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It’s the start of another dark academia season and fantasy author Ava Reid (“A Study in Drowning,” “Innamorata”) is celebrating with the release of her new YA dystopian novel, “Winterveil.”
The first book in a planned
duology, “Winterveil” is set at Valeran Academy, which boasts the brightest – and precociously criminal – students in the nation, who are trained to be elite assets in a Cold War that has dragged on for nearly a century. Amid eerie war simulations, cutthroat competitions and foreboding new technology, four students are drawn together for a mysterious mission.
Without getting into spoilers, we can reveal this political tale has one particular inspiration that might come as a surprise: competitive “Pokémon.”
“I, like so many of us, grew up playing ‘Pokémon’ as a kid,” Reid tells Variety. “Playing ‘FireRed,’ ‘LeafGreen.’ I have all my Pokemon plushies right behind me on my couch right now. But it was during the pandemic that I think so many of us got very involved in kind of esoteric hobbies, and my hobby that I got really into during COVID was competitive ‘Pokémon,’ specifically.”
And that’s what it sounds like, according to Reid, “’Pokémon’ where you play against you know other players and you have battles.” “And I’m talking specifically about the official competitive format of Pokemon, the one that’s run by the Pokémon Company itself,” Reid says. “There are different fan formats where you can play online, but the official competitive format is called VGC. So I got very, very into VGC, watching a bunch of kind of VGC content creators, playing on the in-game ladder myself.”
Reid’s time spent playing some hard core Pokemon inspired aspects of the competitive nature of the academy within “Winterveil,” a book that publisher HarperCollins has described as “The Secret History” meets “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.”
“The thing about ‘Pokémon’ is that it works on so many different levels,” Reid says. “There’s a very low skill floor if you just want to engage in the main games and you beat the Elite Four and you catch all the Pokémon. It’s super fun. Pretty much anyone can do it. That’s the aspect of the game that’s marketed toward literal children, but then there’s also competitive Pokemon. It’s a turn-based strategy game, so like chess, but actually many orders of magnitude more complicated than chess. Wolfe Glick, who’s the most famous competitive ‘Pokémon’ player, he’s kind of like the [chess grandmaster] Magnus Carlsen of competitive ‘Pokémon,’ he said that competitive ‘Pokémon’ is like chess, but sometimes the pieces explode, which I think is a great way to explain it. It’s very chesslike. It’s strategic, it’s tactical, but it’s so much more complicated than that. There’s so many ways to customize your ‘Pokémon.’ There’s a lot of math and mathematical equations and probabilities and percentages. So that is the particular element that inspired aspects of ‘Winterveil,’ is competitive ‘Pokémon,’ specifically.”
When she’s not playing competitive Pokemon, Reid has been hard at work on “Necromantica,” the sequel to her gothic fantasy epic “Innamorata.” After that massive cliffhanger in the first book, which released in March, there’s not much Reid can say yet about the sequel, which debuts next April, except that fan-favorite character Waltrude will certainly return.
“Waltrude will be back,” Reid says. “She’s a POV character in the sequel, and Marozia is now a POV character in the sequel, which I think is obvious because she’s on the cover. But a large part of the story actually revolves around Gamelyn, who is the Master of Blood, who we’ve not seen very much in the first book. I don’t even think he’s had a line of dialogue, but he is a very, very significant character in the sequel and I’m very excited for that. I think his plot line and his chapters are some of the best things that I’ve ever written. Personally, I believe that, so I’m really excited.”
Elsewhere, Reid is collaborating with “Room” writer Emma Donoghue on a film adaptation of Reid’s 2024 novel, “Lady Macbeth,” told from the point of view of the titular character herself.
“We’re still pretty early. We’re still working on the script, but things are definitely moving along,” Reid says. “They’re moving along behind the scenes, as so many of these things do, which is kind of a hurry up and wait situation, similar to publishing.”
Reid isn’t sure what the distribution plans for the film will be, but is not opposed to a streaming launch on the heels of the success of her filmmaker aunt Olivia Newman’s “Remarkably Bright Creatures” on Netflix. The TV movie was nominated for an Emmy at Monday’s awards show and star Sally Field took home the lead actress award in the category.
“I don’t know if we’re even in the stage to be thinking about that,” Reid says. “I would prefer to have a theatrical release, I think, but my aunt’s movie just came out, ‘Remarkably Bright Creatures,’ and that was on Netflix and that has just done extraordinarily well in that format. So it’s definitely something I’m open to.”
