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Keri Lake on Anathema
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.
Why she wrote it
Waking up at three in the morningThe scale of Anathema, a novel built on two worlds, a 630-year-old mage, an invented glyph system, and a 211-year backstory, is not the kind of project a writer finishes on discipline alone. She has been direct about what has to be present before she will commit to a story at all.
I have to write what I want or the story will flop. It’s the reason I mostly write standalones and I bounce between genres. The story has to excite me and wake me up at three in the morning, or I’ll cast it aside.
warhawkevault.wordpress.com, “🎙 Author Interview: Keri Lake | Warhawke’s Vault Book Blog”Her instinct for darkness predates any genre label. Before she wrote novels, she was memorizing poetry from her mother’s books, and the sensibility those poems fed, gothic, strange, emotionally extreme, never left her work.
My earliest influences were actually poets. My mom had a huge book of poetry and I’d sit and memorize the poems. I started out writing poetry and my love for twisted tales eventually evolved over time, turning into short stories.
The line from memorized poems to Anathema’s bone magic and death-goddess mythology is not a straight one, but it is a continuous one.
When asked which author she would most want to co-write with, she named Anne Rice and described the result she imagined. The answer was less about a collaborator and more about a temperature she has always been trying to reach in her own fiction.
My writing tends to be dark and twisted. I think between the two of us, we could create a dark and twisted paranormal love story. With demons.
How she wrote it
Disaster drafts and invented wordsShe does not treat the first draft as anything other than raw material. The architecture of Anathema, with its interlocking political plots across two kingdoms and a magic taxonomy built from scratch, was shaped in the passes that came after.
Oh boy, my first drafts are a disaster. It’s all about getting the words onto the page as fast as I can.
warhawkevault.wordpress.com, “🎙 Author Interview: Keri Lake | Warhawke’s Vault Book Blog”Anathema’s glyph system, called Aeryz, Osflagulle, Evanidusz, and Propulszir, each with pronunciation guides on her website, did not arrive from a reference book. She has described the same word-building logic at work in her Nightshade series, where the invented language grew from a habit she has always had: when the right word doesn’t exist, she makes one.
I wanted something unique for this world. One of the things I love about writing is being able to bend the rules. When I can’t think of the right word, I make it up. It becomes a unique attribute of the book at that point. The words in the Pri’scucian language are inspired by Latin roots that I twisted and distorted a bit.
warhawkevault.wordpress.com, “🎙 Author Interview: Keri Lake | Warhawke’s Vault Book Blog”Anathema’s full glossary of races, gods, glyphs, and places follows the same logic: Latin roots bent until they sound like they belong to a world that is not ours.
The moral architecture of Zevander Rydainn, cursed as an infant, shaped by a century of slavery, and employed as a royal assassin before the novel begins, goes back to a principle she worked out while writing her 2011 debut, Somnium. That book taught her something she has applied to every morally complicated figure since.
Some writers have a propensity to create a hard distinction between the good guy and the bad guy in a story. In writing Somnium, I learned that characters can be multi-dimensional all throughout and still fall into whatever role the author ultimately plots out for them.
What she wants us to sit with
Flawed, dangerous, and capable of loveOn her author website, written in her own voice outside any interview, she has named the two things she cares most about in fiction. Both of them are present in Anathema at their largest scale yet.
Writing is my passion. Weaving intricate worlds and testing the limits of exceptionally flawed characters is what I love most about these stories. My goal with every book is to give my readers an immersive escape into dark and haunting realms.
keri-lake.squarespace.com, “Keri Lake Author”She has been specific about what kind of reader Anathema is for, and the list is not a genre description so much as a promise about the emotional and atmospheric texture of the experience. The horror element is flagged deliberately; it is there by design, not accident.
Anne Rice is my comfort read. Immortals After Dark by Kresley Cole is probably my favorite series.
Poe, Rice, and Cole together describe the emotional range she is aiming for: gothic dread alongside morally complicated immortals alongside dark romance. Anathema is the book where all three share the same world.