Dire Bound
Dire Bound
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Sable Sorensen on Dire Bound
In their own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why they wrote it
Wolf girls with something to sayThe premise arrived before the politics did. Both Phillips and Paige-Stone had spent years bonded to the idea of direwolves, shaped by Philip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ and Tamora Pierce’s ‘Wolf Speaker’, and when they finally sat down to write together, the animal-bond fantasy felt inevitable. But the 2024 US election gave the project a harder edge, and what had started as genre love became something more urgent.
We had a lot on our minds — specifically the insidious rise of authoritarianism and what the consequences of an autocratic government might be, and the rampant misogyny that we both felt was central to the election. It felt important to write about both of these things, so we decided to write a story about an imperfect heroine who nonetheless took on these issues.
Alongside the political motivation ran a simpler, more personal one. When Eliza described where the book came from in her CBS Boston interview, she traced it not to craft ambition but to appetite: a desire to collect every genre pleasure both writers shared and find out where those pleasures overlapped.
We sat down together before we embark on writing and we figure out the big overarching plot for the whole story. And then I go off and write a very, very detailed outline. It’s like two to three pages per chapter, so we know exactly what we’re doing as we start writing. [paraphrased from audio]
Among the pleasures they were reaching toward was a very specific visual. The giant white wolf at the center of ‘Dire Bound’ was not invented from scratch; she was borrowed from a film both writers already loved, and the image of a fierce woman at that wolf’s side came with her.
We also both love Hayao Miyazaki’s masterpiece Princess Mononoke, which inspired our giant white wolf and the fierce warrior woman at her side.
How they wrote it
When Gladiator became a boot campCo-writing was not a stylistic choice for Phillips and Paige-Stone; it was the only condition under which either of them had ever finished a novel. Each had accumulated abandoned manuscripts before they joined forces, and the partnership solved the problem that solitude had not.
Having a writing partner is, for both of us, such a welcome thing. We’d each tried writing multiple novels over the years on our own and had never finished anything until we had someone to work alongside.
The Bonding Trials, the series of lethal tests through which warriors in Nocturna earn their wolf companions, began as something far bloodier. The original model put spectacle first and character second, and it took the actual writing to reveal why that didn’t hold.
We both love trials as a romantasy setup, but Gladiator specifically was a major inspiration here, specifically the element of bloodsport as entertainment for the rich.
That premise eventually gave way to a boot-camp structure, because once they were drafting, the competition as originally conceived stopped serving the story’s needs. The Trials in the finished book function as an initiation into Nocturna’s warrior class rather than a spectacle for its aristocracy.
The wolves themselves required more than fantasy invention. The Bonded packs that structure Nocturna’s warrior society carry deliberate echoes of real wolf behavior, including the cruelty that wolf-loving readers might prefer to forget.
We actually thought a lot about wolf instinct as we created our world. Both of us grew up reading countless books about wolves — from werewolf stories to Wolf Speaker by Tamora Pierce, to classics like Julie of the Wolves and Call of the Wild.
Meryn, the protagonist, resisted the shape her writers had planned for her. Her hero’s journey arc was fixed from the start, but the person walking that arc kept complicating the route, accumulating judgments and grievances that the outline had not anticipated.
Meryn’s story was always meant to be a hero’s journey storyline, so we knew from the beginning the overall arc that she would take. In writing her, though, she ended up a pretty complicated character — she didn’t go easily into that hero’s journey, let’s just say.
On what the book is wrestling with
The oldest government trickThe Siphons, a group within Nocturna stripped of rights and made into scapegoats by the ruling order, were not invented as background worldbuilding. They carry a specific political argument about how authoritarians manufacture consent, one Phillips and Paige-Stone were watching play out in real time as they drafted.
Throughout our real world’s history — and, unfortunately, often in modern times — governments seek to villainize specific groups in order to then unite their citizens against said groups. It’s a sadly typical diversion tactic employed by politicians as a means to an end.
Meryn’s anger at that system is central to the book, but the writers were careful not to make her rage costless or clean. Her fury is legitimate and also corrosive, and the arc that follows is built around a very specific question: whether it is possible to stay angry without letting that anger close you off to people who don’t share your history.
We were particularly interested in the idea of people from two very different classes and backgrounds in this world coming together despite their differences. We think the world right now could benefit from people walking in each other’s shoes and spending the time to understand one another.
The political anger in the book is, in part, the authors’ own, and they were conscious of that transfer. Writing Meryn’s fury was a form of processing, and the hope was that readers who arrived at the book carrying similar feelings would recognize something in her.
Channeling some of that anger and frustration into a strong female character was cathartic, and we hope it rings true for our readers as well.
What they want us to sit with
Anger as a tool, not a destinationMeryn’s arc is constructed so that her quick, class-bred judgments of others are shown to cost her, without asking her to give up the underlying anger that makes those judgments legible. The two impulses are kept separate, and that distinction is what the book asks readers to carry forward.
Her rage sometimes turns into unfair judgments of others, and a big part of her character arc is learning to overcome those quick judgments without burying or minimizing her own anger.
The cross-class relationship at the book’s center is not incidental romance scaffolding. It was chosen because it dramatizes exactly what Phillips and Paige-Stone believe is missing from the moment they were writing inside: the willingness to spend real time inside another person’s circumstances before deciding what they deserve.
We were particularly interested in the idea of people from two very different classes and backgrounds in this world coming together despite their differences. We think the world right now could benefit from people walking in each other’s shoes and spending the time to understand one another.