Crystal King's "The Happiness Collector"

Crystal King is the author of In The Garden of Monsters, The Chef’s Secret, and Feast of Sorrow, which was long-listed for the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize and was a Must Read for the MassBook Awards. She is an author, culinary enthusiast, and marketing expert, and has taught at multiple universities including Harvard Extension and Boston University. She resides in Boston.

Here King dreamcasts an adaptation of her new novel, The Happiness Collector:

I don't cast actors while I'm writing. For me, that comes after, when the manuscript is finished, and I can look back at who my characters became on the page. In The Happiness Collector, my protagonist, Aida Reale, emerges as a historian who loses everything: her book deal, her academic position, and her sense of purpose. When she accepts a too-good-to-be-true job at a mysterious Italian company called MODA, she thinks she's salvaging her career. Instead, she discovers she's been hired by gods using mortals as pawns in their nefarious machinations.

Looking back at Aida now, I'd cast Emma Stone without hesitation.

Stone has that rare ability to play intelligence without making it feel performative. In The Favourite, she navigated court intrigue with a combination of calculation and vulnerability that would serve Aida perfectly. My protagonist isn't a warrior or a chosen one. She's a researcher who solves problems by digging through archives and asking uncomfortable questions. She needs to be smart enough to piece together what's happening, stubborn enough to keep pushing when things turn dangerous, and human enough that we feel her fear when she realizes the people she works for aren't people at all.

Stone also excels at playing women whose relationships are messy and complicated. The romance in this book is woven into Aida's transformation from someone who thinks she knows what she wants to someone forced to reckon with who she actually is. Stone can play that kind of internal conflict without spelling it out in dialogue.

What I appreciate most is Stone's gift for balancing drama with moments of levity. The Happiness Collector has humor woven through the tension. There's absurdity in discovering your boss is a god, in signing an NDA that binds you to divine employers, in trying to have normal conversations about happiness disappearing as part of your job. Stone can find that tonal balance. She proved it in Poor Things, where she played innocence, curiosity, and rage all at once, often within the same scene—exactly the range Aida needs.

As for directors, I'd love to see what Yorgos Lanthimos could do with this story. His work on The Favourite and Poor Things shows he understands how to film power imbalances and make mythic elements feel visceral rather than abstract. He's also unafraid of letting his characters be difficult or make choices that don't neatly resolve. The gods in my book aren't benevolent. They're capricious, selfish, and dangerous. Lanthimos knows how to film that kind of moral ugliness without flinching.

Alternatively, I'd trust Guillermo del Toro to bring the Italian settings to life and capture the growing sense of wrongness as Aida realizes something is deeply off about her employers. He'd probably be the ideal director for my previous novel, In the Garden of Monsters, but I think he could do amazing things with this book too. His The Shape of Water balanced romance and fantasy in a way that would suit this story.

I didn't write Aida with Emma Stone in mind, but looking back at the character now, the fit feels pretty darn good. Stone has spent her career playing women who are smarter than the people around them realize, who solve problems by paying attention rather than making noise. That's exactly who Aida is.

Visit Crystal King's website.

The Page 69 Test: Feast of Sorrow.

Writers Read: Crystal King (March 2019).

The Page 69 Test: The Chef's Secret.

--Marshal Zeringue