SPOILER ALERT: This story contains spoilers for Ava Reid‘s new novel “Fable for the End of the World,” released March 4 by HarperCollins.
“A Study in Drowning” and “Lady Macbeth” author Ava Reid is back with her latest novel, “Fable for the End of the World,” which Reid describes as “the most YA of all my YA books so far, because it is like a love letter to the dystopian fiction of the 2010s.”
Promoted by publisher HarperCollins as a cross between “The Hunger Games” and “The Last of Us” franchises, the dystopian book centers on a fictional future version of our world that is controlled by a government run by the corporation Caerus, who keeps a firm hold on society by charging them for anything and everything needed to live in their environmentally ruined world until they go into massive amounts of debt.
This leads to Inesa, the young owner of a taxidermy shop in a half-sunken town, being thrown into Caerus’s solution for its most debt-ridden citizens: a livestreamed assassination spectacle called the Lamb’s Gauntlet. During the one-on-one battle royale, Inesa is up against cyborg Caerus assassin Melinoë. In a twist, the two end up needing to rely on each other to survive to the point where they form a romantic attachment.
Here, Reid breaks down the idea for “Fable for the End the World” and why she chose to conclude the story on a more bitter than sweet note, as well as telling Variety about the upcoming sequel to “A Study in Drowning,” her next adult book, and which one of her novels is being adapted into a movie.
Let’s start at the end — how did you decide where this story would wrap up and why did you pick a conclusion where Melinoë and Inesa both live but are separated don’t end up together, though Inesa sets out in an attempt to reunite with her somehow one day?
I always envisioned this as a standalone. I tend to, as I’m sure you’ve seen over the course of my career, I really like writing standalones. And I think the ending was something that was always in my mind. And to go all the way back to the inspiration for this book to begin with, obviously, the DNA of “The Hunger Games” is very much apparent in this book. But aside from the surface-level similarities — the fight-to-the-death, live-streamed competition — I think that this book is a dystopian that’s interested in actually very different ideas from “The Hunger Games.” “The Hunger Games” is about philosophies of war and taking up literal arms against the oppressive government. And “Fable” is not about that, obviously.
It’s about kind of just surviving. And even though it is like this death gauntlet, the stakes are actually quite small, quite intimate. On that note, that’s why I went with that ending, because the crux of this book is about how hope is just as much of this act of rebellion, and it’s just as meaningful as taking up literal arms. And I think maybe because I’m actually quite a pessimistic person, just as a human being, it’s hard for me to see us getting out of the situation we’re in. So I think that I have to believe in these kind of intangible things, like hope and love. I don’t know where I heard this phrase, but I think hoping and loving, even when it’s probably all doomed, is a brutal privilege of being human.
This book has a sapphic love story at its center, something you haven’t focused on before. How did you decide on a lesbian romance for the main characters in this book?
It was always part of the idea and I’m probably gonna embarrass myself a little bit by talking about this book’s inspiration, because aside from “The Hunger Games”– I’m a grown-up fandom girly, I got my start writing fanfic on FanFiction.net before AO3 [Archive of Our Own] was a thing. I was there writing in the “Warrior Cats” role-play forums. That’s what raised me, fandom raised me. So another inspiration for this book was– I don’t know if you’ve ever played “Overwatch” and I’m humiliated even talking about this, but Widowtracer, or the ship between Widowmaker and Tracer was my other big inspiration for this.
Where did your idea for the debt-plagued world and privatized government aspect of the book come from?
That’s very much an extrapolation of current-day dynamics in our system of government and corporate control through debt. And I think that the only thing that art needs to do is just to provoke strong emotions. And so I knew I wanted to write about this because it provokes such strong emotions in me, and I wrote about this a little bit in my author’s note for the advanced reader copies, but I take a lot of daily medication that I literally need to survive, and I’ve had about like six surgeries in the past decade, and every time, every single time, I’m afraid of basically going bankrupt because of this exorbitant medical debt and insurance and healthcare companies that operate completely without empathy. And however you feel about Luigi Mangione, I don’t think it should come as a surprise that his actions really struck a chord with people, because I don’t think there’s a single American who doesn’t have some negative experience with their insurance company.
Your next big YA release will be the sequel to “A Study in Drowning,” “A Theory of Dreaming,” on Aug. 5. Why did you decide to continue that story and what can you tease about the next book, which will be the final in that duology?
There was kind of a nasty cliffhanger at the end of “A Study in Drowning” that I got a lot of feedback about from readers. I completely envisioned that as a standalone. I’m in general a person who enjoys an ambiguous ending. I always think about my favorite middle-grade series, “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” and how ambiguous that ending is and how real that feels, because such a major theme of that book is coming out of childhood and realizing that the world is so much more complicated, and choosing that complicated version of the world, rather than the safety of eternal childhood. That idea imprinted itself on me very early. So I was fine with “A Study in Drowning” being a standalone. And then I was reading “Piranesi” by Susanna Clarke, one of the greatest books of all time, in my opinion, and something just clicked into place, an idea for how to continue the book.
At first, my publisher didn’t want it because they were, like, “Sequels don’t sell, we’re not going to do this.” And I was like, “Oh, OK.” So my agent had the idea of publishing just an e-book only, where I keep 100% of the royalties. And so that’s something we kicked around as well. And then I don’t know if my publisher changed their mind. At the time, there was this upheaval happening at the publisher where they were kind of restructuring a lot of the children’s side of Harper. So a bunch of new people came on, and one of the new people who came on with someone who had published my adult books, actually, so they knew my work a little better, and they wanted to take on this story. It really just kind of came to me out of nowhere. And I don’t think I would have spent that much time thinking about it further if “A Study in Drowning” hadn’t done as well as it did. I think part of me writing is always that fear of, “Oh, God, my book flops, so I never want to think about it ever again.”
What are you working on right now in the adult-demographic space?
I am so, so excited for my next adult project. We are actually just launching it now; it’s going to come out, I think, tentatively, in March of 2026. I can’t wait to be able to talk about it in more detail, because this is my favorite book I’ve ever written. This is the kind of book that I have spent my entire life trying to write and my entire career trying to publish. It feels like the culmination of so many things that I love and so many things that are so meaningful to me. It’s kind of a blend of Gothic horror and romance and also epic fantasy. It takes a lot of inspiration from the tradition of Italian Renaissance epic romance. It’s kind of a vague retelling of one of those. And gothic novels like “Gormenghast,” which is my favorite ever and a lot of homages to that, and “A Song of Ice and Fire” and “Dark Souls,” just all those things that I love in this unholy amount.
My nickname for it between me and my agent and publisher is, “The Inscrutable Tome,” because it’s like 170,000 words and the beginning of a duology. At first, I was like, “Can I just publish this as one giant 500,000-word book?” And they said no. I just turned in my revisions, it’s going to copy edits, we’re talking about covers. I can’t wait to talk about it more. I feel like I’m being muzzled and all I want to do is say something about it.
What are your feelings about your books potentially being adapted into movies or TV shows? Do you have any on-screen adaptations in the works right now?
My feeling this whole time has been, “Don’t ever think about that, because you write fantasy, and no one ever adapts fantasy.” I have a lot of fellow authors who that’s really, really important to them and I can’t begrudge them that, but to me, that’s always felt strange, because most of the fantasy adaptations we have are, first of all, so few and far between and most of them are really bad. “Game of Thrones” and “Lord of the Rings” are really the only two examples of epic fantasy, secondary-world fantasy, that are generally agreed upon to be actually good. And a lot of what we get is just like CW shows and stuff like that. So it’s something that I’ve never really thought that much about, despite my aunt [Olivia Newman] actually being a director and directing a lot of well-known movies, like “Where the Crawdads Sing.” So I kind of had a little look into that world, but for me, I was always like, “This will never happen. I’m not even going to think about it.”
But as we kind of saw with “Nosferatu,” I think we’re maybe entering an era where genre movies are becoming more accepted. And the fact that it even got Oscar nominations is crazy to me, because the Oscars kind of famously hate genre. And we’re starting to see more of these prestige horror movies that are getting critical recognition, like “The Substance,” and it’s made me feel a bit more hopeful. And I can say that I do have some confidential movie news that, hopefully, I will get to talk about soon. But it’s very unexpected and very exciting, and hopefully we’ll be able to share more about that.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
