Interview with Ry Herman, Author of This Princess Kills Monsters

Ry Herman, author of This Princess Kills Monsters, was so kind to provide insight about their book and fairytales through our discussion below, and I can’t wait for you to read it!

This Princess Kills Monsters is a fantasy novel that defies gender norms, and bends fairytales at Herman’s will. It is one of the most unique reads that I have had the pleasure to read, and I am beyond excited for the upcoming sequel.

Synopsis

A princess with a mostly useless magical talent takes on horrible monsters, a dozen identical masked heroes, and a talking lion in a quest to save a kingdom—and herself—in this affectionate satire of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tale The Twelve Huntsmen.

Someone wants to murder Princess Melilot. This is sadly normal.

Melilot is sick of being ordered to go on dangerous quests by her domineering stepmother. Especially since she always winds up needing to be rescued by her more magically talented stepsisters. And now, she’s been commanded to marry a king she’s never met.

When hideous spider-wolves attack her on the journey to meet her husband-to-be, she is once again rescued—but this time, by twelve eerily similar-looking masked huntsmen. Soon, she has to contend with near-constant attempts on her life, a talking lion that sets bewildering gender tests, and a king who can’t recognize his true love when she puts on a pair of trousers. And all the while, she has to fight her growing attraction to not only one of the huntsmen, but also her fiancé’s extremely attractive sister.

If Melilot can’t unravel the mysteries and rescue herself from peril, kingdoms will fall. Worse, she could end up married to someone she doesn’t love.

Interview

Sage Moon: Ry, I’m a huge fan of fairytales myself!  What made you choose the lesser-known fairytales that you incorporated in your book, This Princess Kills Monsters?

Ry Herman: I didn’t originally plan on using lesser known fairytales at all! When I started researching fairytales for This Princess Kills Monsters, I began by looking at the ones everybody knows – “Snow White,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “The Little Mermaid.” But while I love those stories dearly, they’ve already been retold many times, and none of them called out to me as something I desperately needed to adapt. But then I came across “The Twelve Huntsmen,” and became obsessed with it.

Here was a story I’d never heard of, and it had so many interesting things packed into it. Like queer subtext. And an obnoxious talking lion who sets bizarre gender-identification tests. And a dozen identical women whose presence serves no purpose whatsoever in the plot. It also had a push and pull between feminist themes and fairytale tropes that I thought was fascinating. So that story became the basis for the whole book.

After that, as I was writing the book, I decided that the main character would be a fairytale-savvy woman living in a fairytale world. It became important to make the stories part of the environment. Some I put in to add to the overall weirdness, which resulted in odder stories like “Straw, Coal, and Bean” making their way into the narrative. Other stories were intended to be important to the characters’ histories, which meant finding a fairytale to match the character. In one case, that ended up being “Rapunzel,” but in another, I used the much less famous “How Six Men Got On in the World.”

(As a side note, there was one character I didn’t find an appropriate story for, so I ended up making up my own tale for her… and then after the book was published, I discovered that it was bizarrely similar to a legendary Danish saga about a king named Hrólf Kraki. So, I’ll pretend it was based on that so I can seem Very Educated.)

It’s probably worth noting that my next book, This Knight Topples Empires, is based on “The Girl Who Turned Into a Boy.” Which is yet another fairytale that’s not going to be turned into an animated musical anytime soon. So maybe I just have a fondness for the obscure ones.

SM: I run a mental health organization for the queer community, and am a skilled bibliotherapist, which is a large part of my work.  Your book is one that I am planning to use with clients who are exploring gender and unpacking gender expectations.  That being said, I think that your book will be so powerful in this area.  Do you think that fairytales hold a special kind of power that sets them apart from other stories and books?

RH: First, let me say that I’m so happy to hear you’re planning to use the book that way! I very much hope it’s of use.

I do think that fairytales hold a special kind of power. They’re often some of the first stories told to children, which makes them the basic building block for understanding what a story is. Quite a few of them are among the oldest stories which are still being widely retold. There are versions of “Beauty and the Beast” and “Rumpelstiltskin” that are about 4,000 years old, versions of “Jack and the Beanstalk” more than 5,000 years old, and a story called “The Smith and the Devil” which is likely 6,000 years old. Variants of “Cinderella” can be found all over Eurasia, from China to Greece, foot measuring and all. And speaking of Greece, quite a few fairytales can be traced back to Greek mythology; for example, the myth of Cupid and Psyche is a precursor to “Beauty and the Beast,” and it’s even more structurally similar to the Norwegian fairytale “East of the Sun, West of the Moon.”

So fairytales are, in many ways, fundamental stories. They speak to something very deep in the human brain.

SM: If you could be one character in any fairytale, who would it be?

RH: I’ve actually given a lot of thought to this. I don’t want to die horribly at the end, so that leaves out pretty much all monsters and villains. Even the great ones, more’s the pity. I don’t want to get trapped in heteronormativity, so that leaves out nearly all the princes, princesses, and other heroes and heroines. The mother of the main character is usually dead, and the father is often vague and inattentive, unless he’s a king, in which case he’s a tyrannical narcissist.

So, I’m going to go with… Helpful Talking Animal Companion! Magical, intelligent, proactive, and generally doesn’t end up dead or forced into marriage. My current top choice would be the eponymous stag from the Moldovan fairytale “Prince Theodor and the Magic Stag.” (Have I mentioned I’m fond of the obscure ones?) The stag solves all of the main character’s problems and basically knows everything – how to get to the Land of Darkness, which hazelnut the princess has been imprisoned in, and what the magic hairbrush does.

The magic hairbrush, incidentally, turns into a forest when you throw it on the ground. Fairytales are weird.

SM: Melilot is such a fierce and genuine main character – I loved how you made her so sassy and powerful!   So much of your book pokes fun at some of the classic fairytale tropes (like a man not recognizing a princess based solely on her dressing differently).  

RH: As a gender expansive person myself, I have always felt conflicted and unseen in fairytales (despite my love of them!)  Your book completely changed that for me.  What would you say to readers who have felt unseen in so many stories throughout their lives?

Many years ago, in a discussion about gender imbalance in movie characters, someone said to the rest of us, “If every movie had to have female characters, then Gettysburg could never have been made!” Of course, that only sounds true if you think there weren’t any women who fought at the Battle of Gettysburg.

But there were. Marie Tepe fought in thirteen battles, including Gettysburg. She received the Kearny Cross medal for extreme bravery and heroism in the face of enemy fire after the Battle of Chancellorsville. Lorinda Anna Blair, also on the Union side, received her Kearney Cross at Gettysburg itself. At least five other women – or possibly trans men – are known to have fought in men’s clothes on one side or the other, based on hospital reports. One lost a leg. Another died taking part in Pickett’s Charge. There were also women who weren’t fighting, but who were involved nonetheless. Josephine Miller distributed bread to the troops throughout the battle. A woman known as Aunt Liz escaped capture by the Confederate Army by hiding in the belfry of a church (the Confederate Army sent any person of color they encountered south as “captured contraband.”)

So I think what I would say to readers who have felt unseen is this: in real life, the odds that someone like you was there, taking part, are much higher than you might think. In fiction, the world of might have beens, could have beens, and should have beens, the odds really should be even higher than that.

It’s important for people to see themselves in stories, but if you don’t, remember it’s the stories that got it wrong, not you.

SM: I am so excited to read the upcoming sequel to This Princess Kills Monsters!  What emotions and reflections do you hope your next book will inspire in readers?

RH: This Knight Topples Empires is the first book I’ve written with a nonbinary main character. Because of that, there’s a lot of my own story in there – the slow internal journey of coming to understand myself and who I am. I hope that nonbinary readers will get to feel seen, and other readers will develop a better sense of what it means to exist outside the gender binary. But I also hope it’s an awful lot of fun!

About Ry Herman

Ry Herman’s career path has included stints as the artistic director of the Bloody Unicorn Theater, the submissions editor for a publishing company, and a job that could best be described as typing the number five all day long. Although born in the US, Ry is now a permanent resident of Scotland.

Their most recent book, This Princess Kills Monsters, is a retelling of “The Twelve Huntsmen”, one of the Grimm Brothers’ weirdest fairy tales. It takes that tale’s jilted, trouser-wearing fiancée, her eleven identical crossdressing doppelgangers, a talking lion, and of course, the princess, on an extravagant, fantastical quest to save a kingdom, subvert destiny, and fall in love with the perfectly right wrong person. Publisher’s Weekly said that “Readers are sure to be won over by the cleverly deployed archetypes, snappy prose, and rollicking adventure.”

Ry has also written a queer romance duology about a vampire astrophysicist: Love Bites and Bleeding Hearts. Love Bites has been translated into German and published by Heyne under the title Die Unmöglichkeit bei Tag die Liebe zu Finden (“The Impossibility of Finding Love During the Daytime”). SFX calls them “the sweet, emotionally literate, non-sparkly love story you’ve been looking for” and the Horror Writers’ Association says they are “fun, well-written, queer romantic comedy… brimming with literary and writerly jokes amidst the deeper issues”.

In addition to writing novels, Ry has written plays and musicals which have been variously described as “funny and smart” and “like a fork in the eye”. These include The Monster and Voices in My Head, both published by Samuel French, and Man On Dog, published by United Stages. Ry is bisexual and genderqueer, and is married to a pale goth astrophysicist who otherwise bears no resemblance to any character in their books.

You can follow Ry Herman on bluesky: @ryherman.bsky.social‬. (Ninety percent of the posts by weight will be book reviews.) Ry is represented by Michelle Hauck of the Storm Literary Agency — https://www.stormliteraryagency.com/