Interviewing CL Hellisen
Hellooo!!
CL Hellisen has been on my radar since I read their very good fantasy novel Cast Long Shadows and now they’ve started a new project which is an audiobook. The Shape of Monsters is out now and it was therefore a great time to find out more from the author about this and future plans.
How do you like to booktempt The Shape of Monsters?
It’s a book for people who like their stories dark and lush, their characters broken and complicated, and their love stories (such as they are) savage with a sprinkle of cannibalism. Mainly, it’s a story about the delicious, corrupting siren call of power and revenge.
Also, if you like that one dick character who is, underneath it all, just a scared, powerless kid who learned to attack first to save themself.
So The Shape of Monsters will tempt you if you love morally grey characters who keep making deeply questionable decisions but mean well, honest. And if you want a story that’s queer down to its bones.
What drew you to siblings and magical secrets for this tale?
I’m a sucker for stories that play siblings off each other, plus I’m the eldest of four so I have a lot of sibling rivalry and support to draw on. I love stories that are riddled with secrets like worms in a peach, especially when those secrets make everything worse for everyone.
Essentially, I like to torture my characters in the name of plot.
Aleks and Vaira are very different in how they’ve dealt with (or not) the trauma of their parents’ deaths, and the roles they played in that night. When they should be allies, they’ve become near-enemies with a wall of secrets and guilts between them. And when they’re forced to rely on each other again, those secrets destroy what they should be building.
Which sibling was hardest to write and why?
Vaira, hands down.
Aleks was easy – every time I need him to be a dick I just asked myself what I would do, then amp that up a smidge.
But Vaira was complicated because I had to walk a fine line between making her sympathetic while showing how her fall was logical for her. The moment you write a female character who is morally grey, tough, and does things for a host of complex reasons, people tend to default to OMG EVIL (See: Lady Eboshi in Princess Mononoke, and many others as examples).
Men are allowed to be complex, women...not so much.
I love writing them though.
How did the idea for an audiobook original evolve and what have you enjoyed about the process compared to print?
It didn’t, not really. I find it very difficult to listen to audio books; my mind starts to wander. I wrote The Shape of Monsters and its sequel for print but Audible made an offer so good that there was no way I could turn it down.
When I told my youngest child I had an audiobook offer, but I didn’t think people listen to audiobooks, they gave me a Patented Gen Z Stare and explained in small words that no one reads books in print any more, and it’s all audio now.
What can I say, I am an old, I don’t know these things, though we’ll see the book in print eventually.
In this process how does the writer work with the narrator?
For me, the general process of editing remained the same as for print – I worked with editors and copy editors who focused on the narrative structure and line edits, but there were a few things I needed to focus on that I wouldn’t have considered for print.
Some examples are cutting the use of ‘said’ to absolute bare minimum because it really sticks out in audio (I’ve since seen John Scalzi say similar for writing for audio), adding more context for scene transitions as there’s no visual break, and cutting words that might have...unwanted homophones (bye, hoar!)
When the time came for the narrator, Audible suggested a few actors and I picked my faves of them for Audible to approach (we picked a few, because obviously it depends on actor availability.) As it happened, my top choice was Omari Douglas (from It’s a Sin and Black Doves) and he ended up as the narrator.
I recorded a pronunciation guide for some of the more obscure stuff, and that was it for my involvement. Audible have sound designers and people they work with, something way beyond my skill set.
What else can we look forward to you in the near future and in this weird world of social media where can we find out more??
I’m currently editing the sequel to The Shape of Monsters, titled A Million Points of Light, which should be out early in 2026
What great books have you read recently?
I recently really enjoyed Lucy Lapinska’s Some Body Like Me, which is a sapphic AI love story, and a more nuanced take on the usual Android Escapes and Discovers What Love Is. It’s also deeply hopeful in the face of and despite the imminent demise of the human race.
In a more lush and decadent vein, I loved Laura Elliott’s Awakened, which is a near future gothic with all the trappings, set in the Tower of London after a brain-chip turns humanity into mindless monsters. It’s also a subversive exploration of how the rich of the world want to eradicate the chronically ill and make humans work twenty-four hours a day.
I’m currently reading the graphic novel Spinning by Tillie Walden, which combines my love of figure skating and LGBTQ stories.
