In a way, I feel like it’s all I’ve ever known. So it was natural that when it came time to write stories of my own, I gravitated toward fantasy. I think I’m naturally drawn to the way that speculative fiction allows me to escape the conventions of this world and enter another. What drew you to SFF as an emerging writer? Did you always know that you wanted to write a fantasy novel? We talked to Henderson about how her upbringing in one of America’s most haunted cities shaped her writing and how she crafted Immanuelle Moore’s journey to the dark heart of her society. And while Henderson’s fundamentalist world of Bethel does invite comparisons to the horrors of Gilead, a more apt parallel may be the 2015 horror film The Witch, in which a young Puritan girl discovers that the only avenue for self-determination in her deeply misogynist and joyless world may be to embrace all that is forbidden, sinful and powerful. Many early reviews have compared Alexis Henderson’s debut novel, The Year of the Witching, to other feminist dystopian novels such as The Handmaid’s Tale.
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