It’s been a while since I’ve read Twilight, but Jennifer the Damned seems to be almost its opposite. The romanticism of immortal love is traded for the dangers of disposable liaisons, as just one example. Where do you position Jennifer the Damned in terms of classic and modern vampire tales?

My editor likes to refer to Jennifer the Damned as the antidote to Twilight. The absolute inanity of modern vampire tales was certainly one of my inspirations, in the sense that I wanted to combat it with something more substantive, and I drew from those modern stories in terms of setting and tone to try to appeal to the same readers. But of course there’s a lot of Dracula in my book, too, going back to the idea that vampires pose a threat to both body and soul that only the pure of heart who are armed with Christ can defeat. The story itself is really taken from Crime and Punishment. Jennifer is Raskolnikov, testing the limits of human law and morality because she perceives herself as existing outside them. So where does Jennifer the Damned fit? I think that’s a question for readers and critics more than for me. I like to think it’s a literary novel masquerading as a teen vampire story, but maybe it’s the other way around.

You’re a proponent of the horror genre’s rightful place in Christian fiction. Can you elaborate on its role in communicating the truth?

We live in an age when we depend so heavily on science and reason that we’ve lost much of the sense of symbolism that previous generations attached to storytelling. There’s a tendency to dismiss books about monsters, dragons, aliens—anything outside reality—as fanciful nonsense that cannot help us understand our lives or our world. This idea is of course a failure to recognize that such stories, when they’re at their best, operate on a symbolic level that opens up a different kind of exploration that the “real” world cannot offer.

Monsters in literature are a way to represent sin and the fallen state of man. From a Christian perspective, literary monsters are the antithesis of the Incarnation; rather than God’s pure goodness taking flesh, we’re able to do the opposite, to give sin and evil a body, to take it out of the realm of the abstract so that we can better grapple with its implications. There is only one monstrosity for a Christian, and that is our separation from God through sin. I don’t know of any book that gives us as poignant a glimpse into the utter dependence of a creature on its creator as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or one that grapples with the implications of the sins of our spiritual fathers in the Church as well as The Hunchback of Notre Dame. When we put pure evil on the page, it always ends in one of two ways: either in the Nihilistic triumph of sin, or in its redemption through pure goodness. Christians should really view this as an opportunity. The greater the evil, the greater the good required to overcome it, so the horror genre allows Christian writers to use the darkest darkness as a contrast to brightest Light.

I’ve written extensively about this topic, so if you’re interested in learning more, here are some of my articles.

The Catholicity of Monsters, Dappled Things

The Spiritual Purpose of Horror Stories, Part 1, Wiseblood Books

The Spiritual Purpose of Horror Stories, Part 2, Wiseblood Books

How Monster Stories Can Be Good for Our Souls, The Federalist

Horror, Abuse Scandals, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Dappled Things

When we put pure evil on the page, it always ends in one of two ways: either in the Nihilistic triumph of sin, or in its redemption through pure goodness. ~ Karen Ullo #catholicfiction Click To Tweet

Fairy tales also teach us valuable truths, and Cinder Allia does it with intrigue and beautiful, poetic imagery. What about Cinderella inspired you to re-imagine it?

The story behind Cinder Allia is pretty funny. Once upon a time, shortly after I had finished grad school, I got together with some of my childhood girlfriends for a sleepover. We were all in our mid-twenties and still single. Sometime after midnight (and after a few cocktails), we started wondering what had happened to our Prince Charmings. Fairy tales had promised us princes! Where were they? And then we thought, what if Prince Charming had died before we could meet him? We concocted a very silly story that the prince’s guardian angel had gone on vacation and left a replacement—the Angel Vinnie—in charge, and Vinnie had been asleep on the job when the prince got whacked by a crack dealer. 

Fast forward many years to a happily married, mother-of-two version of myself… and I realized there really was something to that idea. What if Prince Charming died before he could save Cinderella—and what if it was not a guardian angel’s fault, but the fairy tale version of that, the fairy godmother? Somehow, out of that very silly seed of an idea, something completely different blossomed. But if you read the dedication in the book—To L and M, whose princes have not come, and to K, who found hers—those are my friends from the slumber party, who inspired the seed.

The film rights to Cinder Allia were recently purchased by Believe Entertainment. You have a Master of Fine Arts in screenwriting from the University of Southern California. How has screenwriting influenced your novel-writing, perhaps paving the way for a movie adaption?

Screenwriting has been hugely influential in my novels. I’ve always wanted to write, and novels are my first love. But, like a lot of Christians, I didn’t get along very well in my college English department. Frankenstein’s monster as feminist repression and Huck Finn and Jim as a homosexual odyssey… no, thank you. So I had to get creative about learning the writing craft, and there’s really no better place to learn the fundamentals of storytelling than in film school. Film is a much more compressed medium than the novel. Every word, every image has to justify its place in the story because actually bringing them to life is expensive, so there’s no room for excess. You also have to learn not to rely on interior monologue to portray the characters’ motivations. Everything in film has to be externalized, so you learn to make action and images meaningful. You have to learn how to externalize a character the way an actor would, how to shape scenes and pace them the way a film editor would. All of these skills translate very well into writing novels… and yes, into writing novels that (hopefully) make good films! I’m thrilled to be on this new journey with Believe Entertainment. I know it’s still years away, but I can’t wait for the premiere!

With the launch of WhiteFire Publishing’s Chrism Press, you’re now an editor seeking to bring more Catholic- and Orthodox-friendly titles to print. What are your goals and aspirations for Chrism Press?

Chrism Press is a dream many years in the making that suddenly came true. My friend Rhonda Ortiz and I have said for years that “someday” we’re going to do this Catholic Fiction Publishing thing right… and WhiteFire Publishing has made that dream possible right now. Several small companies have opened their doors to Catholic fiction in the last five or ten years, but most are entirely focused on literary fiction to the exclusion of more popular works, or their focus is really on nonfiction with a few fiction titles just for fun… Chrism Press is all about stories. We want to fling wide the doors, and ultimately build a community where readers know they can come for fun, smart Catholic and Orthodox fiction. We want everything: sci-fi, mystery, romance, literary, you name it. Going back to my film school roots, there was only one rule at USC, and that was, “Never be boring.” Chrism Press has adopted that rule, too. We want to bring depth to our storytelling, but we also believe fiction should be fun.

We’re off to a good start. Our first three books, due out Fall of 2021, include a romance interwoven with espionage set in 1793 Boston, a Gothic romp battling werewolves and demons, and a historical novel set during the British-Viking conflict of eighth century North Umbria. We’re definitely having fun.

I know that COVID-19 postponed a novel research trip to France, a huge disappointment, I’m sure. Can you share a little about the story you’re working on and what you hoped to learn in France?

Yes… Phooey on COVID. I still don’t know whether or not I’ll be able to reschedule that trip before I finish the novel.

For several years now, I’ve been writing an adaptation of two stories from Strange True Stories of Louisiana by George Washington Cable… which aren’t true. The original is a literary hoax from 1888 that claimed to tell the story of a French countess who had fled the revolution by marrying her gardener to renounce her title, then ended up starting a new life in the Attakapas Territory of Louisiana. I am expanding it into an exploration of the eighteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic, especially focused on the French Revolution. The trip to France was to bring me through the settings of the novel so I could better recreate the world of the eighteenth century. My heroine comes from Normandy, so I had planned to visit cliffs, beaches, and châteaux there, as well as Versailles and as many of my settings in Paris as are still standing: the Palais Royale, St. Sulpice, St. Joseph des Carmes, which was one of the sites of the September massacres… But I guess I’m going to have to rely on photographs, paintings, and period writings, at least for now.

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Karen Ullo is the author of two award-winning novels, Jennifer the Damned and Cinder Allia, which is now in development as a motion picture with Believe Entertainment. She holds a MFA in screenwriting from the University of Southern California and serves as an editor for Chrism Press. Prior to that, she served for more than three years as managing editor of the Catholic literary journal Dappled Things. She has been featured as a speaker at venues across the country including The Louisiana Book Festival, The Catholic Writers Guild Conferences (both live and online), the Trying to Say God conference at Notre Dame University, and Doxacon in Washington, D.C. She lives in Louisiana with her husband and two sons, where she works full-time as the music director of a Catholic parish. You can find her on the web at www.karenullo.com.

Links:

Website: www.karenullo.com

Facebook: www.facebook.com/karenulloauthor 

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