Snare was the first book we discussed, and Racheline Maltese, one of the authors, generously volunteered to answer reader questions! Here is that Q&A, which illuminates new things about the story and the characters, including subjects that came up in our conversation about the book!

Q: What led you to write Snare and to set it in NYC?

A: I’m a native New Yorker, and Snare is actually based on/inspired by a real apartment building in the city. 34 Gramercy Park East was built in 1883 and was one of (if not the) first luxury apartment buildings in the city. It had elevators. It was very exciting.

At any rate, I used to live around the corner from this building, and would often walk around the small, private park in the evenings. Every time I passed the building, I got a shiver. It just always felt different. Eventually, I even had the opportunity to go inside when I auditioned for a play with a writer who lived there. Like many grand New York buildings, over time many of the original apartment layouts have been further divided with renovations taking place in different decades (and centuries). I was fascinated by its maze-like quality and how at one moment I’d be looking at smooth walls and recessed lighting from an 80s renovation and at the next what were clearly the original fixtures of the building.

Anyway, the building had haunted my imagination for over a decade, and when Erin and I were feeling each other out about vampires (Snare was written fairly early in our partnership), I finally found a use for this space.

Q: It feels like consent is a complex thing in Snare, that there are moments where it is murky, and moments where it is broken, as well as moments where it is clear. Can you describe your intentions in writing about consent this way in the story?

A: I think, in general, Erin and I are always interested in the places where life is messy. In general, we’re very consent-focused in our fiction, and have certainly become more so as time has gone on (the political climate, an awareness of what the readers who like our stuff want, our own personal comfort, etc.) but vampires felt like a place where we could look at consent from a messier, more toxic place. It certainly felt safer/more acceptable to us to explore darker, murkier things with the unreality of the setting.

The way the story has and doesn’t have consent in places (and the way it ends, which is as murky as the rest of it), is one of the reasons we’ve sort of always questioned calling this thing a romance. But I also don’t know what else to call it.

Q: How did you go about (re)building trust and consent between Richard, Matthew and Eli various relationships after that first bite?

A: For there to be real trust — or at least trust the way we understand it out here in our own world — Eli, of course, would have had to have had freedom of movement. Instead, we were writing a situation where one person’s dilemma was “How do I make the best of this?” when they are also very legitimately angry and unwell. So does Eli trust anyone truly? Or just the best he can in a set of given circumstances that he’s grown used to?

And for Matthew, his situation is very complicated, both in giving and gaining trust. I always felt like we were writing someone with a lot of contradictions. He is kind, he has a good sense of himself, but he’s in this relationship that’s very messy and power-imbalanced. And he knows that he feels comfortable choosing that for himself, but the second he’s put in a position of having to justify Richard’s bad choices to another person and enabling that, that really shakes his foundations. Because he knows that’s not good or right or fair and he knows that makes him into a very different sort of person than he wants to be. But at the same time, he’s not willing to blow up his entire life to do the right thing as we, the outsiders to the story, understand it.

Richard, of course, has almost no interest in admitting he’s wrong. He made this mess but is also convinced it’s beneath him. But he does really, really love Matthew. He’s trying to fix this even when he doesn’t entirely understand why what he did matters. I think that’s what ultimately wins over Matthew, he can see Richard is making an effort around a set of things he doesn’t understand and doesn’t even necessarily care about.

Eli is obviously blameless. And we can argue that Richard can’t help his nature. But Matthew makes a choice, so if there’s a villain in this story (and I don’t necessarily think there is), for as kind and as lovely as he wants to be, I do think it’s Matthew. He makes prey possible, both by accident and on purpose.

So writing all that what we tried to do was show different types of trust — some of the characters trust the world they are in and some of the characters trust the people within that world to help them survive it. And at a given point, that idea of having a guide through a strange world becomes more appealing than being on one’s own in a familiar one. And I think a lot of us wrestle with dilemmas that could be described that way, even if those dilemmas aren’t about vampires.

Q: Are you planning to revisit this world again in another book?

A: Maybe. We wrote Snare a long time ago, and it did all right when it came out, for the very narrow niche it’s in (length, M/M/M, HFN instead of HEA, etc.) but it had been — I don’t know if it was naivete or emotional attachment to the story — something we thought would be really huge for us. So we kicked around some ideas. But then the publisher it was with collapsed, and we got distracted by other projects, and it was always a sort of *wistful sigh* sort of feeling of whether we would ever get back to this world.

But we do seem to have a recurring pattern of our books finding their readers far after the fact. Snare is probably our third project to have suddenly made most of its sales several years after initial publication. So revisiting it is possible now in a way it wasn’t before.

I will say that a sequel, if it happens, starts in a very different place. A character we’ve never seen before is in peril, he’s on the run, and his instincts take him to the warren where Snare is set. But when he gets there, the building — this thing he was looking for but didn’t know why — is gone. And it’s through his eyes that we get a sort of history of New York between the events of Snare and the present of the sequel. But the three men who are central to Snare are central to this book, but who and what they are and the world they live in have all changed a lot.

Of course, I’ve teased this while we’re in the middle of writing a 100,000 word sequel to our royal romance, so revisiting this is likely a 2020 sort of thing.

You have written several polyamorous romances; where does Snare fit in with the others?

I think the only thing our polyamorous romances have in common is that they are all very mood driven pieces. Snare is about that building and the snowstorm and all the people moving around in the background before it’s even about its plot. And when I think about The Art of Three, which could not be more different from Snare (no vampires, set in Europe, entirely fade-to-black sex, novel length, very consent and communication focused), that’s also a mood piece to me driven by things like an old farmhouse or a late night ferry ride, the sound of a dog barking welcome in the dark.

I do think we’re more place-driven as writers when we write polyamory, because I think we have this idea that family is a thing that converges and people are drawn together to occupy a space that has power and meaning to them and they’ll figure out the details later. Polyamory to me is about making room and using physical space to show that can save us a lot of 101 words.

Reminder: Our next book is Ascension by Jacqueline Koyanagi and we will be discussing it next week on Saturday July 20th! More info here. We do hope that you will join us!