Crystal King Combines Literary Suspense, Mythology and Food Writing - 'In the Garden of Monsters'

Author and marketing expert, Crystal King, visits Writer’s Voices to discuss her third novel, a blend of mythology mixed with history and goth, titled In the Garden of Monsters. Set in 1948 in Italy’s Sacro Bosco, her book is a retelling of the Greek myth of Hades and Persephone, and is told from the point of view of a woman named Julia Lombardi who gets an offer to model for the famed Spanish painter, Salvador Dalí. As King explained, “You find out very early on that she doesn’t remember much and she goes to this garden because there’s something in Dalí’s paintings about pomegranates that really interests her, and so she decides to go and be there in part of the garden… the book takes place in the course of one week and she is there with Dalí and his wife, Gala… so Julia goes to this garden because she wants to discover who she is. She can’t remember her past and there’s something in those pomegranates that Dalí was painting that really inspires her, and she’s a model at the Accedemia di Belle Arti in Italy and she wants to learn more about painting. She is a painter, so she’s like, ‘I’m going to go because Dalí, there’s this connection I have that I feel like I have that also I can learn from a master. I’m going to go,’ and so she goes and… she’s getting paid handsomely, very handsomely… and she’s surprised, but delighted and decides to go, and her friend Lillian is like, ‘what are you doing? This guy is nuts! Don’t do it.'”

Regarding the setting of her novel, King explained why she decided to choose the Sacro Bosco as the location for her story. “So, the Sacro Bosco, which means the sacred wood, is a real place in Bomarzo, Italy… and there’s a garden in the valley… the garden was created in the late 1500’s by this man, Vicino Orsini, and it’s a manor-esque garden, but it’s a garden unlike any that you’ve ever seen before. There are statues of monsters carved out of stone, the stones that are already in place in the garden. There is a Mouth of Hell which is featured, actually, on the cover of my book. It’s an ogre, or an open-mouthed monster, with big wide eyes…” She went on to say that during the pandemic, she was struggling to sell a book that she had written at the time, but was unable to due to the state of publishing then. A friend suggested that she write a gothic novel because they were quite popular with readers during that time. She said, “…I immediately thought of this garden, and then when I started revisiting the garden and realizing, ‘oh, the statues in the garden that I saw have a lot to do with the myth of Hades and Persephone,’ and that was it. Then, I discovered in my research of the garden, that Salvadore Dalí went there in 1948…and I thought, ‘this is interesting,’ and then Dalí suddenly appeared in the story.”