H.M. Wolfe Author of Daggermouth Interview

H.M. Wolfe wrote Daggermouth as a throwaway project, something personal she never expected to publish. The book became a sensation anyway, and in this interview with the Fantasy Fangirls podcast, she walks through how she built its suffocating dystopian world, why she kept the reader in the dark on purpose, and what is coming in the sequel Python.

The World Was Built from the Characters, Not the Other Way Around

Wolfe describes herself as a "pantser" — she does not outline. Daggermouth was the first book where she stopped trying to force herself into being a plotter, and the world emerged from the characters rather than the reverse. She knew what dynamics she wanted between the people in the story, so she built the political structure around those dynamics. "The relationships really are the subplot," she says. "Their dynamics built this world."

The city of Newfound Haven is stratified into rings, with the opulent Heart at the center decaying outward into poverty. Wolfe drew from real class systems and from history — the illegality of love between rings was pulled from interracial marriage bans. The masks worn by the elite are symbolic of how the one percent hides behind corporations and paperwork. "It's not a physical mask," she explains. "It's corporations. It's paperwork. It's all of these things. So you can never really find out who they are."