Running Away with the Fairies

Here in Avalon was never supposed to be about fairies. I’d envisioned the novel—a literary thriller about two sisters, one of whom, Cecilia, goes missing after getting involved with a mysterious interactive theatre troupe—as a straightforwardly Gothic cult story: complete with plenty of murders to solve. And, two or so drafts in, it still wasn’t working—or at least not working in the way I wanted it to. The characters weren’t quite coalescing; their motivations weren’t quite making sense; the Avalon itself—the shadowy cabaret troupe at the heart of the novel’s plot—always just beyond my reach, thematically, even as more and more of the book’s scenes were set there. And then a throwaway line in the novel’s third draft changed everything. In a moment of frustration, Paul—Cecilia’s estranged yet maddeningly loyal husband—refers to his wife as “running away with the fairies.” At last, the whole novel—and what I wanted to do with it—made sense.