Håvard asked Lynn Buchanan:

The placenames in The Dollmakers felt meaningful to the book and the characters in it. How did you come up with them, and what was intension behind the choice?

Lynn Buchanan I’ve always had a soft spot for fairy tales—they can be both simplistic and brutal, straightforward and nuanced, and they mix whimsy and darkness in a way that I enjoy immensely. I wanted to emulate that intersection between fairy tale-like charm and brutality/horror in The Dollmakers, and part of my method for accomplishing that was in how I chose the place names in the book—the country called One, the city called Ports, the road called Wide, etc. Labels that are simple, descriptive, and straightforward, similar to the sort of names you’d find in a fairy tale, but existing alongside the devastation caused by the weeping, demonic monsters that periodically terrorize the people in the book.

In terms of how I chose the place names themselves, I tried to think of the most logical thing to call certain places—for a seaside city that specializes in world-wide commerce and trade, “the city called Ports.” For a city known for its beauty and black pearls, “the city called Pearl.” For a town known for silking spiders, “the village called Web.” And so forth.

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