K. Ancrum—author of the YA psychological thriller The Wicker King—reimagines the titular myth in Icarus, a queer YA romance that follows two teens’ paths toward healing from trauma. Under his father’s instruction as part of a decades-long revenge scheme, 17-year-old art thief Icarus Gallagher steals from the collection of the wealthy Mr. Black. He’s never been noticed—until Icarus enters the supposedly empty mansion to discover that Mr. Black’s son Helios is there under house arrest. Helios and Icarus strike a deal: Helios won’t turn him in if Icarus returns to keep him company. As their relationship develops, Icarus plots to help both himself and Helios escape their respective situations before it all comes crashing down on them. In a conversation with PW, Ancrum reflects on returning to her original writing style, her connection to the Icarus myth, and the healing power of connection and empathy.
Can you talk about your relationship with the original Icarus myth and in what ways you drew on it to develop your novel?
As a kid, I remember reading about Icarus and thinking that the story was so sad. Even though I didn’t fully grasp its nuance then, I was still very focused on Icarus’s resourcefulness, and the deep tragedy of his chasing beauty and wanting to be something more, and how that created a situation of youthful folly. One of the things that is very much threaded through the majority of my works is children’s dynamics when it comes to generational trauma and looking at the circumstances of the adults around them and trying to figure out a way to do better.
For this story, I wanted to write about a child whose father had more in common with the Icarus of the myth while Icarus, the main character, had more of an ability to step away from the things that attracted his father so much. Having that kind of dynamic where a kid can look at a situation and be like, “I don’t want to live my life this way. I want to try and do better, I want more for myself,” is a very empowering thing for teenagers to read, because you never know the kinds of circumstances that a teenager might be in. So, seeing somebody else also trying to do something that the people around them aren’t doing because they know that it’s healthy and good and beneficial is a priceless lesson to be able to talk to children about.
You’ve been quoted as saying that your works are often inspired by movies. What inspired Icarus?
I saw a trailer for the adaptation of The Goldfinch [based on the novel by Donna Tartt], and it was so beautifully designed in a way where I couldn’t really tell what the movie was about. I just knew that it had this unusual friendship set against this tapestry of urban life and art and beauty with nuance and depth, and it was one of the most gorgeous things I’d ever seen. I wanted to write something that made me feel the same breathlessness I felt after watching that trailer. Most people don’t think of a trailer as something that has the potential to be a source of inspiration, but they’re designed like a poem—in the same way a poem has to take so much care in each specific word that’s used to have the greatest impact. I have a lot of reverence for art that kind of summarizes something in a way that gives it nuance and meaning with so much less. When I was designing Icarus, I really wanted to hit those beats and make sure that the feeling that came across through my story—which is entirely different from The Goldfinch—was intimate and emotional and had a lot of depth.
On social media, you mentioned that Icarus was written “in a way that feels most natural to me with the limits of my disabilities.” Can you elaborate?
My first two books—The Wicker King and The Weight of the Stars—I wrote in the same vignette-like format as Icarus. One of the elements of my writing is that I don’t really provide a lot of description. I have ADHD and the way that I see the world and take in information doesn’t look like how a lot of other people take in information. Like, someone can walk into a room and notice that the walls are this color, the floor is that color, while all this other stuff is going on, whereas I just kind of tunnel vision my way through life. Because of that, I don’t have a very strong ability to describe things in a way that feels natural to a lot of people. I decided to try a different approach when writing my third book, Darling, but it didn’t feel the way that I want people to feel when they’re reading my work. My audience is looking for character study, they’re looking for stuff that feels immersive and sonorous, with emotionally rich writing.
With Darling, there was a disconnect. I was trying so hard to overcome this element of my disability and forcing myself to figure out what everyone else was seeing so that I could present something that I thought would be commercially viable. People liked it and everything, but it very much felt like I was doing something that made creating art feel less natural. It felt like a betrayal of my ability to use art as a tool for communication, which is the original reason I decided to go into the arts in the first place—I wanted to communicate certain things that I felt about the world with the world in a way in which they were able to see me and understand me. So, when I went to write Icarus, I was like, “I’m going to go back to what I was doing before, and I’ll just see if people like it. If they don’t, whatever. But let’s see.”
While all your books center community, empathy, and connection, they also deal with heavier themes including trauma, abuse, and hardship. How do you create a balance between these two dichotomies?
A huge reason why I write—full stop—is because, historically speaking, when it comes to queer media, there are often rising and falling times in which it is very, very available. Everything that I write is in service both to the children of today and for the potential children of the future who may only have access to what we write now. When I’m building these communities, I want to show a child who may be in a situation that is much worse than what we have right now that there was a time when we were happy, and we were together, and there was this richness and tenderness, and friendships that were fulfilling and life-giving for the queer community.
The trauma and neglect and stuff like that comes from when I was younger, and I was doing a lot of compulsive reading. I found that other children who were also doing a lot of compulsive reading were doing it because they were lonely, or they were in a situation where reading was their primary source of comfort and enrichment. I want to create books that are in service of that, too. When you’re an adult and you’re writing about a child who is suffering, it’s a huge responsibility to provide them with the tools that they need to be able to either lift themselves out of the horror of that situation, or show them that there could be a situation where they don’t have this happening to them.
There’s this part of me that always stays facing away from the future and turned toward the past to be able to remember enough about what it felt like to be as vulnerable as the children who are reading my books.
What can you tell us about your upcoming book with HarperTeen?
I just turned in the copy edits for The Corruption of Hollis Brown, which will probably be out in 2025 or something like that. It’s about a small town dealing with the economic impact of having their major industry leave. The people who live there are kind of like subsistence farmers, and the story surrounds the circumstances of this kid named Hollis, who gets possessed and then falls in love with the ghost that’s possessing him. It’s a monster romance.
Icarus by K. Ancrum. HarperTeen, $19.99 Mar. 26 ISBN 978-0-06-328578-1
