Interview: Victoria Blake of Underland Press
Victoria Blake is the founder and publisher of Underland Press. She started the company after three years as a prose editor at Dark Horse Comics, in charge of the production of the Aliens, Predator, Hellboy, and Lankhmar novels. She came to book publishing from a career in newspapers, having worked as both a hard news and features reporter. Currently completing an MFA in fiction at the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, she holds a bachelor’s degree from Barnard College at Columbia University.
Publisher Victoria Blake steps into the closet for a chat about her upstart, Underland Press, which dares to make wovel (web novel) a word to remember…
What creative urge inspired you to start Underland Press?
I read Brian Evenson’s amazing novella, “The Brotherhood of Mutilation.” I’d never read anything like that before—the prose was so spare and yet the world he created was so alive. I fell in love. When Brian told me that he was writing a follow-up novella, I knew that if there was any way for me to publish both as one book, that’s what I wanted to do. I had been thinking about leaving Dark Horse—I already had a business plan and I’d gotten my printer bids and I had a rough financial projection. The start of Underland was when Brian said I could have the book as my first title.
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