Amber Benson

IF MAGAZINE’S exclusive interview with Amber Benson about her new book DEATH’S DAUGHTER continues.

iF MAGAZINE: Besides DEVIL WEARS PRADA on the character-detail side, are there specific other fiction authors, books and/or series that influenced you in writing DEATH’S DAUGHTER?

BENSON: AMERICAN GODS was a huge influence on this book. I adore that book. I loved how [author Neil Gaiman] took mythological characters and gave them a whole new contemporary life. He and Thorne Smith are two of the only people I can think of who take mythological characters – not just like one, but a whole pantheon – and make them real and give them different personalities outside of just being Kali, death-bringer. Charlaine Harris is a big influence. [Harris’] Sookie Stackhouse books, I love them so much. I was reading those, and then I read some Mary Janice Davidson, [author of] UNDEAD AND UNWED. They’re more like the girl [who is] interested in the shoes and the clothes and stuff like that. But I wanted to mix those.

iF: There’s a fantasy slant to DEATH’S DAUGHTER with some horror, whereas GHOSTS OF ALBION seemed a little more horror-oriented …

BENSON: GHOSTS OF ALBION was done in a horror vein, especially with the books. The webisodes less, because originally when [BBC Online came to us for GHOSTS, they had just talked to Chris about doing something like BUFFY meets Jane Austen. He said, ‘We can’t really do that [legally, so why don’t we do this?’ He and I got together and we fleshed the whole thing out, and they wanted something a little more fantasy. In the [GHOSTS OF ALBION]books, we were, ‘Well, we want to take it to a more horror Victoriana place.’ With this, I really just did what I wanted. I created the world I wanted, I let her go through all the things I wanted her to go through, and Ginjer was really supportive of it. There will be some horror aspects in the next two, but they’ll probably be more fantasy-oriented. The first book deals with Hindu mythology. I took a lot of mythological characters from the Hindu pantheon and I took license with them and made them more into what I wanted them to be. The second book has more of an Egyptian flavor, so you do have Egyptian mummy horror-esque things in it, but it is more of a fantasy.

iF: Is DEATH’S DAUGHTER now planned as an ongoing series?

BENSON: I’d love for it to go on. I’d originally just created one book. Ginjer said, ‘I really like this character, let’s do three.’ And I was like, ‘God, how am I going to create three things from just the one?’ I always loved Dante’s DIVINE COMEDY. Not that it’s in any way like THE DIVINE COMEDY, but that was sort of my model. The first book would be about Hell, the second one would be about Purgatory and the third one would be about Heaven. I just turned in the second book and it’s very much about Purgatory, and the third book is very Heaven-oriented. I’m hoping to get everything answered within these three books, so if we do more, they’re part of the world, but maybe not of the same [character-defining nature]. Things progress very quickly in the third book. The first book is the beginning. The second book is more of a standalone thing, and the third book is the progression of her fate and what she’s meant to be doing and what her destiny is.

iF: Is your Heaven like your Hell, incorporating a lot of different mythologies?

BENSON: I outlined it and I started the first couple of chapters, so I haven’t really gotten to that point yet, but I think it’ll be different. I’ve always conceived of Heaven as being more along the lines of another dimension, per se, like maybe it exists with us, around us, at all times. I always thought that was interesting – Heaven is all around you. Heaven is here. I [thought], ‘Well, I don’t want to take it literally – Heaven isn’t here, this isn’t Heaven, but maybe Heaven exists alongside of us.’ So that’s more my idea of Heaven, more so than Hell being more Dante-esque. Heaven is a little different.

iF: Once it was conceived as a trilogy, did the end of the first book change and/or become moved to the third book?

BENSON: The end of the first book is exactly as I wanted it, as I had conceived it. In the second book, a lot of the things that were left hanging in the first book get answered or dealt with in the second, and there will be more questions for the third [laughs].

iF: As far as the actual writing, do you set a schedule and goals for yourself?

BENSON: Yeah. I try and do two thousand words a day. I don’t like to write at home, I like to go out, so I sit at a coffee place and just write for three or four hours, drink a lot of coffee. Coffee is always good. And I take breaks. When I’m working on a thing, everything is about it, and then when I’m done with each book, I take a little breather before I jump in again, give myself a few months in between, so that I’m not just slammed. But I did finish a kids’ book, THE NEW NEWBRIDGE ACADEMY, in between the second and the third [DEATH’S DAUGHTER] books.

iF: Is this a prequel to DEATH’S DAUGHTER? We know that Calliope attended the New Newbridge Academy.

BENSON: It’s not so much a prequel as just a continuation of the universe. It’s actually about [Calliope’s] friend Noh, who goes to the New Newbridge Academy, and her experiences there.

iF: Besides writing novels, you’ve also recently co-directed the feature film DRONES and some music videos.

BENSON: Yeah. My boyfriend Adam Busch [Warren on BUFFY] and I have been co-directing. We did one for his band Common Rotation [Busch shares frontman duties with Eric Kufs] called ‘Wasted Words,’ which we shot in Alaska, and [one for] a friend of ours, David Garland, who hosts a radio show on WNYC in New York. He also is a musician and does this very interesting music. We randomly met him and his wife in an Indian restaurant and started talking, and it turned out Adam was a fan of his show, and he was a fan of BUFFY, and we became friends with them, and then we [thought], ‘God, we should collaborate.’ David’s wife Anne Garland has this thing called the Luminous Playhouse. She takes pictures of these dollhouses that she designs and creates. They’re very interesting, dark and she tells stories with these dolls, and it’s just beautiful. You can go see her website, theluminousplayhouse.com. We love to incorporate the art with music [in] the video. I like to say it’s very avant-garde, our video. It’s a little story, it’s all shot in Super 8, it’s a lot of fun. Adam and I shot everything together, cut it together, came up with the concept together. I have a Super 8 camera and I really fell in love with the format when we were in Alaska. [Common Rotation] went on a tour of these Alaskan Inuit villages and they played and met a lot of people. My friend Alfonse and I documented the whole thing. We have a whole bunch of video footage to go through. So we shot all this DV footage and photos and I took the Super 8 and shot a bunch of stuff with it. The video [for ‘Wasted Words’] came out of that. I love the medium.