include baking bread, playing tabletop roleplaying games, and reading as many books as humanly possible.

MIKE GLYER: What was the inspiration for Love Bites?

RY HERMAN: I met the love of my life in a goth club, one night very close to the turn of the 21st century. Both of us had recently gotten out of awful relationships. That created a bond between us, in the shared understanding of what we’d both been through, but at the same time it made us reluctant to start anything new. That dynamic, that simultaneous drawing together and pushing apart, eventually formed the basis for the book.

MG: Legend, books, and movies give vampires various attributes and vulnerabilities. What have you added and subtracted from the traditional vampire?  In fact, doesn’t one of your characters try to come up with tests to answer that for herself?

RY HERMAN: I tried to keep my vampires fairly traditional in their attributes. Mine are a bit more invulnerable than some. There are so many accumulated vampire legends, though, that every author has to pick and choose. One I didn’t include, but would love to see in a story sometime, is the arithmomania aspect; in some legends, one way to stop a vampire is to put a pile of millet or rice in their way, because they’ll be compelled to stop and count every grain.

And yes, the main vampire in my story is a scientist by training, and she immediately sets out to test how her newfound supernatural powers work. She becomes very frustrated, too, when some of them obstinately defy logic – she isn’t invisible, so why doesn’t she have a reflection?

MG: I enjoyed the wordplay – where else am I going to see a character say they spent a weekend learning to “cooper a firkin”? Language that suited the character just fine, I should add – she’s an editor at a publishing house, after all. But to tailor the vocabulary just right, did you have to “kill your darlings” sometimes? 

RY HERMAN: I actually tend to hear character voices very clearly in my head from the beginning. I suspect that’s because I began my writing career as a playwright, and theater conveys information almost entirely through dialogue. But for the same reason, physical description was something I had to go through a long process of learning to write when I turned to novels. I think it was around the third draft when I realized that maybe readers would like to know what my characters look like – you never put that in a play, because you don’t know what actor will end up playing the part. In the early stages of the book, there were a lot of failed attempts at description, and a number of descriptive passages I initially quite liked but later realized had to be changed or cut.

MG: Lately I have seen several writers put into characters’ mouths the idea that life is composed of stories we tell ourselves. The figure in Love Bites who says that might be an unreliable narrator – (or might not!) – Is her advice a good strategy for changing your life? 

RY HERMAN: Yes and no, I think. Many of the events that affect our lives really are external to us and out of our control, and there isn’t a way to alter them through sheer force of will. But I do think that the way we interpret and respond to events is, in a real way, an ongoing story we tell ourselves. It’s possible to change that narrative. And if we’re all the protagonists of our own stories, it’s important to remember that tragedies are traditionally about protagonists who can’t or won’t learn and change.

MG: Two of your main characters are abuse survivors from other relationships, and in a series of scenes threaded through the book you show us what one of them experienced. What’s one thing a writer needs to keep in mind when writing about a character in an abusive relationship?

RY HERMAN: I’m reluctant to make a blanket prescription for this, because I think everyone experiences abuse in their own way. For myself, I found it important to keep it as emotionally real as I could, even when that made it very difficult to write. But leaving out the difficult parts would have meant only telling part of the story.

MG: Who are some authors of supernatural characters that you admire, and why?

RY HERMAN: There are so many! I’m going to have to restrict it to a few. Robin McKinley created some of the best vampires ever written in Sunshine – recognizable as once being human, but at the same time creepily alien. For fairies, I might go with Holly Black’s Modern Faerie Tales series. She makes them attractive and horrifying at the same time. The werewolves in Patricia Briggs’ Mercy Thompson books are pretty great. But I really could go on forever – Kirsty Logan’s mermaids, Tasha Suri’s daiva, Sophie Cameron’s angels, R. F. Kuang’s shamans, Robert Jackson Bennett’s gods, Max Gladstone’s craftworkers, Fonda Lee’s Green Bones, N. K. Jemisin’s orogenes, Rachel Hartman’s dragons, Victoria Schwab’s ghosts, T. Kingfisher’s witches, Tamsyn Muir’s necromancers …

MG: By the end of the book important decisions about sexuality and the fate of a relationship are not the only issues your main characters have to cope with, so are immortality, supernatural strength, and foretelling the future. Is there meant to be a sequel? The key relationships get resolved, but there are questions that didn’t demand immediate answers which could lead to another novel.

RY HERMAN: There will be a sequel! Bleeding Hearts, the second book about Angela and Chloë, will be coming out sometime in 2021. I wrote it because those unresolved questions eventually made me desperate to find out what was going on with the characters a year later.

MG: What else does the future hold for Ry Herman?

RY HERMAN: Hopefully, a lot more books after these!

14 thoughts on “Q&A With Ry Herman
About Love Bites

  1. Huge congratulations, Kyra! Being published by Jo Fletcher is no small accomplishment! 🥂 🍾

  2. One I didn’t include, but would love to see in a story sometime, is the arithmomania aspect; in some legends, one way to stop a vampire is to put a pile of millet or rice in their way, because they’ll be compelled to stop and count every grain.

    Go find a copy of Fang Girl by Helen Keeble; it’s a paranormal YA comedy with vampires. Arithmomania is not only mentioned, it’s explored in a variety of interesting ways.

    (Full Disclosure: The author is a friend of mine, which is why I know about it—normally I avoid vampires because I don’t find them that interesting. The book is very funny, though.)

  3. Congratulations, Kyra!

    Vampiric arithmomania features in a hilarious X-Files episode, “Bad Blood”.

  4. Congratulations, Kyra, and happy book birthday!

    The Laundry Files’s vampires also have a form of arithmomania (most notably in The Nightmare Stacks).

  5. Sounds interesting — but is it UK-published only? Searching Amazon for “ry herman love bites” gets nothing but a polysyllabic German title that Google Translate renders as The Impossibility of Finding Love by Day, despite normally showing books months ahead of publication.

  6. Thanks, everyone!

    Sounds interesting — but is it UK-published only?

    Chip Hitchcock — it is UK published. The paperback edition can, however, be ordered through Amazon.com:

    https://www.amazon.com/Love-Bites-Ry-Herman/dp/1529406307

    Another option is Book Depository, which I’ve been told is very good for UK imports to the US:

    https://www.bookdepository.com/Love-Bites/9781529406306

    (And The Impossibility of Finding Love by Day is, in fact, the German language title of the book, which is something that I find oddly pleasing.)

  7. ISTM downright Byzantine that a translated e-edition is listed 8 months before publication, but not whatever e-edition is planned for the much larger U.S. market. But I never claimed to understand business.

  8. Congratulations, @Kyra! Wow, I almost didn’t read this post (blush); I’m glad I didn’t skip it. I love a “local filer makes good” story. 😀

  9. Thanks, Kendall!

    Chip Hitchcock — Yeah, there seems to be a whole … thing with U.S. Amazon and UK books. I have no idea why.

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