This Week in Fiction: Karen Russell on Balancing Humor and Horror
In “The Bog Girl,” your story in this week’s issue, a young man named Cillian falls instantly in love with a two-thousand-year-old girl that he’s cut out of some peat. Cillian, who is fifteen, lives on a remote island off the coast of northern Europe. How did you start to get interested in this semi-fictional landscape, and what made you realize that it would make a good setting for a story? Was it the landscape or the apparition of a preserved woman that was the initial kernel of the story?