Ask the Author: Cheri Johnson
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Cheri Johnson
My newest novel, Annika Rose, was inspired by Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby. I first tried to read that book when I was seventeen, but I only got a few pages in. When Rosemary and her husband Guy discover that the previous tenant of the apartment they are dying to rent shoved a heavy piece of furniture against one of her closet doors, I was so terrified that I had to stop reading. It didn’t help that after they move the secretary and open the door and find the closet empty except for a few towels, Guy remarks, “Whoever she locked in got out.”
That image haunted me, and I returned to the book about ten years later. At that point, the thing that scared me the most was the idea that an ambitious husband could betray his wife in such a horrific way and lie so easily about it. All these fears got packed into Annika Rose, which re-tells the story of Rosemary’s Baby in northern Minnesota, with a kind of feminist twist. There’s no supernatural element, but the story is told through the eyes of the weird and wild Annika Rose, one of my favorite characters I’ve ever created; she’s very dear to me. Some of the characters and storylines also hearken back to stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: in particular, the stories in which divine entities go after and rape mortal women (an element they have in common with Rosemary’s Baby).
In the first chapter of Annika Rose, there’s a parallel scene to the “secretary scene” in Rosemary’s Baby—and even reading over my own scene often makes me shiver a little. Yes, despite the fact that I’m attracted to this scary stuff, I am a scaredy-cat. I always watch horror movies through my fingers or with my face buried in the arm of the person next to me.
That image haunted me, and I returned to the book about ten years later. At that point, the thing that scared me the most was the idea that an ambitious husband could betray his wife in such a horrific way and lie so easily about it. All these fears got packed into Annika Rose, which re-tells the story of Rosemary’s Baby in northern Minnesota, with a kind of feminist twist. There’s no supernatural element, but the story is told through the eyes of the weird and wild Annika Rose, one of my favorite characters I’ve ever created; she’s very dear to me. Some of the characters and storylines also hearken back to stories from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: in particular, the stories in which divine entities go after and rape mortal women (an element they have in common with Rosemary’s Baby).
In the first chapter of Annika Rose, there’s a parallel scene to the “secretary scene” in Rosemary’s Baby—and even reading over my own scene often makes me shiver a little. Yes, despite the fact that I’m attracted to this scary stuff, I am a scaredy-cat. I always watch horror movies through my fingers or with my face buried in the arm of the person next to me.
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