Song of the Saltings by RACHAEL KING is an atmospheric YA fantasy, stepped in folk horror, misty bogs, and ancient sacrifice to the sea monster The Grimm.
Read on for a Q&A with the author.
MEET RACHAEL KING
What first sparked the idea for Song of the Saltings?
I became interested in bog bodies and the stories many of them tell, particularly the ones that suggest some kind of human sacrifice. I loved the unsettling, eerie novel Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss. At the same time, I found the word ‘saltings’ in Robert McFarlane’s Landmarks, which was a book that gave me all the wonderful nature words in my last novel, The Grimmelings, and wanted to use it. The Grimmelings was inspired by dark folklore, and the Scottish kelpie, and I thought: what if I made up my own folkloric creature? So it wasn’t just one spark, but a culmination of a whole lot of things I’d been thinking about, including one of my favourite settings – cold, windswept, isolated islands and their communities.
Brack is such an eerie setting – how did you build that sense of place?
Writing atmosphere and place is one of my favourite things. I try to engage all the senses when bringing a place to life, and to not overly describe it. I concentrate on the way a place makes me feel and choose a few choice details to convey that to the reader – the quality of the light, or the popping of the bog in the stillness. One of my characters, Moss, is very tuned into nature so I looked at it through his eyes as well. I definitely like to engage the pathetic fallacy – where a landscape reflects the moods of the people moving through it (literally in this case), and also using it to create a sense of foreboding … and a sense that nature is out of our control. Music is very important to me when creating an atmosphere. I have a whole playlist of dark folky songs that helped me.
Did any real places or environments influence how you imagined Brack?
Yes! I travelled to the Outer Hebrides in Scotland to get a sense of the landscape, and I went even further afield to St Kilda, a group of islands 45 miles west of the Harris and Lewis. It was inhabited for thousands of years until 1930, when life got too hard and was abandoned. The village is still standing and the sheep the islanders farmed are still there, wild, along with millions of sea birds. It’s an incredibly moody, dramatic place, that feels full of ghosts. I wanted to learn about and to understand what life might be like on a cold island cut off from the rest of civilization. To be clear, Brack is not supposed to be Scottish; it’s a made-up place that resembles those islands physically, including standing stones and a deep past, but it is its own place. I listened to the music I mentioned while I was there, and plugging back into it is like stepping into a magic portal back to the place when I am writing.
What can you tell us about the Glimm? And how did you come up with the idea for this creature?
I’m not sure how the Glimm was formed. I needed a creature, and it just presented itself to me as this mysterious thing as I wrote. You don’t meet the Glimm until the end of the book, so I had plenty of time to work out what it was and what it meant to my main character Lotta, who finds herself somehow connected to it after it spares her from sacrifice. We meet her eight years later once the islanders have stopped sacrificing children and use horses instead. I was finding out about the Glimm and Lotta’s connection alongside her in the first draft!
Did any character surprise you as you were writing?
All my books seem to have a character who arrives from nowhere and makes a big impact. In this book, it’s the character of Sadie, a hideling girl. When she first walked onto the page, this is what poured from my fingers: “Sadie has a knack for blending in … She slips unnoticed into the straw of a cart, the stacks of peat, melts into the grey of the stone shops and buildings. Her hair is the colour of dried mud, her skin pale and forgettable. People look right through her, only realising they’ve seen a girl when she’s already passed. They turn to check again, but by then she’s vanished into shadow, and they doubt their own eyes.”
I don’t know where that came from, but I can tell you, these qualities came in very handy later on.
Did any folklore or myths influence the story?
There are shades of serpent-like creatures such as the Lambton Worm in the Glimm, and the myth of Andromeda’s sacrifice to the sea monster, but it was just as much influenced by Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’ and the film The Wicker Man as it was by ancient myths. I did steal Jenny Greenteeth, the bog hag, and put her in the bog as the character Jenny, the witch everyone is told to be afraid of to keep them safe from the treacherous bog, but who has her own story.
What do you hope readers take away from Lotta’s journey?
It became clear to me as I was writing this book that the story is about all kinds of things other than a page-turning adventure. It’s a book about inequality as much as anything, and about groupthink and scapegoating, and how people are easily swayed by those in power to act against their own interests and those of their community. I hope it will stir something in the young people reading it and help them identify oppression and injustice in the future, and to know that using your voice can be powerful. I also hope that adults will read the book – as with The Grimmelings, my books aren’t ‘just’ for kids; they are for everyone. I never dumb things down or try to simplify things for a younger audience, so the book will offer plenty to older readers who remember that feeling of being sixteen and who like a good, creepy but hopefully beautiful story to escape into.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rachael King is a writer, reviewer, former literary festival director and ex-bass player living in Ōtautahi Christchurch. Her novels for young people include The Grimmelings, which has won several awards and is published worldwide; the Violet and the Velvets series, inspired by her time as a teenage bass player; and Secrets at Red Rocks, which won the Esther Glen Medal in 2013 (as Red Rocks) and was relaunched to coincide with a television adaptation released on Sky/Neon in March 2025. Song of the Saltings is her first novel for young adults.
Rachael was named Best Reviewer at the Voyager New Zealand Media Awards in 2023, received a Waitangi Day Honour Award for her work at WORD Christchurch in 2020, and was awarded the 2025 Frank Sargeson Fellowship. She sometimes writes for adults too.
Visit Rachael King’s website here.
0 Comments