Behind the Book

There are several things that inspired the writing of A Cave of Ice. I wrote this novel when I was a senior at Washington College studying for my degree in English. In one of my classes, we explored the idea of subjectivity in the narrators of novels. My favorite example that we discussed was The Great Gatsby. The professor argued that Jay Gatsby, one of the main characters in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, was not real and had, in fact, been made up by the novel’s protagonist, Nick Carraway. “Do you really think a private from Kentucky named Jay Gatz, who says things like ‘her voice was full of money,’ could rise to the height of sophisticated life in New York City?” asked the professor. Learning to question the narrator inspired the untrustworthy nature of my protagonist in the novel A Cave of Ice.

The title of the book comes from the poem “Kubla Khan” by Sam Taylor Coleridge. I had just read this poem while in a class on Romantic poets and found myself instantly obsessed. I even tried to memorize it, listening to the poem on repeat as I would walk between classes. The book and the poem share similar themes. Without writing a full-blown essay on this (maybe I will in the future…), the poem depicts an opium-induced dream-state featuring surreal imagery. While the poem lacks any smoking squirrels, the imagery utilized by Coleridge inspired the novel’s outlandish depiction of reality.