Fired from her lackluster job as an adjunct professor of writing, and on the verge of needing to move back in with her parents, Zelu has lost control of her life. Because she’s disinclined to pick up the pieces in a way that will satisfy her family, a Nigerian American dynasty for whom being exceptional is considered merely ordinary, she turns instead back to her writing. What comes out of those dark moments is a piece of science fiction set in the aftermath of humanity’s extinction. Upon publication, the novel captures the entire world’s imagination, quickly becoming a bestseller and almost immediately being optioned as a movie. But the consequences of Zelu’s meteoric rise aren’t all so dreamy. As they ripple out, they change her life forever, causing her to rethink her relationship to her writing, her family and even her own body.
Death of the Author, by acclaimed science fiction writer Nnedi Okorafor (Who Fears Death), is comfortable straddling the line between genres. Okorafor explores the dynamics Zelu experiences as a disabled Nigerian American author from the south suburbs of Chicago, rendering familiar experiences with remarkable specificity, pulling us in so that we understand Zelu’s truth, warts and all. As the book shines on a literary level, so, too, do its science fiction elements. In a metafictional twist, Okorafor peppers in chapters from Zelu’s bestselling novel with increasing frequency as the story progresses. Beyond being interesting in their own right, the chapters give us a lens through which to see Zelu more clearly—and influence the course of her journey. A remarkable exploration of storytelling, fame and the Nigerian American experience, Death of the Author surprises all the way to its brilliant ending.
A remarkable exploration of storytelling, fame and the Nigerian American experience, acclaimed science fiction writer Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author surprises all the way to its brilliant ending.
Nnedi Okorafor knows that her latest novel is “a lot.” The way Okorafor delivers this pronouncement with a grin makes it clear that the description is anything but apologetic. “I feel like one of the things about this book that’s going to be interesting is this question of ‘What is it?’ Because it’s so much.”
This wouldn’t be the first time Okorafor’s work has defied easy categorization. Though many of her previous books, such as the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning Binti, were decidedly science fiction, their setting and perspective lacked a place within science fiction’s numerous subgenres, leading her to coin a new term, Africanfuturist, to describe them.
But with Death of the Author, Okorafor eschews the tidy boundaries of genre entirely. At its core, the book is a literary novel about a woman named Zelu, a disabled Nigerian American author from the suburbs of Chicago whose meteoric rise to literary stardom changes her life. Her story, which begins with being unceremoniously fired from her decidedly unglamorous teaching job, is told through a combination of close third person and interviews with family and friends that show her for the complex—and often flawed—person that she is. Interwoven with Zelu’s story are chapters from Zelu’s breakout novel, Rusted Robots, in which humans have been replaced by robots we created to live alongside us.
“I have a general rule that if I’m scared to write it, I have to write it.”
While those familiar with Okorafor’s science fiction may see a literary novel as a departure, Death of the Author is a book whose heritage mirrors that of its author. Although she’s a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, Okorafor—like Zelu—also has a more traditional background as both an English PhD and as a professor of writing. “I learned a large part of my writing from professors who were very anti science fiction and fantasy,” she says. She credits both her literary and genre instructors for what Death of the Author became, and hopes that the novel can forge a middle ground between the two camps where everyone can “just love storytelling” regardless of genre.
Early in her career, Okorafor had dreamed of writing a literary book about the Nigerian American experience and all of its “complexity, all of its hypocrisy, its strengths, and its specificity.” After the death of her sister a few years ago, Okorafor felt compelled to return to the idea of writing the great Nigerian American novel. For her, that meant talking about food, something that in most Nigerian families is passed down from mother to child. “You develop this whole mythology around the food,” she says. “You love it so much that you bring it for lunch in grade school.” But other kids weren’t familiar with Nigerian food and would question her jollof rice or egusi soup. “You’re forced to explain what it is and either be insecure, or you start defending it, and that strengthens your cultural identity.”
In the book, Zelu’s relationship with food is complicated by the fact that she is the child not of two cultures, but of three: Yoruba, Igbo and American. “Nigerian men expect the wife to cook and be able to cook. . . . So if Zelu’s mom is marrying an Igbo man, then she’s going to have to know how to cook those foods. And then she’s proud of her own culture, so she’s going to cook Yoruba food, too.” Plus, like all children of Nigerian American immigrants, Zelu initially experiences Nigerian food prepared with American substitutions for all the ingredients that you just can’t get in the suburbs of Chicago. Being raised with these foods, in this context, Okorafor explains, connects Zelu to her Nigerian heritage and makes her who she is. “I’m sure it’s this way with other cultures,” she says, when asked about capturing the specificity of this experience, “but I’m speaking as a Nigerian American.”
She’s also speaking as a writer with a disability. Like Zelu, Okorafor became partially paralyzed after an accident. Although she did eventually learn to walk again, the experience profoundly affected her. She says that it felt like she was a “broken, rusting robot.” Instead of moving through the world with the agility of an athlete, “I had to think about every step that I took. I was programming myself instead of intuitively walking as I did when I was a baby.”
“Wanting to box something comes from wanting to feel comfortable, wanting to feel in control.”
And so when it came time for her to write about Zelu experimenting with exoskeleton-like prosthetics that would allow her to walk again, Okorafor drew from personal experience. She’d seen a similar type of prosthetic in the real world and had wondered: If she had the chance to augment the athleticism she’d lost, “would I do that? How would that change who I am?” It’s a fraught question among people with disabilities, she says, whether to see your disability as “something that’s wrong with you that needs to be corrected” or as a part of your identity that you should embrace. “That’s what I’ve had to do with my situation. There is no cure for it. . . . I’ve built my identity around that.” To use this kind of prosthetic “would just shatter so much about what I’ve built. It wouldn’t be as simple as one would think.”
Through playing out part of that debate in the pages of her novel, Okorafor wants to start a conversation, “not necessarily an argument,” about subjects that we might normally shy away from. Where Okorafor sees nuance, however, her main character often doesn’t. Zelu picks fights, and she is sometimes bullheaded, both traits that can be challenging in a main character. But, as Okorafor points out, “It’s not about right or wrong. This is the world, and this is how some people choose to navigate through the world.”
It wasn’t originally Okorafor’s intent to write Rusted Robots as part of Death of the Author. She was interested in writing a literary novel, after all, not more science fiction. But as she began to write about Zelu writing Rusted Robots, Okorafor knew that she wouldn’t be able to keep going if she didn’t at least write a chapter or two of Zelu’s book to understand it a little better. As someone whose science fiction typically depicts the future of humanity, Okorafor initially balked at the idea of writing something with no humans in it—nothing that would interact with the world in the same way that we do. “I was scared of that. But I have a general rule that if I’m scared to write it, I have to write it.” So she did. And within a few chapters, she was hooked. She began to write the two stories in parallel, noticing how what she wrote in Rusted Robots often reflected Zelu’s story, and vice versa. Where Zelu is paralyzed by an accident, the main character of Rusted Robots, Ankara, loses her legs in a brutal attack from a rival robotic faction. Both regain use of their legs in a way others in their lives see as distasteful or outright unnatural (Zelu with her prosthetics, and Ankara with the help of an AI from the faction responsible for the attack). These connections, Okorafor says, were at first unconscious, but later became an intentional way to show how the experiences of an author affect their subjects.
It’s the interplay between these two stories that gives Death of the Author its strength—and which might make it an intimidating read for some. Literary fiction readers may be tempted to skim the science fiction sections, and science fiction readers might “focus on the robots and totally miss out on the whole Nigerian American thing.” But Okorafor stresses that part of the point of the book is to strain against the need for a label. “Wanting to box something comes from wanting to feel comfortable, wanting to feel in control.”
This was a feeling Okorafor, too, has had to fight against. “I remember when I finished writing Death of the Author, I was like, ‘Oh my god, what have I done? How are people going to comfortably categorize this?’” But then she did as she hopes her readers will do: She let it go and focused on the joy of storytelling instead.
Princess Rhea Silvia has had everything wrenched from her grasp. She has borne the loss of her mother and brothers, and seen her father stripped of his throne. Now forced into the life of a Vestal Virgin by her power-hungry uncle, Rhea has been divested of whatever power she once possessed. But she has a secret that will change the world forever—if she can live long enough for it to bear fruit. The night before she is to be commended to the virgins, Rhea takes Mars, the god of war, to her bed, violating her vows and consummating an affair that will birth one of the most powerful empires the world has ever known. Rhea’s story is one of gods and blood, of sacrifice and vengeance. Hers is the story of the birth of Rome.
In Mother of Rome, author Lauren J.A. Bear reinterprets the strange and tragic backstory of the twin founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, into a story of intrigue, determination and the raw ferocity of a mother’s love. Like most myths, Rhea’s intrigues even when stripped down to its most basic parts. But Mother of Rome gathers strength from emotional specificity: namely, Bear’s refusal to shy away from the uglier parts of a mythological retelling and her devotion to showing the emotional truth of the women she portrays. Rhea seeks vengeance in a world where men acknowledge her only when exerting control over her destiny and body, and her rage and frustration spring from the page—but so too does her unbridled joy at seeing her children for the first time. Similarly, her cousin Antho’s sense of helplessness at being tied to men who disgust and terrify her may loom large, but so too does her hope for her forbidden love. Because in Bear’s hands, women’s stories—and women’s rages, hopes and fears—matter. Cathartic and moving, Mother of Rome reimagines the founding myth of Rome in a way that transcends gods and empires, instead focusing on the humanity at the story’s core.
Cathartic and moving, Mother of Rome reimagines the myth of Romulus and Remus by placing their mother, Princess Rhea Silvia, center stage.
An acolyte of the sun god, Mische saw her life destroyed when she was forcibly Turned into a vampire. After murdering the vampire who turned her, Mische is spared from execution when she agrees to journey into the afterlife with Asar, a vampire prince, and resurrect the god of death. Tasked by the sun god with betraying Asar and sabotaging their mission, Mische finds herself questioning everything she’s ever believed in when she begins to fall for Asar.
The Songbird & the Heart of Stone takes us straight into an afterlife that’s as intriguing as it is terrifying. How did you conceive of your version of the road to the underworld? Much of my process adhered to the improv philosophy of “yes, and . . .” I know that many readers love my books for the hot vampires—and make no mistake, I do also love hot vampires!—but I have a streak that just really, really loves weird, gross, dark magic. I always enjoy creating structures to my magical fantasy journeys that have a strong sense of progression, and better yet if they give me the opportunity to try all kinds of different gimmicks. So, I loosely ran with the general idea of “circles of hell” and thought about what those “levels” might look like in the context of the Nyaxia world. Then I mapped each of these levels to the character arcs for Mische and Asar, and tied them into the lore of the gods’ story. This piece was the most fun for me!
So far in the Crowns of Nyaxia series, we’ve been inside the heads of three characters: Raihn, Oraya and Mische. Mische has a very different internal monologue than any of the others. How did you get into her head to really capture that change in narrative voice? Going from Oraya’s cynical, hard-edged voice to Mische’s optimistic and thoughtful one was a little jarring in the beginning. But, I had a baby in between writing The Ashes and the Star-Cursed King, the previous book in the series, and Songbird, so I had a lot of time to think about the inner workings of Mische’s brain during my maternity leave. I got to know her a lot in borderline-hallucinatory brainstorming sessions at 3 a.m.!
“There’s a lot more to power than physical strength . . .”
Luce, Asar’s beloved necromantic dog, is undoubtedly going to steal some readers’ hearts (just as she stole mine). How did she come into the picture? It’s only now that I realize I cannot remember when I first conceived of Luce! She came into the picture very early in my brainstorming for Asar’s character. He’s introverted, rigid and definitely a bit scary, but boy does he love his dog! (Rightfully so—she is a very good girl.) I believe that platonic relationships are just as important as romantic ones. It’s important that we see the characters reflected against someone else who is meaningful to them. In this case, Luce really helped me define Asar, and took on an (after)life of her own from there.
Architecture—whether it’s the impressive structures of the underworld or the details of the Citadel—gives a distinct sense of character to the human, vampire and godly locations within The Songbird & the Heart of Stone. Did you have any particular inspirations for the look of each major location? I’m very flattered by this question, because it’s so important to me that each of the houses feels distinct! My favorite thing about the Nyaxia world is that it’s just so huge, and with every book that ventures into a new corner of the world, I try to make sure that place feels different from everywhere we’ve been before it. Typically, I’ll start with a very general “vibe” for a place, and then I’ll mash together many different influences until I like what I’ve arrived at. I will be the first to admit that the entire creative process on this front is chaotic!
You once mentioned that you ended up with the three courts because you couldn’t choose one type of vampire. What were some of your influences in creating the vampire houses, and if you had to join one of the houses, which would it be? There wasn’t one specific influence for each house so much as each had a general “vibe” I was trying to capture. The Nightborn are the winged, deadly vampires; the Shadowborn are the seductive, scheming vampires; the Bloodborn are the monstrous, bloodthirsty vampires. Of course, these simplistic ideas bloomed into many others as I fleshed everything out!
I would be in the House of Shadow, because I’m definitely not coordinated enough to be in the House of Night nor intimidating enough to be in the House of Blood. I’d likely immediately get myself killed in the House of Shadow, too—but at least I could hide out in the libraries for a while first.
Despite following the same god, Mische and Chandra have little in common when it comes to both their outlook and their goals. If their roles had been reversed, how would Mische have taken to life as a midwife for vampires? What about Chandra as a vampire? Chandra and Mische both have been indoctrinated by their god most of their lives, and both of them have very real, very legitimate reasons to justify hatred of vampires. Chandra is so similar to Mische in so many ways, and yet has followed all of those commonalities to a completely different end. Even at the height of her status in her previous human life in her cult, Mische couldn’t fully accept the harsh boundaries of her world. Chandra was likely exactly the kind of acolyte Mische wished she could be in those years: pious, devoted and unquestioningly loyal. But Mische was never going to be that person, for better or for worse. Even if her positions were swapped with Chandra, they would always end up in radically different places.
Just as Chandra and Mische are foils, so too are Mische and Asar. We get Mische’s perspective the first time she sees Asar, but what does Asar think of Mische at first sight? I can’t answer this question in too much detail because it might be something we cover in the next book! In a super general sense: Asar knows right away that Mische is unusual, and he’s intrigued by her right off the bat. Some of that is just because he’s a guy who likes to know things, and Mische is objectively unusual because of her background. But even from the start, when he’s underestimating her, he gets the sense that there’s more to her.
Imbalanced power dynamics and the abuse of power are themes that have cropped up several times in Crowns of Nyaxia so far, from Vincent in The Serpent & the Wings of Night to this novel. This is obviously an issue in our own world as well, but do you think that there’s something about vampire society that makes it particularly interesting to explore? The exploration of power runs through the entire series. In the world of Nyaxia, there are just so many different layers to those power dynamics: humans versus vampires, gods versus mortals and, of course, the plethora of interpersonal power dynamics that are specific to each character. What makes this particularly interesting to me is that some groups or characters stand in very different places on the power spectrum depending on the lens you’re looking through. Vampires, for instance, are much more powerful than humans physically, but they’re also often brutally hunted if they venture beyond Obitraes. Vincent, Oraya’s father, was obsessed with maintaining power, but the things he had to do to keep it ended up isolating him—and unforgivably harming those he loved most. There’s a lot more to power than physical strength and having so many different layers in this world has made it particularly fun to explore.
Even with her own discomfort surrounding her vampirism, Mische holds views on vampires that seem more nuanced than what we see from Oraya in the Nightborn Duet. How much of that is from their backgrounds, and how much is due to the individuals—and the courts—that they’re dealing with? I love this question! Mische and Oraya are so, so different. They came from opposite backgrounds. Oraya was surrounded by vampires but constantly told how dangerous the world around her was. Meanwhile, as a missionary, Mische learned to help people become better versions of themselves by looking beyond her initial impressions of them. They embody opposite extremes, and we would have seen that even if their positions and Houses had been swapped—but of course, both still isolate themselves in different ways.
We get a deeper view of the pantheon in The Songbird & the Heart of Stone, including the very intimate interactions between the gods and their followers. What inspired you to have the gods be so very present (and fallible)? I love the sheer amount of possibility that the pantheon introduces into this world, and from the beginning, I wanted the gods to be highly present, creating very tangible impacts on the story. It introduces a whole other layer to the hierarchy of the world and another level of power dynamics. It throws open doors that would otherwise be impossible to explore!
Are there any gods who we haven’t interacted with yet who you’re excited to explore further? I am fascinated by the gods, and they play a much bigger role from Songbird onwards. So, the short answer is “yes, so many!”—but I think I’ll leave it at that rather than risk saying too much.
Photo of Carissa Broadbent by Victoria Costello.
The Songbird & the Heart of Stone starts a new arc in the author’s bestselling Crowns of Nyaxia series.
Detective Vicky Paterson has seen more than her fair share of murders in the town of Fort Halcott, New York. But this one is the strangest yet, an unnerving ritualistic killing of a woman with hoarding disorder discovered amid the already horrific backdrop of her home. Meanwhile, hot on the trail of a missing girl, professional fixers Will and Alicia stumble on another disturbing ritual in an abandoned factory that seems to stretch the boundaries of what is possible. Vicky is ready to blame her case on a potential serial killer; Will and Alicia are willing to call the ritual nothing more than the work of a deranged sex cult. But both investigations stumble to a halt when the world erupts in a cicada emergence of biblical proportions. Far from the harmless, droning creatures one would expect, these cicadas are driven to attack, forcing themselves down humans’ throats and taking residence there. As people everywhere fight to survive, Vicky, Will and Alicia begin to wonder: How is this infestation related to their cases? And how can they ever hope to stop a swarm so immense?
Even if they lack the drive to infest and kill, a cicada emergence can feel like an invasion. The Swarm, Andy Marino’s latest horror novel, pulls on this thread and amplifies it. Marino turns cicadas’ already otherworldly drone into a malevolent force, their haphazard way of flying into a learning algorithm bent on human destruction. While that premise might seem hokey to anyone who has spent time around harmless, bumbling cicadas, in execution, it is anything but. Marino’s insects are horrifying, alien creatures with unshakable drives and unknowable goals. And they don’t just come in ones and twos. In the tradition of Hitchcock’s seminal classic The Birds, the cicadas of The Swarm are inescapable, blotting out the sky in great streams of wings and writhing masses of bodies. Marino balances this ecological horror with a sympathetic look at a cast of characters whose lives were already on the brink far before the cicada emergence. Sometimes gruesome and always creepy, The Swarm rides the balance between good horrific fun and grisly speculation.
Andy Marino rides the balance between good horrific fun and grisly speculation in The Swarm, a tale of a cicada emergence of biblical proportions.
As she begins the second of the three duologies that will make up her Crowns of Nyaxia series, author Carissa Broadbent leaves the House of Night and takes her characters straight to hell—the underworld, that is. The Songbird & the Heart of Stone picks up in the months after the events of the Nightborn Duet (The Serpent & the Wings of the Night and The Ashes & the Star-Cursed King), as former acolyte Mische is still reeling from losing her connection to the sun god after being Turned into a vampire. When she is captured by the House of Shadow, one of three vampire courts, Mische is spared from death by the mysterious Asar, the bastard prince of the House of Shadow and brother to the vampire who Turned her. But Asar saves Mische not out of compassion, but to help him complete a task given to him by the goddess Nyaxia: Descend into the underworld and resurrect Nyaxia’s long-dead husband, the god of death. It’s an offer Mische can’t refuse, especially when her own god breaks his silence, ordering Mische to aid Asar and then betray him by killing the god of death after his resurrection.
In The Songbird & the Heart of Stone, Carissa Broadbent marries a thoughtful look at religious and family trauma with epic adventure and romance. Fan-favorite Mische was originally introduced as a seemingly happy-go-lucky sidekick in The Serpent & the Wings of Night. But now, she struggles to choose a path that could bring her happiness in her new life as a vampire, afraid of destroying her tenuous hold on her humanity—and her god. Not to be outdone in the personal baggage department, necromancer Asar has a past as bloody as it is tragic. You could argue that his actions go slightly beyond the “morally gray” territory so beloved by fantasy romance readers, edging into downright villainous. But his devotion to Mische and desire to help her find love that doesn’t hurt make him a compelling (and swoon-inducing) romantic lead. Mische and Asar’s story isn’t over yet, but this first half of their romance makes clear that they are destined for an adventure that will shake the very foundations of their world and its pantheon.
In The Songbird & the Heart of Stone, Carissa Broadbent marries a thoughtful look at religious and family trauma with epic adventure and romance.
Ezri Maxwell and their sisters fled the house they grew up in—a malevolent McMansion in a gated community where the Maxwells were the only Black residents—as soon as they were old enough. Their parents stayed, and now they’re dead, seemingly in a murder-suicide. To finally face the traumas of the past, Ezri and their sisters will have to return to the nest.
Model Home is a striking take on a haunted house novel, and in its pages you make it clear that you know the trope’s lineage well. What are some of your favorite haunted houses, and what drew you to the house-as-monster motif? Having a favorite haunted house feels a little like having a favorite serial killer—it’s hard to hold something in any kind of esteem when what gives it its cultural hold is its degree of terror. I came first to the haunted house genre, if it can be called a genre in its own right, via film. Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001) upset all my ideas about how we define a haunting in the first place, and for that reason was extremely formative for me when dreaming up Model Home.
I also can’t talk about Model Home without discussing Toni Morrison’s Beloved. They don’t have much in common at first glance besides families surviving in, to use Morrison’s word, spiteful homes, but both books also deal with the United States itself as a kind of specter, an entity that possesses. There’s so much that cannot be exorcized, no matter how much we will it.
“When writing about a place, I ask, what would I miss about it were I to leave it?”
Model Home is a very internal novel. Can you talk a little about what it was like getting inside Ezri’s head? Ezri has an extremely fractured, poorly realized identity. At many points in the novel, it’s evident they don’t see themself as a person or self at all. Still, they’re extraordinarily observant and self-examining. Getting into Ezri’s head was a little like writing about a subject the way a scientist might, with a very keen, cold, objective eye. I wrote Ezri the way I’d write someone filling out a lab report about themselves, trying desperately to understand something they never could.
One of the more unique features of the prose in Model Home is the lack of dialogue punctuation when Ezri is remembering a conversation, rather than actively taking part in it in the present. Why did you choose to use quotation marks for conversations in the present but not in the past? Everything that happens in the past is happening in Ezri’s memory, which necessarily has a dreamlike quality to it. When writing, I aim as much as possible to use the tools of language and prose to mirror various feelings and phenomena. The lack of quotations in the memories calls to attention the haze and murkiness inherent in the act of remembering.
A narrative featuring a heavily racist community could have (obviously) been set in a lot of places. Why did you decide to set Model Home in the suburbs of Dallas? I spent a lot of time as a kid in the North Dallas suburbs, and it will always have a really intense hold on my imagination. Texas, in general, actually. It’s a strange place with strange people (though, of course, that can be said of anywhere). My mother and I used to visit houses for sale in fancy gated communities just like the one in Model Home, fantasizing about what life there would be like. There was a short-lived TV series set in Dallas called Good Christian Bitches, based on a memoir of the same name. I’ve never seen the show or read the book, but I remember when I heard that name and learned it was about Dallas, I was like, oh, yes, absolutely, correct.
Over the years, I’ve loved seeing the breadth of places where your mind has taken readers—and how strongly you’re able to invoke those places. How do you go about instilling that sense of place within your work? I was always that kid who could get lost in a fantasy, and I haven’t outgrown that. I live in the worlds I create in my head, fall asleep thinking about them. It’s genuinely a pleasure. The realm of the imaginary, even when what I’m imagining is something awful, is a refuge for me. It’s like real life but more. Or sometimes less. But in just the right ways I need at a specific time. I like to think that by spending a lot of time in these fantasy worlds, I can pull out the details that give a place its uniqueness. I moved around a lot growing up. I am always longing for places I’ve been before. So when writing about a place, I ask, what would I miss about it were I to leave it?
I love the environmental contrasts that come up constantly in Model Home—from the heat of Dallas versus the cool of the interiors to the difference between Texas and the U.K. Why did you highlight the extreme contrasts of these environments? Contrast makes things easier to see. The fake sterility of a new-build development appears sharper against a crumbling old Victorian. But also, I love place. It’s strange how every city, and every pocket within a city, has a flavor and a history and a strangeness. It feels right and correct to write about it and draw out that uniqueness.
Emmanuelle, Ezri, Elijah, Eden, Eve—why the “E” names? There’s nothing special about the letter “E” in particular—They used to have all “F” names in a previous draft!—but I thought Eudora might be the sort of parent who would give all of her children names with a similar theme or sonic motif. Since she and her husband shared “E” names by coincidence, she decided on the letter E for her offspring: Ezri, Emmanuelle and Eve. I think the fact that Eve and Ezri kept up the tradition shows the hold their mother still has on them.
We mainly see the siblings’ father through Ezri’s eyes: a distant man who, while not particularly harmful to their upbringing, certainly has his own shortcomings. Do you think that Emmanuelle and Eve would have the same things to say about him? I think for all the siblings, their mother was such a massive force in their life that no matter what kind of father their dad was, he would’ve been overshadowed.
Your work spans several media. Has working with different forms—and video in particular—affected how you approach your writing? I absolutely think through a multimedia lens when I write. Through playwriting, I’ve learned specifically how to think about bodies in space, how they move, how they interact with the objects in a scene. And I always think about each scene as if it were in a film. What is being communicated through the actions of the characters? What does the space look like? What’s the geography of the room they’re in?
Photo of Rivers Solomon by Wasi Daniju.
The author’s new horror novel, Model Home, is a terrifying new take on the haunted house.
Ezri Maxwell doesn’t know whether their childhood home had ghosts, exactly, but they do know that it was haunted: determined to maim, traumatize and scare them and their Black family into leaving their mostly-white Dallas suburb. Desperate to distance themselves from a childhood of constant dread, Ezri and their sisters fled the former model home as soon as they were old enough. Their parents, however, stayed where they were—right until the day they died under mysterious circumstances. In the aftermath of the apparent murder-suicide, the remaining Maxwells must reckon with not only their parents’ deaths, but also their relationships with one another and their past experiences. All the while, they must wrestle with a singular question: Were their parents’ deaths as they seemed, or did they die at the hands of the spirit the three siblings all tacitly agree haunted their childhood from the moment they moved in?
To call Model Home a haunted house novel is like saying that It is about a clown. Yes, you would technically be correct, but you’d be missing the point. At its core, Rivers Solomon’s latest novel is a study of the interior landscape of someone trying to make sense of their life in the wake of extreme tragedy. Ezri’s head is cluttered with the detritus of trauma, from their mother’s ambivalence toward them as a child to the repercussions of living with mental health issues for years, (“a host of diagnoses—which change with whatever clinician I see”). That emotional clutter often makes Ezri an unconventional narrator, and occasionally it makes them an unreliable one. It also explores how Ezri’s struggles to learn to be a parent mirror their mother’s obvious reluctance to move from academic to full-time mother. Add that to the long-reaching malice of the house itself, and Model Home makes the point that the past doesn’t just inform the present: It haunts it. A disturbing tale that explores self-doubt, family drama and childhood trauma, Model Home is a powerful and gut-wrenching addition to the haunted house pantheon.
Rivers Solomon’s Model Home is a powerful and gut-wrenching addition to the haunted house pantheon.
TJ Klune’s gentle yet politically pointed tale of six magical orphans, their devoted caretaker, Arthur, and Linus, the government official who comes to love them, The House in the Cerulean Sea, was hailed as a beloved modern classic practically the second it hit shelves. Klune’s sequel, Somewhere Beyond the Sea, is told from Arthur’s perspective as he, Linus and the children continue the fight to protect their makeshift family.
The title card for the novel coming after the prologue felt wonderfully cinematic. How and why did it end up there instead of in the very front of the book? I thought of some great moments in film, television and video games where the title card comes not at the beginning, but partway through. I tend to be a visual writer, and the thought of the title coming after the prologue felt like a neat little trick. Not only that, it’s different! I want to try and find new ways to tell stories, and this is just the first step.
The technology in Somewhere Beyond the Sea, which takes place in a world just a few steps away from our own, is both fantastical and outdated—almost like what people thought “futuristic” would look like in the 1960s. What inspirations did you have for the setting, especially its technology and time period? I adore the idea of retro-futurism. It’s kind of funny how I chose what and what not to include. For example, there are radios and computers, but no mention of cell phones or televisions. Music gets played on records. People dress a certain way. It’s timeless, in a way, but also very much in the right now. It gives the illusion of this being a fairy tale of sorts, while allowing me to write about issues of today while still bopping about in the old-school.
The rich and playful sartorial choices in Somewhere Beyond the Sea are delightful. What visual or cultural influences went into our beloved characters’ iconic looks? OK, stick with me here because this might sound a little weird: You know Studio Ghibli? The makers of such animated film treasures like Spirited Away or Princess Mononoke or The Castle in the Sky? No one—and I mean no one—can animate food like they can. The soups! The bread! The big hunks of meat! Not only do I want to create literary visuals on par with Studio Ghibli (Reach for the sky!), but I want readers to feel like I do when I see Studio Ghibli animated food. It is such a weirdly specific thing, I know, and yet, it is something that gets stuck in my brain. You can feel the love and passion the animators have over such little details. That’s what I want to do with my writing. I think so many authors can get stuck on the Big Picture which, OK, fair play. To me, however, it is these little details that mean just as much.
“So many decisions are being made on behalf of children, but why is no one asking what they think or want?”
Poetry and song lyrics, especially from jazz standards, are absolutely everywhere, whether it’s via direct quotation, allusion or description. Why is music so important to Somewhere Beyond the Sea, and why the emphasis on jazz in particular? Music has always been a big part of my books, perhaps none more so than in these two books. But with the sequel, I wanted to push it a little further. Jazz music in particular feels like these characters, given how many variations of jazz there are. Jazz can bounce, it can sneak and slither, sometimes all at once. Particularly, I think of Lucy and Chauncey and Talia [some of Arthur’s charges] in terms of jazz music.
There are multiple moments in Somewhere Beyond the Sea when older generations try to pass down the defense mechanisms of respectability politics, an act that is generally met with justified pushback from the children. What do you hope people—especially older readers—take away from this debate? That so many decisions are being made on behalf of children, but why is no one asking what they think or want? It boggles the mind that some people seem to think that they can take away books or come down hard on trans students and not expect there to be repercussions. The youth of today are smarter, more worldly than we ever were at their age, and we expect them to just sit there and take it? That’s not going to happen. Kids know what’s going on, and they are furious about it. They walk out of schools in support of their classmates. They’re marching in the streets to show that they won’t let people in power get away with taking away their rights.
This book is meant to show that no matter how hard you prepare kids for the future, there will always come a moment when you have to step back and let them make their own decisions, their own mistakes. It’s part of growing up.
The idea of equity and human rights as an intersectional struggle comes up several times, from comments about nonbinary pronouns, to opposition to queer couples adopting, to race. You could create whatever kind of world you wanted, so why did you decide to create one where transphobia, homophobia, sexism and racism are still issues? Because I remember how certain people reacted in 2015 when same-sex marriage was legalized. They said things like, “Homophobia is over now that queer people can do what everyone else can!” Do you remember what followed? We were told that allowing same-sex marriage was a slippery slope toward degeneracy.
And now, here we are, in 2024, and the world has gotten that much worse, especially with regards to the LGBTQ+ community. If we don’t face these things head on, if we don’t call them out immediately, then they fester and grow.
Same-sex marriage isn’t even a decade old, and we have certain Supreme Court justices signaling they think the 2015 decision oversteps. We were told Roe v. Wade wouldn’t fall, and yet it did. The same could very easily happen with same-sex marriage.
And it boggles the mind that there are people in the queer community—mostly cis white gay men—who are just as transphobic as right-wingers are. Do we really think they’ll stop at the trans community? They won’t. If people in power have their way, they’ll come for the rest of us next. It brings to mind the fun little internet expression coined by Adam Brott on Twitter in 2015: “ ‘I never thought leopards would eat MY face,’ sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party.”
All the children have their own stories and struggles, but Lucy’s transformation into a child who loves actively and fiercely over the course of both books is such a powerful one. How do you balance that with the fact that he is, technically, the Antichrist? Initially, I chose to include the Antichrist in the first book as I wanted an “extreme,” someone who is capable of great power. It fed into the idea of wanting to explore nature versus nurture. What would happen if a child like Lucy, a child of immense power born of darkness, was given the chance to be a child? What would that look like if he got to grow up just the same as everyone else?
In these stories—particularly in the sequel—we get to see Lucy reckon with the idea of what it means to be human. As he says, it is so hard being human. And it is. What I love about Lucy is that he takes this all in and makes his own decision about what it means to be human, or what it means to be good. Though I adore Arthur, I think it’s important to show that not everything is black and white; there are so many shades of gray that we can fall into, and still try to be good. That’s where I think Lucy is.
“Not everything is black and white; there are so many shades of gray that we can fall into, and still try to be good.”
Arthur’s relationship with the basement changes by necessity when David, a new addition to the orphanage moves in. Why did you put David’s bedroom there? These stories have always been about healing. What does it look like? How can it be different for each individual? How long does it take, or is it a lifelong process?
Part of Arthur’s healing was to remove the power that some places/people/things can hold over us. In his case, the basement was a place where Arthur was held because he was told he was a monster. To take something that caused pain and suffering and turn it into a beautiful thing, a room for a boy who has never had his own room before, seemed like something Arthur would do. It is for David, yes, but I like to think it was also for Arthur, too.
David mentions wanting to be a monster—and wanting to scare people—as a way of giving them what they want and bringing them joy. To say that Arthur is at first ambivalent about this concept feels like an understatement. How do you think each of their perspectives has changed by the end? Arthur has spent so long fighting against that word: monster. Not only for himself, but for his children, his community. And then, to have a child come to their home, one who finds power in that word? While Arthur is lovely and caring and would do anything to help, he’s also a bit stuck in protective mode, as many parents are. Bringing David to the island with his monstrous talents was meant to show that even Arthur can sometimes make mistakes. He too needed to grow, and I think David was the best thing for that.
Lucy mentions Florida as a place to send an unwanted individual, and the existence of Ella Fitzgerald does imply that the U.S. exists somewhere in this world. Does it—and Florida—exist as we know it in your version of Earth, or has Lucy glimpsed its unique horrors through the fabric of the cosmos? I do believe the U.S. exists in this world, at least some variation of it. And let’s be honest: Florida is probably not so great there, too. How delightful is it that even children who have never been know not to travel there? Though Chauncey would probably enjoy all the hotels along beaches in Florida, he would be dismayed at the fact that the Florida government isn’t allowing rainbow colors to be shown during Pride. As Chauncey says, “Gay rights are human rights!”
Photo of TJ Klune courtesy of the author.
How jazz and Studio Ghibli helped the author write a sequel to his bestselling The House in the Cerulean Sea.
Arthur Parnassus, a survivor of the regressive policies of the Department of Magical Youth (DICOMY), would never have imagined his adult life could be so happy. But even as he enjoys his status as soon-to-be adoptive father to the six magical children who live with him and his boyfriend, Linus, on Marsyas Island, the world is becoming more dangerous for people like Arthur and his charges. In an effort to shine a light on the treatment of magical beings at the hands of DICOMY, Arthur publicly testifies about his past and the issues with the current system of orphanages and segregation of magical children. But it soon becomes clear that the government is less interested in what Arthur has to say than in painting him and the children as dangers that must be subdued to defend “normal” families. After Arthur’s testimony inevitably ends badly, Marsyas is saddled with a new inspector determined to prove that the children must be removed and order restored.
On the surface, Somewhere Beyond the Sea, the highly anticipated sequel to TJ Klune’s beloved 2020 bestseller The House in the Cerulean Sea, seems to be taking Arthur and Linus’ story in an ominous direction. The threat of DICOMY looms larger, its lieutenants more threatening and its messaging more overtly fascist. Some of this is a matter of perspective: While the first book followed Linus’ journey from a well-meaning outsider to a solid ally, Somewhere Beyond the Sea is told from Arthur’s point of view. The shift in perspective centers Arthur’s struggle to hold on to what is precious in the face of increasingly bigoted attacks and the weight of personal trauma, all the while trying to figure out the “right” way to protest being abused by his own government. Yet despite its darker framing, the novel remains rooted in the joy of its characters as much as in their struggles. From weekly Saturday adventures to Arthur and Linus’ blooming relationship, Somewhere Beyond the Sea never misses an opportunity to show us the love that permeates Marsyas. Indeed, the novel is a triumphant rallying cry that reminds readers that it isn’t enough to believe in the rights of our brethren: We have to fight for their joy, too.
Somewhere Beyond the Sea, the highly anticipated sequel to TJ Klune’s The House in the Cerulean Sea, is a triumphant rallying cry for freedom and joy.
If you had told T. Kingfisher a few decades ago that she would write a novel inspired in part by her love of Regency romance novels, she probably wouldn’t have believed you. After all, the author is best known for her work in horror and dark fantasy, two genres not exactly known for their similarity to frothy series like Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton or Evie Dunmore’s A League of Extraordinary Women.
Indeed, years ago when she discussed romance with a friend (who just so happens to be acclaimed Regency romance writer Sabrina Jeffries), Kingfisher was largely dismissive. “I had the unenlightened, snarky view of romance as just ‘girly stuff.’ ” Her friend pushed back. “She, very patiently, was like ‘Have you ever read one?’ ” Kingfisher hadn’t, so she gave one of Jeffries’ books a try. To her surprise, she liked it. More than liked it, in fact, despite the fact that “nothing actually happens; there are no explosions, no one is getting kidnapped.” So she read more, and she realized that Regency romances are set “just far enough away in history that it feels fantastical.” The subgenre also gave her a look into what she describes as a sort of shared universe: “A good Regency takes you to a world you know and that you’ve read lots of books in, so it’s fun comfort reading.” And because Kingfisher doesn’t read in-genre while she’s writing, Regencies eventually became what she’d read while she was drafting. “Since I write a fair amount of horror these days, I read quite a lot of [romance].”
“There’s a lot of people in the world who are just trying to get by and are just kind of beaten down, and they should be allowed to be the heroes of books too, dammit.”
Years later, Kingfisher decided that she wanted to dip her toes into the familiar “extended universe” of Regency romance and write one herself. “It sort of grows on you, and you think ‘I could do this,’ ” she muses. But it wasn’t so simple to switch genres. As a setting, Regency requires a lot of research, something that Kingfisher admits is something that she can do, but that she isn’t particularly meticulous about. “There are a lot of things that it never really occurs to me to even question,” she says, referencing tiny details like the invention of modern canning practices or the use of specific types of lamps.
Which is a problem if you want to write a Regency romance, she says. The genre has ardent fans, particularly costumers, who care very much about the historical accuracy of the work. “There are people who know exactly what kind of buttons are on things, what sort of boning is in the corsets and what year it came into fashion, and they’re all very nice people. The emails they send are not in anger but in sorrow.” By her own admission, she doesn’t really care about researching clothes, so Kingfisher decided not to write a Regency romance exactly, but “something that’s more fantasy-universe Regency, and it turned into A Sorceress Comes to Call.”
Kingfisher’s horror novel, a crafty reimagining of the classic Grimm fairy tale “The Goose Girl” set in a Regency-esque world, centers on two unlikely heroines. The first is Cordelia, a young teen whose abusive sorceress mother, Evangeline, is determined to ensnare a wealthy and well-placed husband. Usingher cunning, Evangeline lands an invitation to the home of her potential match, Samuel, a squire with a sizable fortune and a love of pretty women. Cordelia is timid and naive, a poor combination for a horror heroine. She initially flounders in her new environment, jumping to help servants with their work and struggling to do more than stutter in front of their hosts. Although she knows what her mother is doing is wrong, she doesn’t feel like she can tell the squire or his family that Evangeline is a murderess with the power to physically control people like puppets (a practice referred to as “making them obedient”). When asked about Cordelia’s nature, Kingfisher grins. “She was too timid. If she would have been the only protagonist, I would have just been yelling, ‘Grow a spine for the love of god and stab someone.’ ”
But, as Kingfisher points out, not every Final Girl is going to be a spunky master of martial arts who is ready to take on evil. “There’s a lot of people in the world who are just trying to get by and are just kind of beaten down, and they should be allowed to be the heroes of books too, dammit.”
Luckily for both the plot and Kingfisher’s patience, the novel has that second heroine: Hester, the squire’s 51-year-old sister. Where Cordelia is unsure, Hester is confident. Where the young girl is guileless, her counterpart has wisdom. The only problem is that Hester is also reluctant to act, understanding that her brother will make his own mistakes and that she cannot force him to make good decisions.
“She would not be a hero unless she was pushed out of her comfortable existence. She is perfectly fine where she is at the beginning of the story,” Kingfisher says of the middle-aged heroine. That is, of course, until the consequences of not acting are great enough to spur Hester into action, something that Kingfisher says is like the story of the world in microcosm. “A lot of things in the history of the world have been done because women of a certain age go, ‘Well, crap, now I have to do something.’ ”
That isn’t to say that Hester is perfect. She can be described charitably as curmudgeonly, and more realistically as resistant to anything that will make her happy. She is a spinster by choice, having turned down a marriage proposal from Lord Richard Evermore, a man that she very much loved. Hester was convinced that Richard would be marrying beneath him, both because of her lack of title and her bum knee. But when Hester calls on her former paramour for help to get rid of Evangeline, she gets a second chance at love. Although, as Kingfisher points out, she does “fight off that second chance very hard. There are people who are just determined not to do something that will make them happy. It’s frustrating, but we’ve all known them.”
Even if A Sorceress Comes to Call didn’t quite end up being a traditional Regency romance, elements from the era still sparkle within the dark firmament of Kingfisher’s fantastical horror. One of these is Cordelia’s obsession with etiquette. She quotes heavily from a real-life tome called The Ladies’ Book of Etiquette and Manual of Politeness, consulting it for everything from how to make conversation with her hosts to the proper way to interact with her childhood friend. Cordelia’s constant check-ins aren’t just for her benefit, though. They’re for the reader’s—and for Kingfisher’s. Young ladies of the time had to follow Byzantine rules of etiquette, and as Cordelia struggled with the expectations of her new home, Kingfisher did too. “I didn’t know the etiquette of things either,” she says. And so Kingfisher mined TheLadies’ Book to assist them both. While many of the social mores outlined in the text struck Kingfisher as silly, she also recognized that “the author cared enormously about her readers and really wanted them to not be embarrassed.”
As she creates a rich tapestry of magic and alchemy, Kingfisher also weaves in a poignant depiction of abuse. Evangline’s power is manipulation, from taking control over another’s body to making them see things that aren’t there. As in many horror novels, there is no established, detailed magic system as there might be in a pure fantasy work: Evangeline’s magic is, instead, more like an elemental manifestation of her own penchant for abuse. “It’s inherently powerful and uncontrolled,” Kingfisher says.
But despite all that magic affords someone like Evangeline, it’s also precarious to try to practice it. The people of Kingfisher’s alternate Regency believe that magic is real, which makes it difficult for a sorceress to operate without being attacked by either non-magical citizens seeking to protect themselves or by their fellow magic users. “If a sorcerer were smart,” Kingfisher says, “they would never ever display any sign of magic whatsoever, and they would tell their children to never show any sign of it either.” One of her characters echoes this sentiment, saying that magic is likely “more trouble than it’s worth,” a statement that makes the author wonder if that character has magic in her own family. (She isn’t sure, wondering aloud during the interview if it’s possible to “have headcanon about your own book.”)
“A lot of things in the history of the world have been done because women of a certain age go, ‘Well, crap, now I have to do something.’ ”
To fight Evangeline’s power, Cordelia, Hester and their allies use a sort of alchemy rooted in the power of water, salt and wine. “I’m not sure where that came from,” Kingfisher says of the alchemical system, other than a question of “What feels vaguely elemental here?” As with Evangeline’s magic, the rules of alchemy are largely obscured, hidden in half-truths and metaphors within dusty tomes. Kingfisher points to the traditions of folk Catholicism as a possible influence. “My grandmother was a very devout Catholic,” she says, but was more of the “putting saint cards in the frame of the mirror type, not the going to church regularly type.” No matter its inspirations, the alchemy in A Sorceress Comes to Call is viewed with the same feelings of distrust and suspicion that Catholic practices would have been in Regency England (which was, by the time the 1800s came around, almost exclusively Protestant).
Despite A Sorceress Comes to Call’s dark subject matter, Kingfisher never abandons her signature dry sense of humor, something that she says is essential to the delicate balance of telling an effective horror story. While she admits that it’s an unavoidable part of her authorial voice, she also contends that the ability to know when to break the tension is an integral part of the genre. “I think it works in horror. It’s the same reason that the music builds, it’s very tense and then it’s the cat. It’s a cliche now, but you can only tighten the screw for so long before it just can’t ratchet any higher. You have to deflate some of it. People can’t just stay at the maximum level of paranoia the whole time.”
And indeed, without the occasional bit of situational humor—Hester and the household servants have a pointed tendency to interrupt Evangeline’s interludes with the squire at the most delightfully awkward moments, much to the sorceress’s frustration—A Sorceress Comes to Call’s dark ambiance would become stifling. As Kingfisher points out, deep horror and humor go hand in hand. “Did you ever watch M*A*S*H?” she asks, and she laughs as she says it. “People under stress crack a lot of jokes.”
Photo of T. Kingfisher by Henry Soderlund.
T. Kingfisher’s latest fantasy-horror hybrid, A Sorceress Comes to Call, takes inspiration from Regency romances.
A sorceress able to take control of others’ bodies and force them into submission, Evangeline is an unpredictable and often cruel force of nature in her daughter Cordelia’s life. And when Evangeline’s latest “arrangement” with a gentleman falls apart, the pair moves to the house of Evangeline’s next target, a squire named Samuel with a large estate and a too-generous nature. The only obstacle is Hester, the squire’s spinster sister. Hester takes one look at Evangeline and knows that she’s up to no good—and that Cordelia is as much at her mother’s mercy as Hester’s own brother is. Cordelia and Hester must work alongside a cadre of Hester’s closest friends (including Richard, her former lover) to stop Evangeline’s dark plot and rescue Cordelia from a life under her mother’s thumb.
Inspired at least in part by author T. Kingfisher’s love of Regency romance novels, A Sorceress Comes to Call is a delightful combination of the alien-yet-still-familiar worlds of Jane Austen and Bridgerton and the shadowy terror of the unknown. That might seem like an odd combination, but telling a story that takes inspiration from such a well-known setting affords Kingfisher with ready-made world building, giving her flexibility to focus instead on her leading women and the evil that has come to ruin them.
To say the two heroines of A Sorceress Comes to Call are unlikely is an extreme understatement. Cordelia is too timid: Left without guidance (and encouraging banter) from Hester, she would likely have continued to cower in her mother’s shadow. Lively and curmudgeonly, the 51-year-old Hester would have been content with her lot in life, bum knee and all, without the threat of Evangeline’s presence. Neither is the image of the “final girl” we’re taught to expect. But through gut-clenching scenes of body horror and moments of heartwarming humor, Kingfisher shows that even the most unlikely of heroines can prevail against the darkness
With both gut-clenching scenes and moments of heartwarming humor, A Sorceress Comes to Call is the Regency-fantasy-horror hybrid only T. Kingfisher could write.
As teens, best friends Jeremy Cox and Rafe Howell disappeared into a stretch of West Virginia wilderness known as Red Crow. They reappeared six months later, perfectly healthy and fit save for a series of scars on Rafe’s back. Fifteen years later, the two men are estranged. Rafe is an artistic recluse with no memory of their time away, and Jeremy is a preternaturally gifted missing persons investigator. Rafe knows that Jeremy remembers the truth of what happened, but Jeremy has long refused to reveal a single detail. When a young woman named Emilie Wendell tasks Jeremy with finding her birth sister—who coincidentally also disappeared in Red Crow—Jeremy knows that he’ll need Rafe’s help to find her.
Meg Shaffer’s The Lost Story is a gorgeously wrought tale of yearning, grief and hope. Taking heavy inspiration from C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, Shaffer imagines what life would be like after a magical world changes you forever and then sends you home. Would you be Rafe, whose subconscious wants so desperately to return that he tries to drive to Red Crow in his sleep? Or Jeremy, who can remember every moment, but clearly has very strong reasons for not sharing them with Rafe? Or would you be the one left behind, who never knew what happened to your loved ones and could only hope that one day they’d return? The Lost Story gives us a window into all of these perspectives, depicting each with compassion without sacrificing a whit of drama. Layered atop it all, a delicious smattering of meta-narrative keeps the story feeling less like a tragedy and more like the warmhearted fairy tale that it is, reminding us that there is likely a happy ending (at least of sorts) waiting for us at the end of it all.
A spiritual epilogue to C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia, Meg Shaffer’s The Lost Story explores what happens after you return from a magical realm.
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