Kat Dunn discusses her latest novel Bitterthorn, a tale of love and loneliness

"I think when you’re so alone it can be very hard to trust other people because you feel like you’re not human,” says Kat Dunn, when we meet on a stormy day in her publisher’s office in London to talk about her sapphic fantasy novel, Bitterthorn.

A homage to the fairytales which populate childhood and have been immortalised on film by Disney, Bitterthorn is a web of magical allusions with a contemporary twist. Dunn spins a tale of love and darkness redolent of “Beauty and the Beast”, “Cinderella”, “Sleeping Beauty”, “Rumpelstiltskin” and “Little Red Riding Hood” to create a story at once new and familiar. “I purposely didn’t go to a specific text because I wanted to be like, ‘What’s in our collective consciousness that I can play off without having to be tied into something?’,” she says. “When you touch on a fairytale world there’s so much that your reader already understands so you can do a lot without having to establish it because you’re playing on these incredibly well-known elements.”  

Bitterthorn opens with Mina who, disregarded by her father, stepmother and stepsisters, grieves the loss of her mother. She is incredibly alone, existing on the periphery of her family’s bourgeois life. They live in Blumwald, an up-and-coming fictional German dukedom, which is haunted by a Witch. Every 50 years the Witch materialises to take away a man who is never seen again. As the age of the Witch comes once again, Mina volunteers herself as a sacrifice in a desperate attempt to escape her bleak existence. In the Witch’s castle, high up in the mountains, Mina is haunted by footsteps at her door, never-ending corridors and the less than friendly castle-keeper, Wolf. She yearns for companionship and as she and the Witch fall in love, Mina finally learns the fate of the men who came before.

I particularly get really frustrated by people being put in extreme isolation for long periods of time and there’s no real understanding of what [that’s like]

Mina and the Witch’s love story is entrancing. Dunn dispenses with the ubiquitous “love at first sight” trope and instead charts how their relationship steadily grows under the weight of their isolation. “Loneliness makes monsters of us all,” Dunn writes in her acknowledgments and Mina and the Witch’s love symbolises a triumph over such monsters.

Isolation is something with which Dunn is intimately familiar. She wrote the first half of Bitterthorn during lockdown, seeking refuge from loneliness and mourning the loss of her mother. Living alone was “acutely awful” and Dunn struggled with her grief and memories of childhood trauma triggered by lockdown’s enforced isolation: “I think a lot of my process has been realising that it wasn’t all OK.” Bitterthorn contains Dunn’s feelings during, after and prior to lockdown in an immediately provoking manner, giving voice not only to the state of loneliness but its debilitating mental and physical effects. “I was a dead thing in my heart,” Dunn writes in Bitterthorn. “I knew it like a poison I drank each night and purged each morning.”

The third character

Dunn expresses her frustration when “something sort of traumatic happens in a book or film and there is no impact at all”. She continued: “I particularly get really frustrated by people being put in extreme isolation for long periods of time and there’s no real understanding of what [that’s like].” Bitterthorn rectifies the tokenism of such descriptions. Loneliness exists in the novel as an omnipresent third character, as an antagonist which Mina and the Witch must overcome.

The Witch may be centuries old, sporting audacious and occasionally tatty outfits from several historical periods, but the novel is set in 1871 Germany. The year marks the point where Germany, previously a sprawling set of “micro nations” became unified: “I like the idea that the point of unification is essentially the death of that fairy-tale world.” Germany has long literary associations as the heartland of fairy tales, the stomping ground of Hansel and Gretel, yet Dunn points to modernity as the end of magic and “the Witch as that last gasp of fairy tale”.

Dunn does not expect the reader to pick up the significance of the date, enjoying it as an “Easter egg” for herself, yet it does compound the Witch’s loneliness as the last scion of a magical lineage soon to be cut short by the weight of industry.

I just did not want the lesson to be more pain…it had to be a story that went towards hope

Unlike Mina, left stranded by her family, the Witch’s isolation is self-imposed: “She sets herself aside from humanity. She’s like: ‘I’m a monster. I’m not lovable. I’m not worthy of anything.’” The Witch may initially seem like the malevolent Maleficent—existing to curse and harry away the unwitting—but it becomes clear that she too is a victim, forced to wield a magic which demands sacrifice. Years ago, the Witch was tricked into becoming responsible for a spinning wheel, a spinning wheel which weaves together strands of time. Without a spinner, the boundaries between the past, present and future deteriorate and reality unravels. The Witch is bound to the wheel and to time, and time requires a steady supply of human sacrifices.

A tale of hope

As a tale, it had to be one which moved toward hope, towards Mina and the Witch’s happily ever after. They defeat not only the curse which binds the Witch to her tower, but in finding and reaching out to the other, they slay the larger beast: loneliness and its crippling effects. One of the novel’s final lines reads: “Loneliness had lost its power over me, and all that was left, was love.”

“The emotional story of the book is quite huge to me,” says Dunn. “I just did not want the lesson to be more pain […] it had to be a story that went towards hope.” Not only was the ending an escape for Mina and the Witch, but also for the author: “It meant a hell of a lot to me to write that [ending]. It was kind of like writing my way out, a way through.”

Growing up under Section 28 “massively coloured” the world in which Dunn came of age, but it has not stopped her from representing LGBTQ+ relationships on the page. Instead, Dunn’s childhood fan-fiction writings acted as a shield  against discrimination: “It never occurred to me not just to write whatever relationships I wanted to in books.”