Anna Kovatcheva’s debut novel, She Made Herself a Monster, follows a con artist vampire hunter whose fake rituals serve a real emotional purpose for the villagers she fools. We asked the author, who was born in Bulgaria, about the folklore she drew on for this story, her journey to publication and the enduring appeal of the vampire.
This is a fantastic debut. What sparked the story’s creation, and how long did it take to craft from the initial kernel of an idea to the final draft?
Appropriately, it started at the beginning—with Yana, my con artist vampire slayer, and what is still the opening scene. In the earliest draft, the chapters had titles, and chapter one was simply called “Yana Buries a Vampire.” The rest of the book changed dramatically over the course of the eight years that it took to write, but Yana and her brick were always my way in.
What did your journey to publication look like? And what was harder for you—writing or selling this book?
Writing was definitely harder. For a long time, I thought of myself only as a short story writer. I’m a perfectionist, and it’s much easier to be a perfectionist for 10 pages than for 300. I resisted the common (but absolutely correct) advice that you first need to draft something messy to learn what book you’re writing. I completed two drafts very slowly and then took a long break when the pandemic hit.
In early 2022, a talented writer friend passed away from an aggressive cancer at a young age, leaving behind some amazing work written during his illness. I regret that I was never able to talk with him about his last projects and that I was never able to ask his thoughts on this novel. At the same time, my grandfather—my first and biggest fan—was entering his 90s. It felt important to finish the book in time for him to read it, so I started emailing him the third draft chapter by chapter as I wrote. I finished it at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts in summer 2023 and then began querying that fall.
My grandfather lived long enough to hear that I’d signed with my incredible agent, Stephanie Delman at Trellis Literary Management, and that she thought the book was in good shape to sell soon. We went out on submission three days after his memorial service in 2024. Steph got the book in front of Jessica Vestuto at HarperCollins Mariner shortly thereafter, and Team Monster assembled.
This book is set in 19th-century Eastern Europe and draws on folklore that an American audience might not be familiar with. Can you share some of the literary and or cultural influences that you tapped into to conceive a story this rich?
I was born in Bulgaria and immigrated to the United States when I was very young, but every few years, my parents and I would spend the summer back east. Some of the most striking images in the book come from memories of those trips: a visit to a working cave monastery where the monks access their cells by wooden walkways bolted to the cliff face; a fire dancer performing traditional nestinarstvo, who offered to take me for a spin over the hot coals; a remote mountain church decorated with lurid depictions of the Last Judgment, whose murals were painted by my great-great-great-great grandfather and his sons around 1840.
Other fragments are more universal. I’ve always loved vampire stories, of course. I grew up obsessed with Buffy (I still am!), and it felt inevitable that I would write about slayers myself someday. There’s a great book by Bruce A. McClelland called Slayers and Their Vampires, which informed much of the novel’s lore.
Fairy tales were an influence, too. The story of the girl and the golden river that Kiril recalls was one that I had on a cassette of Bulgarian children’s stories and listened to repeatedly. Minka’s cottage on its stilted legs is a nod to Baba Yaga’s chicken hut. And then there are ideas borrowed from other places—for instance, one subplot features a prolific poisoner in a nearby city, who is a fictionalization of Giulia Tofana, the 17th-century Roman.
Writing for me is an exercise in sorting through lifelong obsessions, shiny trinkets I’ve magpied away, and arranging them together into something new. I’m glad this particular nest came together well.
I found the idea that communities need something to conquer in order to heal particularly resonant. Where did that idea come from?
At the University of Virginia, I was lucky enough to study with Dr. Jan Perkowski, who for many years taught a popular class called Dracula. Our primary theme was the social function of the vampire. Jan introduced me to the idea that the lore of vampires (and of other monsters) emerged not merely to entertain, but as a way to make sense of and deal with frightening, unexplained phenomena.
Folkloric vampires are scapegoats—you can’t fight a poor harvest, but you can banish the monster that’s threatened your land. The stories of these creatures always go hand in hand with the stories of their defeat. The vampire slayer exists to vanquish evil, and the vampire exists to be vanquished.
It may not make up for a bad crop or a plague, but a tale of triumph can sustain people through hardship. We see this in history, politics, even in sports—facing dark times, it helps to say, we did it, we won, we endure.
You write that brown-skinned Yana “looked as though she’d been splattered by a broken jug of milk,” and Yana’s mother tells her, “People will think things about you. . . . When they do, they give you power. You can use their thoughts against them.” How and why did you decide that this would be integral to Yana’s story? Was it there from the start?
It was there from the start. The way we look informs how we’re received in the world—that’s true for anybody. Yana, as a nomadic figure, is an outsider wherever she goes, and that she is visibly different makes her even more suspicious and intriguing to the people she encounters. Especially in her time, superstitions and misconceptions about vitiligo were common, sometimes dangerous. Yana herself has been discriminated against and abused for it. And like other women in the book, she has learned to make use of that ignorance to serve her own needs.
Vampire slayers or seers in Slavic folklore were thought to walk between worlds and perceive what others couldn’t. Often, they were people believed to have touched the world of the demonic in some way. Some had been near death and pulled back. Others had the markings of potential vampires themselves. Others still might have been born at times of the year when the veil between worlds was particularly thin. They were both defenders of our world and connected to that beyond. Yana frames her physical appearance as proof of this special status, and she wields it to more effectively do her work. And like everything else, she tells this lie because she believes her work helps people, and that her every deception is for the greater good.
Did you have to do historical research or were your influences more from lore and literature? Are you an avid reader of history or historical fiction?
I love learning about history and I love historical novels, but I’m definitely not a historian. I’m a bit in awe of writers of faithfully historical fiction, because I don’t think I have the fortitude to do what they can. The book I’m working on next is set around Y2K, and I’m so excited to be writing about a time I remember instead of constantly Googling things like “when were matches invented” (after lighters, it turns out!).
There are two main signposts for readers seeking to situate the book in time—that we’re evidently in a post-Ottoman Bulgaria and the extent of Kiril’s medicine. That said, I think of this as a book with historical set dressing more than a historical novel. I did do some historical reading, but I intentionally left the time and place vague and accepted that there may be inaccuracies. The story I wanted to tell was more important to me than strict realism.
How do you think about genre and how She Made Herself a Monster fits in the contemporary literary landscape? Was it hard to think of the kinds of comparison books (comps) that publishers’ marketing departments demand?
I love playing with the conventions of genre fiction, but for me, it’s about style and character above all else. This is a vampire story, but an unorthodox one. It has elements of the gothic, of folk horror, of historical fiction and even a bit of love story, but it’s not entirely any of those things. I really appreciate the ambiguity of “literary fiction” as an umbrella term that lets me do all of it in one.
Because it’s a weird mashup, I did struggle to nail down comps. In the end, I named authors and themes rather than specific titles. I pitched for fans of Mona Awad, Lauren Groff and Carmen Maria Machado, specifically citing the ways their work examines girlhood, female friendship and sexuality, folklore, violence and power.
Who are your most influential authors?
Vladimir Nabokov and Italo Calvino both rewired my brain when I first read them, and I go back to them again and again. In grad school, the work of Aimee Bender, Karen Russell and George Saunders taught me not to worry about being too weird. You can feel Angela Carter’s influence in this book, certainly, and I think there’s some Shirley Jackson in here, too.
If I ever feel stuck in the world I’m writing, I seek out strong prose stylists working under similar constraints in order to get excited about language again. Sometimes the village Koprivci felt too small, and I struggled to find interesting things to say about it. Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Rivka Galchen’s Everybody Knows Your Mother Is a Witch and Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles all pulled me out of deep slumps when the village got claustrophobic.
What about the authors or books you go to for pure pleasure? Or comfort?
Comfort reading for me is often about rereading old, propulsive favorites. I’ll revisit Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand at the drop of a hat. Likewise Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House, Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin.
I’ll also go to nonfiction for something that feels different. Morbid history and cultural criticism will get me any time—Caitlin Doughty, Leila Taylor and Colin Dickey to name a few. And I love a serious inquiry of pop culture—things like It Came From the Closet, which is a great collection of queer perspectives on horror movies; Colette Shade’s Y2K from earlier this year; or John Thorne’s work on David Lynch and Twin Peaks. Right now, I’m having a great time with a new critical review of “worst director of all time” Ed Wood, written by Will Sloan.
Can you talk about the relationship between reading and writing for you?
Reading is nonnegotiable for me. I’ve started The Artist’s Way twice, finished once and the infamous Media Deprivation Week wrecked me both times. I found that “emptying the well” doesn’t spur me to create—it just depresses me.
Nothing inspires me like a well-written line. When I’m reading something great, I sometimes realize it’s been a minute since I took anything in, because my writing brain started talking over the book in my hands. I’ve been reading Clarice Lispector’s The Hour of the Star for the better part of a week, though it’s only about a hundred pages long, because she keeps activating me in that particular way.