If I told you author Nghi Vo’s new fantasy novel The City In Glass (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook) was about someone who loves their city, but that said city is destroyed, and that the principals involves were a demon and an angel, you’d probably think the city was beloved by the angel and destroyed by the demon.
You’d be wrong.
As for why, well, you’ll just have to read the following email interview to find out why Vo decided to defy expectations.
Photo Credit: © 2021 C.J. Foeckler
To start, what is The City In Glass about, and what kind of a world is it set in?
I’ve been describing The City In Glass as three hundred years of grief and city planning.
It’s about a demon named Vitrine who loves a city called Azril, and what happens when angels from across the sea destroy that city. Vitrine has to decide what she does after the end of the world and what revenge she can possibly take on one of the angels responsible.
Where did you get the idea for The City In Glass?
If The City In Glass was inspired by anything, it’s the end of the world and how often in your life you might be confronted with such a terrible thing. It’s inspired by what comes after the end of the world, because so far as I know, there’s always been a time after the end of the world, whether or not we’re around to see it.
Is there a reason why you made Vitrine a demon whose city is decimated by angels as opposed to her being an angel whose city is decimated by demons? Granted, that is more obvious…
You know, Vitrine showed up more or less as you see her in the book. She’s a demon, sometimes she looks a bit like Lupita Nyong’o [Us], she’s really a glass cabinet and she keeps a book filled with her best beloved things inside her. She’s capable of a lot of rage, an impressive amount of pettiness, and so much love it’s genuinely scary.
The angels feel more distant to me. Like I mentally pick them up, rotate them in my hands and wonder what they’re all about. They don’t feel things like Vitrine does or want them, or at least they shouldn’t.
When I thought about who I want loving, protecting, and caring for a city, I wanted it to be Vitrine, not an angel.
In a similar vein, is there a reason why Vitrine is a demon whose city is decimated by angels as opposed to, say, a troll whose city is decimated by elves or an alien whose city is decimated by humans or a bunch of Rush fans whose city is decimated by Nickelback?
Ha! Well, one reason was that I really like playing with words, and more specifically with what we name things. I call Vitrine a demon, I call the angel an angel, and then I wind them up and let them go. Do their actions match what we call them, and what do we make of those expectations? I think if I called Vitrine a god or a goddess, if I call her an alien, if I call her a guardian spirit, all of which are probably legitimate ways to address her, the expectations are different.
It sounds like The City In Glass is a fantasy tale, albeit more of a mythological one than, say, Game Of Thrones or Harry Potter. How do you describe it, genre-wise?
I mean, it’s a fantasy. There’s angels and demons, there’s briefly a unicorn, there’s plague lords and imps, there’s so many ghosts, there’s a city that was planned by some benevolent mind and not through a series of decisions made by committee, it is absolutely a fantasy.
The City In Glass is your third novel after The Chosen And The Beautiful and Siren Queen, though you’ve also written five novellas (so far) in The Singing Hills Cycle. Are there any writers, or specific stories, that had a big influence on Glass, but not on anything else you’ve written?
The City In Glass owes a lot to Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Invisible Cities is about the closest thing to a sacred book for me, and while some of what I’ve taken from it is threaded through my other books, The City In Glass doesn’t exist without it or where I was when I first read it.
Now, you’ve already said that The City In Glass is a stand-alone novel. What made you decide that this would be a self-contained story and not the first book in a series? Because Vitrine seems like an interesting lady…for a demon.
I don’t know if there was a conscious decision in this case. I knew Vitrine’s story, and Azril’s, I knew where the book was going to end. Vitrine’s got a past, I know she has a future, and she’s got stories in both places, I’m sure, but I wasn’t thinking about writing them when I wrote this one.
I may not be the most fun writer to market in this area. I don’t really think in terms of series; the Singing Hills Cycle wouldn’t exist if my editor hadn’t looked at The Empress Of Salt And Fortune and said, “hey, could this be a series?”
I’m glad they did.
Mostly I know that if they ask me the same thing about Vitrine, the answer is “yes, but it might set me on fire a little. I kept none of my notes from writing this book.”
Speaking of The Singing Hills Cycle, the fifth book of that series, The Brides Of High Hill, came out just a few months ago. We did a specific interview about Hill when it was released, but real quick, what is that series about and what happens in that fifth installment?
Ah! The Singing Hills Cycle is about a cleric named Chih and their companion Almost Brilliant, a memory spirit in the shape of a hoopoe. They travel a fantastical landscape collecting stories for their home archive in the Singing Hills, and each installment can be read as a stand-alone.
In The Brides Of High Hill, Chih falls in with a bride on her way to a deeply unlucky and unsuitable marriage, and we learn that actually, messing up the catering isn’t the worst thing that can happen during a wedding.
Did you write The Brides Of High Hill and The City In Glass at the same time, or back-to-back? I’m wondering if they may have influenced each other. I mean, they are both fantasy stories, but very different kinds of fantasy…
Oh gosh, actually, The City In Glass was written ages ago. It’s my pandemic book, written mostly in 2020. My career in traditional publishing started with The Empress Of Salt And Fortune, which came out the same week of the first lockdown, and I was trying to learn things like publicity and marketing and how to hide my messy living room on Zoom calls. I guess with all that going on in tandem with a global health emergency, it was inevitable I would come up with something about the end of the world.
Brides was written pretty recently, and while it does carry forward some of the darkness you see in City, at this point, I think that’s just something that’s endemic to me.
I asked earlier if The City In Glass was influenced by any movies, TV shows, or games. But to flip things around, do you think Glass could work as a movie, show, or game?
I would absolutely love to see it as a miniseries with an enormously high budget. It probably wouldn’t get made for the same reason: it would be so freaking expensive.
Ha, man, it would also be hilarious as a board game, but I don’t know if you can get 2-4 people invested in plotting out a Renaissance city’s canal system or planning health codes for a growing industry of racing pigeons…
You’d be surprised.
So, if someone wanted to make The City In Glass into a movie or a show, who would you want them to cast as the main characters? You mentioned Vitrine looks a little like Lupita Nyong’o…
Lupita Nyong’o hands down for Vitrine. It was her performance in Us that influenced a lot of Vitrine’s grief and anger. Mousa Kraish [American Gods] has been who I’ve imagined as the angel for a very long time, his dignity and his ability to express righteous irritation with the world around him.
Hmm, for the artist Arvan Pilare, how about [What We Do In The Shadows] Harvey Guillén? I don’t think he looks much like Arvan, but he’s got a sort of playful sorrow to some of his work that I think would go well there.
So, is there anything else someone might need to know about The City In Glass?
Hm. How about: I love this one a lot. I hope you love it, too.
Finally, if someone enjoys The City In Glass, and it’s the first book of yours they’ve read, which of your novels would you suggest they check out next? Or would you suggest they start with The Empress Of Salt And Fortune, the first novella in The Singing Hills Cycle?
Well, it all keeps my cat fed and my rent paid.
I don’t think City has a lot to do with my other novels, except that it’s all me at the bottom. If someone liked The City In Glass, they might also dig Into The Riverlands, a stand-alone Singing Hills novella. Riverlands has some of the same mythic quality of City, as well as the idea that largely without knowing it we’re living in history and in legend.
