In her newest book, If Looks Could Kill, readers are plunged into Julie Berry’s historical fantasy where the grim reality of Jack the Ripper meets the unshakeable faith of two Salvation Army volunteers, Tabitha and Pearl. As the notorious killer stalks the streets of 1888 New York and London, the two women are on a mission to bring hope to the city’s darkest corners. But when they encounter a woman in danger, their path shifts, leading them to become unlikely protectors.
This captivating novel delves into the minds of its three narrators: the infamous killer himself and the two determined volunteers. We had a chance to speak with the author about weaving together historical fiction and folklore, exploring the psychology of both a murderer and his would-be saviors, and crafting a story where angels are not to be trifled with.
Trigger warning: This article and the book discussed within it contains references to violence against women. Please exercise care while reading.
About Julie Berry
Julie Berry is the New York Times-bestselling author of the 2020 NCTE Walden Award and SCBWI Golden Kite Award winner Lovely War, the 2017 Printz Honor and Los Angeles Times Book Prize-shortlisted The Passion of Dolssa, the Carnegie Medal — and Edgar Award — shortlisted All the Truth That’s in Me, the Odyssey Honor The Scandalous Sisterhood of Prickwillow Place, and the Wishes and Wellingtons trilogy. Her three YA novels have received a combined 17 starred reviews. Her picture books include The Night Frolic, Happy Right Now, and Cranky Right Now. Julie holds a BS from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in communication and an MFA from Vermont College of the Fine Arts. Julie lives in western New York, where she owns Author’s Note, an independent bookstore.
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Thank you for joining us, Julie. Let’s get started.
If Looks Could Kill showcases your love of mythology on every page. Can you talk a little bit about where this love came from and why you choose to incorporate it into your writing?
Oh, it’s elemental. If someone asked where your love of desserts came from, you might think of a favorite bakery from childhood, or your gramma’s cookie recipes, but also, your tongue was made to love sugar. We’re made to love stories, and myths are pure story, first, all symbolism aside. I grew up with a Reader’s Digest collection of stories for kids that included many retellings of famous myths from around the world. (I did not encounter D’Aulaires’ until I was an adult.) I also devoured Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Bible stories. The sense of the numinous fantastic was all around me. Those were my story bakeries, so to speak, but my brain was born wired for narrative, as I believe all our brains are.
I love how, in Stephen Fry’s recent editions of the great classics of Greek mythology (Mythos, Heroes, Troy, etc.), he emphasizes that, first and foremost, myths should be appreciated as stories, as adventures, as the primordial yarns of What-Happened-Next? that have inspired all literature since. They have certainly inspired everything I’ve written. When I’m writing, I enter a psychic landscape that Homer & Co. first mapped out for me, both directly and indirectly.
Your research into Jack the Ripper and the surrounding cases is quite extensive, as we can see from your famously “hefty” author’s notes. Can you talk us through your research process and how it helps to develop your ideas?
I love that my author’s notes are famously hefty! They are the inspiration for the name of the indie bookstore I now own: Author’s Note. I like to say every book is an author’s note to the world. But also, every work of historical fiction that I write is both an adventure with, and a conversation about, the world, specifically, the world we occupy now, and what chains of causation got us here. In that sense, historical fiction is never about the past. It’s always about the present.
Research is how I discover my story. I begin by following my curiosity wherever it feels like going. This will start me out with broad, exploratory reading, and onward I go until something really grabs my attention. My curiosity pivots to look more closely there. Lather, rinse, repeat. At some point, though the research is never done, I feel I have enough sense of a time, place, or problem to begin auditioning characters by writing opening scenes and character sketches. And on I go, writing and researching in tandem, updating and revising the story as I continue to learn more, right up until I absolutely run out of time.
The multiple POVs in which you tell this story are impressive, especially considering the fact that you wanted to portray Jack the Ripper as a “human animal.” How did you go about building out these distinct characters and intertwining their thoughts?
There’s something revelatory about the process of writing when it’s working as it should. The characters just seem to appear, and they seem to know who they are, and they tell you, if you listen. That’s not to say that it’s all just spontaneous, that the work or discipline of craft doesn’t apply, nor that there’s no such thing as improvement through practice. But practice writing is practice in listening, meaning, opening yourself to what a character actually does think and do (instead of what your plot thinks it would be convenient for them to think and do). The truer you are to how your complicated human character would actually react to something, as opposed to how a flat, cartoonish, clichéd character would react to something, the more distinct your characters naturally become.
Prepare to be surprised, and prepare to fall in love, because listening is the work of love. I am absolutely smitten with both Tabitha and Pearl, and especially with the bond of loving sisterhood that springs up between them despite their initially toxic mutual dislike.
When you share someone you love with the world, it’s easier for others to love them, too — or, if love can’t quite apply (I’m thinking of Jack the Ripper), the easier it is to find them engrossing and compelling, even if chilling. There was a real murderer who butchered women in London’s East End in 1888, but “Jack the Ripper” is also as much of a myth — an archetype, an idea — as Medusa is in our collective imagination. I was determined to strip him of that mystique by insisting he be a body, a brain, a man, someone with nostrils and fingernails, not any kind of legend.
In a 2019 interview with SCBWI Wisconsin, you spoke about your love for well-developed secondary characters and the role they play within the novel. Do you have a favored secondary character from If Looks Could Kill, and how did you go about developing their role for this novel?
Oscar the newspaper boy comes immediately to mind for me. I just adore that impudent rascal and budding urchin capitalist, and I love the relationship he develops with both Tabitha and Pearl. He plays an important role in the story that didn’t emerge in the first few drafts, though he was certainly present from Day One. He emerged as an organic and ideal solution to an important problem through the practice I was talking about in that 2019 interview of being aware, at all times, where all your characters are, what they are doing there, and what they’re thinking as they do it — in other words, not just relegating them to offstage status when unseen in the plot, but allowing them to be actively involved in their lives always, which makes them more real as characters and more active as agents of change.
The atmosphere that you created is so gripping, eerie, and at the same time, (especially in Jack’s POV), eerily mundane. What was your mindset for exploring these horrific moments in a way that feels detached and unsympathetic?
Writing Jack’s point of view was something I approached with caution and care, because I do not want to participate in the glorification of male violence against women, and yet I also believe we have to see what’s real in order to strip away any aura of dark heroism or fascination he may have. We need to see that he was a person with, say, hair sprouting out of his ears, or oily skin, or halitosis, or fussy, annoying habits. We have to see his prosaic thoughts, and we have to enter his tortured rationalizations in order to understand how someone among us, someone who was once someone’s beautiful baby boy, someone who had been a little tyke learning his letters and playing with toys, could grow to become a serial butcher of female flesh and think that was a logical thing to do.
If Looks Could Kill definitely has a darker tone than some of your past novels. How has that challenged you as a writer, and what have you learned from it?
I love this question, because with each new book I write, I’m looking for a new challenge, a larger knot to unravel, a higher level of logic puzzle. I never want to use sensational material gratuitously, and especially not where we’re dealing with the actual facts of an actual murderer who murdered actual women. While there were definitely craft challenges to address in bringing a mythical and fantastical element into what was otherwise a novel rooted in historical reality, I think the greatest struggles I faced were moral. What is the right way to talk about a man, who is himself also a myth and a metaphor, who is famous because he butchered women? What is the right way to grapple fictively with how he is emblematic of a world that not only protects but even rewards violent predators, and not implicitly participate in that glorification? What is the right way to write about such subject matter without adding to the pain of actual survivors of violence? And what do I actually believe about justice and mercy where violent crime is concerned, particularly violent crime against girls and women? How can justice and mercy fully include the rights and needs of those wronged and threatened?
Every novel you write will expose you to yourself ultimately, and lay bare the roiling heart of dissonance and paradox that underpin all we claim to believe. There’s no avoiding it. If Looks Could Kill has certainly done so for me.
As you’ve stated in the author’s note, there is an irony of Jack becoming a household name and his victims becoming expendable. In an age where the problematic nature of true crime is acknowledged, but an audience still exists, what is your opinion on its continuing popularity?
Until I bought a bookstore, I had no idea how massive a market there was for true crime. I don’t watch true-crime shows on TV, and I didn’t realize how many there were. There’s nothing wrong with having a preference or affinity for stories of real events happening to real people. It’s natural to be curious about actual crimes as they unfold in real time before us in the news and in our communities. At what point does curiosity become morbid, voyeuristic, or even self-gratifying is a much more complex and subjective matter. At what point the storytelling and publication of true-crime narratives move from righteous truth-telling to re-exploitation of victims for entertainment profit is likewise murky.
My sense is that book-based narratives are more likely to lean toward humanizing victims as people, as individuals with personalities and hopes of their own, rather than as pieces of flesh (i.e., let’s pan the camera over this beach photo again and again and again). To paraphrase Terry Pratchett, evil is what happens when you treat people as things instead of as people. I’m in favor of true crime narratives (and all narratives) that do the latter.
Lastly, if you had to pick a character from If Looks Could Kill to be a salesperson at your bookstore, Author’s Note, convincing patrons to buy this book, who would you pick and why?
Oh, this is delicious. Can I just have Medusa give everyone an intense stare and say, “Yes, you do want to buy this book. The size of your TBR pile is irrelevant.”? Hee hee. I suppose we don’t want to Jedi mind-trick anyone as an actual retail strategy.
There is Oscar, the newspaper hawker. If I could park him outside the bookstore, bawling out pitches and blurbs, he’d bring people through the door in droves.
Indoors, I’d station talkative Tabitha, who wouldn’t be able to resist telling everyone that this is a terrific story, not because it’s about her — and heaven forbid you should think that! — but because it’s about people she has come to love (sending a knowing look at Mike, who leans against the doorway with a grin on his face).
Thank you, Julie, for such an enlightening and intriguing interview!
You can pick up Julie’s latest book, If Looks Could Kill, from your local retailer; Julie’s indie bookstore, Author’s Note; or one of the links above. Be sure to leave a review and let us know what you think about this spine-tingling historical thriller!
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