Alysse Aallyn is a Connecticut poet and writer who has been interested in questions of good and evil ever since childhood on a gated, bat-haunted colonial estate during the Franco-Algerian war.
“It certainly was a rich source of narrative horror,” she recalls. “We used to be allowed to watch the bombing –as good as fireworks – as a special after-dinner treat.
Men with machine guns routinely searched our van on the way to the beach. Children were sexual targets at any age... there was a bloodstain right outside our gates where the candy seller stood to catch the children coming home from school. We housed a glamorous young Nazi who poisoned all my cats. Flannery O’Connor spoke truly when she said, if you can just survive your childhood you’ll have enough material for a lifetime. I think I have an edge explaining destructive angels who seem so normal on the outside.
I wrote Devlyn under the pen name Alysse Aallyn because it was a “gothic novel”, assuming I’d use my real name, Melissa Clark, for mature work. But I discovered there are other writers making vigorous use of it! Peter Pan goes home, and his bed is taken! Google Alysse Aallyn, there’s only me.”
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