Many early reviews have compared Alexis Henderson’s debut novel, The Year of the Witching, to other feminist dystopian novels such as The Handmaid’s Tale. And while Henderson’s fundamentalist world of Bethel does invite comparisons to the horrors of Gilead, a more apt parallel may be the 2015 horror film The Witch, in which a young Puritan girl discovers that the only avenue for self-determination in her deeply misogynist and joyless world may be to embrace all that is forbidden, sinful and powerful. We talked to Henderson about how her upbringing in one of America’s most haunted cities shaped her writing and how she crafted Immanuelle Moore’s journey to the dark heart of her society.

What drew you to SFF as an emerging writer? Did you always know that you wanted to write a fantasy novel?
I’ve always loved reading SFF. I think I’m naturally drawn to the way that speculative fiction allows me to escape the conventions of this world and enter another. So it was natural that when it came time to write stories of my own, I gravitated toward fantasy. In a way, I feel like it’s all I’ve ever known. And while I dabble in other genres, fantasy has always been, and likely always will be, a creative touchstone that I return to time and time again.

What has the process of releasing and promoting a book been like during the COVID-19 pandemic?
It’s been surreal, to say the least. I think it’s always awkward to promote yourself, but amid this pandemic, attempts at promotion feel a lot like shouting into the void, and I’m often worried that by asking people to pay attention to my book, I’m drawing their attention away from more important issues. That said, I think there’s something profound and humbling about debuting during such a historically significant time. I know, without a doubt, that I’ll never forget the months leading up to my debut. And I’m immensely grateful that the publication of my book has offered me some light in these increasingly difficult times.

“I was raised on a steady diet of ghost stories and Southern folktales . . .”

As a fellow Southerner, I got the feeling that this book was somehow decidedly Southern even if it wasn’t explicitly set in the South. How has growing up in (and then later settling in) the coastal South affected your writing?
I grew up in one of America’s most haunted cities, Savannah, Georgia. Because of that, I was raised on a steady diet of ghost stories and Southern folktales, and they definitely inspired some of the eerie, gothic themes that are so prevalent in The Year of the Witching. Southern cultural conventions were also a huge source of inspiration behind the book. In the South, religion is more present than it is in other regions. Here, churches serve as more than religious institutions. They are cornerstones of the community and are often integral in shaping the social (and even political) climate of the surrounding areas. I think that social piety directly inspired Bethel, the theocratic settlement where my story takes place.

The motif of dark, earthy blood, whether from the cutting knife or menstruation, feels like it’s everywhere in The Year of the Witching. In what ways do you see blood and magic bound in this world? And is this magic feminine?
I wanted to play with the idea that creation (and the power it affords) demands blood sacrifice. I think that menstruation is symbolic of this, but so are the animal sacrifices Bethelans make in order to win the favor and forgiveness of the Holy Father they worship. So while the magic isn’t inherently feminine, I think the blood sacrifices that are required to wield it can manifest in many different ways—whether that be menstruation, blood spilled on a battlefield or a sigil carved into flesh. In the end, every act of sacrifice can be distilled down to a simple truth: blood buys power.

The figure of Lilith might be familiar to folks who know witchcraft lore. But what about the other witches? Did those come solely from your imagination, or from similar witchy archetypes?
The other witches are inventions of my own twisted imagination. I think I was inspired by some of the conventions of the horror genre (specifically the subgenres of cosmic and body horror). But for the most part, Jael, Mercy and Delilah emerged from the recesses of my mind. I remember, in the early days of drafting The Year of the Witching, being visited by each of them in turn. It was almost as though I had to gain their trust through the writing of the story, and once I did they revealed themselves to me.

The contrast between the earthy, transgressive witchcraft and the strict puritanical society of Bethel that you paint is striking. Can you talk about what inspired the setting for The Year of the Witching?
I always knew that I wanted to write a story about witches and cults. The Year of the Witching, and the setting where the story takes place, was birthed from the marrying of the two. I think that both settings are emblematic of the toxic, binary social and religious structures that are responsible for so much of the dysfunction and darkness of Bethel and the Church that governs it. Ezra’s character represents a different kind of subversion of Bethel’s society than Immanuelle does.

Do you think that in Immanuelle’s absence, Ezra would have continued to rebel, or would he have simply fallen into his role as the next Prophet?
This is a great question and one that I’m still wrestling with. A part of me wants to say that, without Immanuelle’s influence, Ezra would have still found his way to the light. But I do wonder if, without Immanuelle’s prompting, Ezra would have simply followed in the steps of his forefathers. I often ask myself if Ezra’s choice to aid Immanuelle’s quest was a testament to his character or simply another way for him to rebel against the Church, and by extension his father the Prophet. I hope to unpack that question in future works, in the hopes that one day I’ll have a firm answer to it.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of The Year of the Witching.

The Year of the Witching deals not just with witchcraft but also questions of identity and how much the actions of one generation affect the lives of the next. What drew you to explore these themes?
I drew a lot of inspiration from my own life, and my natural fascination with transgenerational trauma and the way sins and vices can be passed down from one generation to the next. I wanted to know whether it was possible for a person to completely defy the circumstances of their birth and, in doing so, free themselves from the ghosts of the past.

Is there more to come from Immanuelle, Ezra and the rest of Bethel?
Yes! I’m writing the (yet untitled) sequel to The Year of the Witching right now!

Author photo by Marissa Siebert of Hazel Eyes Photography

After winning near-universal acclaim for Uprooted and Spinning Silver, two romantic, fairy-tale inspired fantasies, Naomi Novik is turning to the dark side. Her Scholomance series, which begins with A Deadly Education, takes place in a supernatural death trap of a school and follows El, a young woman who seems destined to become an evil sorceress. But if you know Novik, you know it’s all going to be a lot more complicated than that.

I’m so excited to get to talk to you about A Deadly Education! What can readers coming in fresh to your work as well as those who are longtime fans expect for the first installment of this new series?
I think that one consistent element is that my work is always in conversation. In this case, there’s an old folk legend of the Scholomance, a hidden school of dark magic where wizards spent years studying in the dark, without teachers, and when they left, the last graduate’s soul was taken in payment for their education. I read about this legend back when I was about 10 years old, and it’s stuck in my head ever since, and in this book I’ve worked it together with the magical boarding school trope that we all know and love from Harry Potter and A Wizard of Earthsea and the Worst Witch books and so many others.

Like Uprooted and Spinning Silver, there’s also a first-person female narrator. El, the main character of A Deadly Education, is very different from Agnieszka or Miryem; she comes into the story already knowing a lot about magic and the magical world. Also, she’s fundamentally a modern girl who has grown up in our recognizable world despite having magic herself, as opposed to being in a more historical era.

But like Agnieszka and Miryem, she’s also going through the coming-of-age process and grappling with her own power and working out who she is and who she wants to become. She’s also trying to find community and connection.

How does it feel to return to writing a series, rather than standalone fantasy?
I did my best not to return to writing a series! I wanted the story of the Scholomance to be in separate books, because the rhythm of the school year is important to the magic school story. I wanted the power of that rhythm in the narrative—punctuating the end of one year, crossing from one year to another. But I wrote most of the trilogy before I paused to get book one actually ready for publication.

"When you start from a place where your reader has expectations . . . what that gives you as a writer is a way to tap into your reader’s brain."

Your previous books are nestled into these wonderful subgenre niches—alternate history (with dragons!), romantic fantasy and now dark magical schools. Do you feel like you approached them all differently or are the bones of creation largely the same? What appeals to you about setting a story and writing in the dark academia world of the Scholomance?
When you start from a place where your reader has expectations, where your reader knows something—whether that’s because they’ve heard the fairy tale Rumpelstiltskin, or they’ve read a biography of Napoleon, or seen a Harry Potter movie—what that gives you as a writer is a way to tap into your reader’s brain.

What you get from working with source material that’s already in your reader’s head is the combination of the pleasure of a new story, and the pleasure of recognition in a story they’ve seen before. “I know that trope! I’ve seen this before!” And you also get the pleasure of the unexpected. Letting your reader have expectations gives you a more interesting way to move around your reader and with them.

The truth is no story stands on its own. Some stories may be more self-conscious than others about letting you see where they’re coming from, but I'm not, because I’m not worried about it. If I didn’t have something new to say about magical schools, then I wouldn’t be interested enough to write it myself. So I’m not shy about using tropes or other stories as inspiration, or history or any other inspiration.

Your previous books—Uprooted and Spinning Silver—are a bit lighter and more hopeful in terms of magical systems, settings and tone. I had the opposite reaction when reading A Deadly Education. It’s so tense and mysterious! How did you feel about that shift? Is a story with much darker magic elements something you’ve always wanted to do? If so, is this how you always imagined writing it, or did you have a much different idea in mind at the start?
The legend of the Scholomance paints a truly horrible place. The idea that you would spend years locked up in the dark, with answers to your lessons appearing in letters of flame, with no teachers, no contact with the outside world. It’s a horrible idea! Who would do that? What would drive somebody to go into the Scholomance? That question was one part of the root of the idea.

The other part of it was taking the glaring flaws in school safety at Hogwarts a little too seriously. If you look at Hogwarts from the objective standpoint of a parent considering whether this institution is really a good place to send your young child—you might have some questions about the choices that the administration is making. Does the school really need to have a locked chamber with a basilisk in it? Do the staircases really need to fly around to different locations?

The Scholomance series is basically taking that a step further, and acknowledging, “Yes, this school of magic is absolutely horrible. The school is, in fact, deadly.” So you have this terrible school—What makes people go there? What makes them send their children there? How do they survive it? Who comes out of it, and how do they come out of it?

El is biracial—Indian and Welsh—and I’d love to know what sort of research or sensitivity reading you did while writing about her identity and lived experience.
My specific research for any novel is guided by the work itself as it goes. I don’t decide a character's backstory in my head and then dole it out; I find things out about my characters as I write them down. And when I do write a line where a character tells me and the reader something about herself, that's where my research begins, making sure that what I'm saying works and makes sense and is true.

But I don’t mean just fact-checking—it’s not the single line; you have to chase the single line you’ve written and follow where it leads you. Once I spent a week researching whether there were sidewalks in Edinburgh in 1806. It didn’t actually matter, I could have just tweaked the line and avoided the question far more easily, but in chasing that question I learned a lot of things that I didn’t know I needed to know. So I do that and I find and pack the information away in my head, and then it is there and ready to come out when it’s relevant.

For one example with A Deadly Education, early on I wrote a line where El was irritated about having been taught Marathi instead of the more practical Hindi. That’s the moment when I learned her dad was from India and specifically the Mumbai area. And it was clearly right when it came, because the Scholomance was taking shape in my mind by then as a British Empire construct, this sort of Titanic-scale industrial project, and therefore intuitively connected to the massive exploitation of India. At that point I needed to do a chunk of reading and research to understand what that line told me about him and about her.

And then in turn, one of the things I found while doing that research was a terrific online course by HarvardX about Hinduism Through Its Scriptures (I highly recommend, it’s free to audit), and what I learned there informed the backstory of the Golden Stone sutras later on in the book.

I did also ask my publishers to get me a sensitivity reader on this book as well, someone who wouldn't feel inhibited about giving honest feedback because they could stay anonymous and weren't working for me. I found the feedback they got for me really useful. I do think a good general rule for any author is that when you want honest feedback on a topic where people routinely react defensively, you have to go out of your way to make it really safe for someone to give you that feedback.

And you also just have to listen to the feedback that is out there in the world already. It’s there to be read and heard and taken in.

El’s also a bit prickly, which I personally loved. Were there any moments in writing her that surprised you, where a scene took a completely different turn than what you had planned simply by way of staying true to her personality?
El didn’t surprise me quite so much because I felt very clearly from the beginning that she wasn’t being completely honest with herself—that mentally she was working really hard to survive the experience and as part of that to convince herself that it was both survivable and worth surviving.

The prickliness, the dark humor, the sarcasm—that’s how El is surviving, and also how the reader survives, because I don’t actually want to give the reader the direct visceral experience of being in the Scholomance. The Scholomance is not a nice place! But I do want to pull back the curtain every so often; those scenes are the true moments. When those scenes happen, that’s what’s real. They tell you something true about the place and about El.

The side characters surprised me more often, because going in, I didn’t know who all of them were and which ones would be important. Several of them became important over the course of the book. Yi Liu in particular was an interesting surprise for me but I don’t want to spoil why.

I always let the characters lead me. So I don’t have a preconceived plan for any scene. I start to be able to see what’s going to happen a certain distance ahead, but that’s only because I know that’s where the characters are going.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of A Deadly Education.

There’s a hefty cliffhanger at the end of A Deadly Education and I certainly don’t want to give anything away. But when can we expect to pick back up in the Scholomance and do you have an expected number of books in the series? I’m already clamoring for the next one!
It’s a trilogy. It was supposed to be a duology, and then the first book ended where it ended—unexpectedly—and I realized I had to write three books instead of two. Book three is already under way; book two is basically done.

I feel I should share, in the interest of giving fair disclosure: When I sent book two (The Last Graduate) to my editor, she replied with a subject line of all AAAAAAAAAs that was longer than the width of my (very) large screen. And that’s generally been the reaction of most readers at the end of book two. I’m sorry! I don’t actually mean to torture people!

But that’s where the books needed to end. As a writer, sometimes you write a scene, and there’s the end. It’s done! When that happens, you have to accept it. You can’t fight an ending. When your brain gives you an ending, you have to nurture it and pet it. Like a small, fluffy mouse.

If you weren’t writing fantasy, which other genres would you like to try? Something similar or completely new?
Fiction is a subset of fantasy, as opposed to the other way around. Fantasy is fiction where, as the author, you use your power over the stage your characters are on, the stakes of their situation. I would never give that power up just to be able to say I wasn’t writing fantasy.

I know people think fantasy means there’s got to be elves, magic, dragons, wizards, something, but those are just fantasy genre tropes that people recognize and so when you use them, it gives you those expectations to play with. I do love all those tropes, and I use them freely, but to me the real value of fantasy is that my world and my characters grow together.

I will always try new things, though. A Deadly Education is very different from Uprooted and Spinning Silver, which are in turn quite different from Temeraire. My short stories have been wildly all over the map, and I’ve written hundreds of fan fiction stories that are as well.

My mantra is just that I write what I can write, when I can write it.

Lastly, I always like to ask authors what they’re reading and loving now. What books have really captured your attention lately or are books you're looking forward to?
Lately I can read three pages at a time before I get interrupted, and then another six pages two days later before I get interrupted again. But I am currently reading Beasts Made of Night by Tochi Onyebuchi and really enjoying it even though I’m crawling through it like a small snail. It’s very good and every time I come back it’s still in my head despite the interruptions, so I continue to crawl.

I also recently had the opportunity to read The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by V. E. Schwab in advance, and it’s really lovely! Faustian bargain stories are often bleak, ticking time bombs of impending doom; without giving away too much, she’s turned it into something very charming, and I think readers will be quite surprised.

Author photo © Beth Gwinn.

Genevieve Gornichec’s debut novel, The Witch’s Heart, was one month in the writing but 10 years in the making.

In the fall of 2011, she needed to write a term paper for a college class on Norse mythology. Her professor said the paper could be about anything . . . except Loki. Luckily, the professor had said something else that drew Gornichec’s attention, about the relationship between female figures in Norse mythology and the concept of fate and death. The comment led her to Loki’s mate, Angrboda, a witch-mother with the gift of prophecy.

Gornichec ended up writing a paper that connected Angrboda to other female figures in the mythology—eventually. “Before that,” the author says from her home in Ohio, “I wrote The Witch’s Heart in three weeks for NaNoWriMo [National Novel Writing Month] in the wee hours of the morning while I should have been working on that paper.”

“In many ways, Loki is the least interesting person in the novel.”

In The Witch’s Heart, Angrboda is trying to build a new identity for herself at the edge of existence after being thrice burned for refusing to give Odin the secrets of the future he desires. But then Loki comes along. Despite her initial mistrust of the trickster god, Angrboda falls in love. The witch raises their three improbable children—the goddess Hel, the Midgard Serpent Jörmungandr and the wolf Fenrir—in her cave in the forest. At first she is safely hidden from Odin and the burden of knowing what fate has in store for her children, but her sheltered life won’t last. She of all people knows that she can’t hide forever. Ragnarök (the apocalyptic end of the world in Norse mythology) is coming, and everyone must play their part.

Like John Gardner’s Grendel or Madeline Miller’s Circe, The Witch’s Heart shifts the focus of a well-known myth to a secondary character with stunning and heartbreaking results. The novel actually started as a “love letter, to Loki, really,” but by the end, Gornichec realized that she’d “really made him suck” and that the story was more of a love letter to “Angrboda . . . and all the other characters.” In many ways, Loki is the least interesting person in the novel. He’s certainly far less interesting than Angrboda, the woman who can see Ragnarök coming but knows she can do nothing to stop it.

After graduating from Ohio State University, Gornichec became involved in Viking Age Living History, a community that re-creates the customs, fighting styles and arts and crafts of Viking life. Her experience with the group helped to root her book in historical reality. Originally, she described Angrboda as wearing heavy, ornate brooches and beads, inspired by the jewelry that archaeologists have found at Viking burial sites. But after struggling to do daily chores around camp in similar clothes, Gornichec knew she needed to simplify the witch’s clothing. Away went the brooches and beads, replaced by a more sensible ensemble.

Gornichec’s command of detail in The Witch’s Heart is immense, pulling readers in and making them examine not just Angrboda’s deepest, most unsettling worries but also the tiniest, most mundane moments of her life. Indeed, some of the most beautiful scenes in the book are the smallest—Loki snoring in bed or Angrboda’s efforts to make her cave more suitable for habitation with help from her huntress friend, Skadi. The grand background of foundational epics such as “Beowulf” is still there, but Gornichec grounds the story in its practicalities.

Because the Norse pantheon can only end with Ragnarök, Gornichec always assumed that she knew exactly how The Witch’s Heart would end. Her editor, Jessica Wade, didn’t quite agree. “She said, ‘I know what you’re trying to do here, and I think that you could craft an ending that’s more satisfying to your readers . . . without compromising the source material.’ ” Gornichec says that her editor’s intervention “single-­handedly saved everyone” from the original ending by encouraging her to build something that is instead more “bittersweet” and “satisfying.”

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE:
Read our starred review of The Witch's Heart. And if you love audiobooks, check out our review of the audiobook, read by Jayne Entwistle.

Gornichec hopes that readers will walk away from her book wanting to know more, ready to ask and find answers to questions about the more mysterious figures of Norse mythology. “A couple people have asked me if I’m ever going to do a Sigyn companion novel of some sort or if I’m ever going to write her side of the story,” she says, referring to Loki’s Asgardian wife. “And my answer to that is no.” She encourages fans to write that story themselves, to “explore on their own and find their own conclusions.” Because, as she notes, what is The Witch’s Heart but “an alternate universe mythology fan fiction, really?”

Author photo by Daina Faulhaber

In a genre filled with sprawling sagas, Sarah Beth Durst has been delighting readers with meticulously crafted, breathtakingly creative standalone fantasies. Her previous novel, Race the Sands, took place in a world where the wicked were reincarnated into terrifying beasts who competed in dangerous races. In The Bone Maker, Durst furthers her fascination with the porous boundary between life and death by creating a world marked by resurrection, the ghosts of the past and a magic system that allows people to see the future, give life to constructs and create talismans through bones.

The magic system you use here is so simple and elegant. What sorts of choices did you make when coming up with the rules of how bone magic works? How did the idea first come to you?
I had this image in my head of a silver-haired woman in a faded blue leather coat. She reaches into her pocket and . . . "What?" I asked myself. "What's in her pocket?" And my brain immediately answered, "Bones."

Not sure what this says about my brain, but that's the moment The Bone Maker was born.

I love to create magic systems with specific, clear rules. Everything that happens—and everything about the society, the history and the culture of the world—spills out as a consequence of those rules. To be clear, you don't necessarily have to have a fully defined magic system in a fantasy world, but I think that the world feels more real if the magic functions logically and consistently.

For my bone magic, I decided there were three different kinds of bone workers: bone makers, who use bones to animate inanimate objects; bone wizards, who imbue bones with specific powers such as strength or stealth; and bone readers, who use bones to tell the future.

"Even in the darkest times, people find a way—they need to find a way—to laugh."

All stories rely on a character's past to inform and shape the present of the book, and that feels particularly true here. Was it easier or more challenging to write these characters' stories after you formulated such rich backstories?
In order for me to write any character, they need to feel real to me. And real means having a backstory. We all have backstories. You, me, Darth Vader, everyone. So I believe it's not that it's easier or harder to write a character with a rich backstory; it's necessary.

It was especially essential with The Bone Maker, because this is a book about what happens after. It's set 25 years after the Heroes of Vos defeated a corrupt magician and his inhuman army made of animated bones. The heroes think their story is over. But it's emphatically not.

On a slightly related sidenote . . . I've always secretly wished it were socially acceptable to walk up to a stranger and say, "Tell me your story. How did you get to be who you are?" I love people's backstories!

This book frequently bounces between humor and solemnity. How did you control and balance the tone as you went back and forth?
I am deeply suspicious of any story that doesn't have humor. It's such a basic human coping mechanism. Even in the darkest times, people find a way—they need to find a way—to laugh.

All the humor in my epic fantasies arises from the characters. I control the tone by trying to be as true to the character as possible. If I think a character's most honest reaction to a particular situation would be to scream, then they scream. If I think they'd cope with snark, then snark it is! I think it was Ursula K. Le Guin who said that fantasy isn't real, but it's true. The more true you are to your characters, the more real your story will feel.

A lot has been said about how history repeats itself and we're doomed to relive our mistakes over and over. Does that idea ring true for you when you think about Kreya and the gang?
I . . . don't think so, actually. If it's only those who cannot remember the past who are doomed to repeat it, then Kreya and her team can't suffer that fate. None of them can forget the past. Especially Kreya. Her husband died years ago, and she's willing to cross any number of lines to bring him back.

I found myself thinking about regret while reading this book. These people have lost a lot over the course of their lives and in some cases, it heavily impacted who they are. Was that a planned decision or a happy accident? Which character's arc came together most easily?
It was a planned decision. I knew from the start that I wanted to write a book about second chances, and I sculpted the characters to be people in need of a second chance in one way or another. I wanted them to be bearing the wounds and scars of what came before and to explore how that would impact their ability to cope with an epic adventure.

As Zera says, "You know, the last time we saved the world, you people didn't have so many issues." I think Zera's arc was the one that came together the most easily. At the start of the novel, she's chosen a shallow life. By the end . . . I don't want to give any spoilers, so I'll just say I really, really loved writing her!

All fantasy worlds are filled with magical beasts and strange contraptions. Care to share any of your favorite creations that fill Vos?
I love creating creatures! I knew from the start that I wanted a slew of deadly creatures in the valley between the mountains—the people of Vos live in cities built high on the sides of the mountains because the mist-shrouded valley is deadly. Loved creating my crocoraptors and the venomous stone fish.

If I had to choose, though, I think my favorite creations in The Bone Maker are Kreya's rag dolls. She animates them with bones so that they can assist her in her tower. They're thoroughly creepy. So fun to write.

When you think back to writing this book, are there passages that you remember writing more vividly than others?
Loved writing every interaction between Kreya and Zera. They mock each other quite a bit and also truly care about each other—they're best friends who haven't seen each other in 25 years, didn't part on good terms and need to find their way back into each other's lives.

I also loved writing every scene where a character demonstrates strength—I adore writing about characters who have to rise to meet a near-impossible challenge. I believe that fantasy is a literature of empowerment. Nearly all my books are, on some level, about characters who must discover or rediscover their own power. And in this case, a lot of bone magic.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Bone Maker.

Is the ability to resurrect someone who is dead a question of morality? If you could do what Kreya did after reading Elkor's forbidden journals, would you?
In The Bone Maker, there's a cost to bringing someone back from the dead: one day of your life for every day they live. The kicker is that you don't know how many days you have left to spare. Only the magic knows.

I think the would-you-should-you depends on who died, how, when and what their wishes were. It's certainly not a power to be used lightly, and I don't think there's any easy or right answer.

Would you rather be a bone reader, a bone wizard or a bone maker?
I've spent way more time thinking about this than I probably should have! I don't think I'd like to be a bone reader—the power to predict the future is, frankly, too much responsibility. It shattered Marso. Bone maker is tempting. I love Kreya's contraptions: the bird skeleton, the ragdolls, the crawler. (A reader called my book "bonepunk," and I adore that term.) But I think I'd choose bone wizard. Make the right talisman, and incredible powers can be yours!

Very curious to hear what other people would choose . . .

At the beginning of Zen Cho’s Black Water Sister, Jess Teoh moves back to Malaysia with her parents. The recent Harvard grad is struggling with typical post-college angst and also trying to figure out how to come out to her family (or if she should come out at all). But then the ghost of her grandmother, Ah Ma, starts talking to her, revealing that Ah Ma was a spirit medium devoted to a god called the Black Water Sister, and that she and the god intend to use Jess’ body to get revenge on a local businessman from beyond the grave.

You’re perhaps best known for your historical fantasies. What drew you to Black Water Sister’s contemporary setting?
I love historical settings, but I've also always wanted to write a novel about Malaysia, where I grew up, and the people I grew up among. Black Water Sister's protagonist, Jess, isn't me—her family and problems are different from mine—but in creating them, I drew a lot on my own life. And even though it's set in the 21st century, it's still in many ways a novel about history and how it shapes our present.

Jess is an unwilling heroine and, in some ways, an underpowered one. The feeling that she’s trapped in her fate with the god only grows as the book goes on. The idea of the reluctant hero is such an interesting one that’s been done in so many different ways. Do you have any favorites from literature?
I've been rereading J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, which is an old favorite and a formative influence, and of course Frodo Baggins is a classic example of the underpowered hero who has a quest forced upon him. I think that's a big part of the lasting power of that book, this idea of small hands moving the wheels of the world. The journey from being or feeling powerless to finding your power has an immediate relatability that makes it a very compelling narrative for a storyteller to draw on.

“I'm much more interested in what is than what should be."

How do you think Jess’ life might have been different if Ah Ma hadn’t spoken to her?
The book starts with Ah Ma saying to Jess, "Does your mother know you're a pengkid?"—pengkid being a Malay slang term for tomboy or lesbian. Jess' journey brings her to the point where she can give the answer that she needs to give. If Ah Ma had never spoken to her, I like to think that Jess would someday find the courage within herself to give that answer, but it might have taken a much longer time.

This book features gods both major and minor, real and created. What drew you to writing about a “small” god (one of your own creation) instead of one of the “big” gods?
What interests me about histories and stories and places is often the specific, the local—the small, if you like. What isn’t generalizable to other places and peoples. For example, probably my favorite Malaysian gods are the Datuk Kong, local guardian spirits who are primarily worshipped by the Chinese community but who themselves may be Malay-Muslim, Orang Asal (Indigenous) or from some other ethnic background or faith tradition. If you pray to a Datuk Kong at a specific shrine, you won't necessarily find that Datuk Kong anywhere else. A helpful Datuk Kong features in the book.

I wanted the Black Water Sister to be a god that was similar in scale, a god who is very much of her time and place. I was also conscious that in writing about spirit mediumship and the Taoist pantheon, I was writing about a living faith tradition. By making up a god, I was trying to put a respectful distance between the story I invented and the actual religious practices that inspired it.

Both the god and Ah Ma are incredibly strong and often terrifying, but they’re also surprisingly weak if you know how to push them. What fascinated you about supernatural forces that are simultaneously so powerful and so weak?
The three main women in Black Water Sister—the god, Ah Ma and Jess—function as images of one another. So in the same way that Jess is weak but has strengths that neither she nor the god and Ah Ma initially suspect, the god and Ah Ma are strong but also weak in ways that Jess and the reader discover over the course of the book. Part of the reason why it's important for the god and Ah Ma to have weaknesses is that, even though they're Jess' adversaries, they're also bound to and dependent on Jess. One of the book's major themes is interdependency—what responsibility do you owe those to whom you are connected by blood or circumstance?

Some of my favorite (and more lighthearted) scenes in Black Water Sister involve Jess’ aunt and mother arguing about the efficacy of their respective religious beliefs. Where did those scenes come from, and why did you want to have your characters discuss different belief systems?
It seemed natural to me to include such discussions. There tends to be an idea of religions being mutually exclusive: If you say you're Christian or Muslim, that implies a whole worldview that excludes any belief drawing from any alternative faith tradition. But that doesn't actually match the reality in a multicultural society like Malaysia. 

My aim wasn't to suggest that any one vision of the world is the correct one but to represent that diversity of belief that exists within families and communities and even individuals. As a Chinese Christian, for example, you may still revere your deceased relatives, in accordance with the Chinese tradition of ancestor worship. I suppose some people would say that is wrong, but when it comes to this sort of thing, I'm much more interested in what is than what should be.

What does your writing process look like? Has it changed at all during the pandemic?
It's changed with every book! To complete my first novel, Sorcerer to the Crown, I wrote in the evenings and weekends while working full time as a corporate lawyer. I went part time after getting my book deal, so I benefited from having a couple of working days a week to devote to writing the follow-up, The True Queen. Black Water Sister is the first novel I've completed since having a baby—and that really messes with your schedule! The pandemic aggravated the "lack of time" issue, but I'm lucky to have a very supportive partner and family. I aim to write a little bit on a regular basis, so not every day, but most days. That will get you surprisingly far.

You’ve published several published books, but you still work as a lawyer. Do you find that any lessons from your work as a lawyer bleed into your writing, or vice versa?
Like many creators, I'm a perfectionist when it comes to writing. This is genuinely unhelpful. It makes you feel that the best outcome, if your work can't be perfect (and no work can ever be perfect) is for it not to exist. The single most helpful thing my legal career taught me was that the work just has to be good enough. Clients won't pay for you to spend hundreds of hours on something to make it perfect; it just has to solve whatever problem they have. Bringing that "good enough" mindset to my writing has made it possible for me to write much better stories than I otherwise could have done.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Black Water Sister.

Not a moment is wasted in Black Water Sister. Was there anything that you left on the cutting room floor that you wish could have made it into the final book? 
In earlier drafts of the book, Jess was aided by a retired Indian Malaysian teacher called Puan Thilaga. Puan Thilaga represented a few different things—the diversity of Penang and the syncretism of its religious traditions, but also the possibility of acceptance and reconciliation, because she had a different attitude toward queerness than the older generation of Jess’ family. I ultimately cut Puan Thilaga's chapters from the book as they weren't really pulling their weight, but I miss her.

In a recent Twitter thread you talked about your love of Tolkien and the necessity of good food writing in epic fantasy. There are also some memorable moments with food in Black Water Sister. Why do you think great fantasies often feature great food?
My favorite books tend to combine the sublime with the mundane. Fantasy is a great vehicle for that because it's capable of conveying a sense of the numinous—the inscrutable, the magical, the extraordinary—while also being attentive to the small details of everyday life, like what meals the characters are having.

Who are you reading right now? What are you most excited about in fantasy today?
We're in a real golden age of fantasy at the moment, with so many exciting voices from historically underrepresented groups being published. Shelley Parker-Chan's alternative history novel She Who Became the Sun is bound to be a huge hit. It combines drama, romance and tragedy in an epic reimagining of the rise of the founding emperor of China's Ming Dynasty. I'm also really looking forward to reading Isabel Yap's debut short story collection, Never Have I Ever, which mixes magic and Filipino folklore with immigrant tales; T.L. Huchu's The Library of the Dead, an Edinburgh-set urban fantasy about a teenage speaker to the dead who draws on Zimbabwean magic and Scottish pragmatism to solve a mystery; Aliette de Bodard's Fireheart Tiger, a romantic fantasy brimming with political intrigue set in a precolonial Vietnamese-esque world; and the concluding installment to Fonda Lee's Green Bone Saga, an epic family drama with all the style and excitement of a Hong Kong gangster movie. 

Author photo by DJ Photography.

Marina Lostetter lures readers in to her complex new fantasy with a killer premise: a death mask imbued with the knowledge and personality of a serial killer has been stolen. We talked to Lostetter about how she developed her alchemy-inspired magic system, why The Helm of Midnight needed to be told from three different perspectives and more.

Your past work has been in the realm of hard science fiction. What led you to write your first fantasy novel? Was there anything that surprised you about writing in this genre?
I've always dabbled in both sci-fi and fantasy in my short fiction, and the first draft of The Helm of Midnight was about halfway done when Noumenon went out on submission, so in some of ways I think of it as my second novel, rather than my fourth.

I think secondary-world fantasy's greatest strength is also its biggest challenge. The author is responsible for every aspect of the world. So, when I'm writing it, I get to break free from reality, but there's also no real leaning on reality. For example, if a government functions a certain way, it's because I chose for it to function that way, not because it just does. And I can use a lot more short-hand in sci-fi, because there are real-world touchstones I can reference directly. In fantasy, if I want to use cultural touchstones, I have to establish them first.

Is there another subgenre of SFF that you haven't explored yet that you would like to? And are there any that you have no interest in?
I'm a very never-say-never kind of writer when it comes to dabbling in different genres. I like to keep my options open and play around. I have an alternate-history novel with giant monsters and dieselpunk aspects that's been sitting half done on my hard drive for a while, and I would love to be able to get it out into the world one day.

"To paraphrase Dickens: Charbon, the serial killer, is dead to begin with."

The setting of The Helm of Midnight is elaborately detailed. What is your approach to world building? Where and how does a world begin to take shape for you?
My world building is a tad haphazard in early drafting. I usually only have a tentative grasp on the rules I'm trying to put in place, and end up just throwing in fun things that I later either change to conform to the rules or reform the rules around. The Helm of Midnight was especially challenging world building-wise, because I knew from early on that I wanted hidden history to be a big part of it. Which, essentially, meant I had to world build in layers.

In your magic system, people can bottle and harness emotions, thoughts and time. Do you remember how you first came up with this idea?
The Helm of Midnight incorporates one of my previously published short stories, which features the knowledge-based and time-based magic. When I expanded the world and integrated that short story into a new plot, I wanted to expand the magic system as well. Since the system already focused on enchantments, I decided the magic itself should be mined and harvested from different materials: knowledge magic is in wood, time magic is in sand/glass, nature magic—which is characterized by evolution and transference—is in metals and emotion-based magic is in gemstones.

If you had the chance, would you like to have such powers yourself?
I think any of these enchantments would be great to have—save for the fact that I know how they're made. Let's just say Arkensyre's enchantments are not responsibly sourced.

What was your inspiration for the five-pointed, multi-gendered pantheon?
I hadn't yet built a religion for the Valley of Arkensyre when I expanded the magic system into five magics, and it felt natural to assign each kind of magic to a god. You'll notice above that I only mention four kinds of magic, and that's because when we're first introduced to the world in The Helm of Midnight, one god and their magic-type is unknown. I chose to have a five-gendered pantheon because I wanted to highlight that many genderized aspects of culture are constructions. Five gods with five genders means it's natural for the people of Helm's world to treat gender more like a spectrum, and to reflect their pantheon by using any of the five gods' pronouns for themselves.

The Helm of Midnight is written from three perspectives, all of which take place in different timelines. What was challenging about such a complicated structure? Why was this approach the best way to tell this story?
Each character has their own journey, and the three perspectives end up converging with all the force of planets colliding—which was very exciting for me to write, and I hope is equally exciting to read!

To paraphrase Dickens: Charbon, the serial killer, is dead to begin with. The novel kicks off when his death mask—imbued with his knowledge and an echo of his personality—is stolen. Knowing how and why he began killing prior to his death is essential to grasping what's really going on in Arkensyre Valley. Krona is a Regulator, tasked with re-containing his mask. Hers is the present-day perspective and really gives us a baseline understanding of how society is "supposed" to work. It's Melanie who feels like the odd one out at first. Her storyline might initially seem divorced from the other two, but the entire narrative hinges on her and her bizarre encounters with magic.

Essentially, it took three perspectives across three timelines because there are aspects of the story that are outside each character's purview. The audience is getting the full story, not the individual characters.

Melanie's point of view was the only one that gave me any problems structure-wise, which I think stems from the fact that her perspective is the one that incorporates the original short story. It was also a bit of a challenge to make sure all three perspectives wove together in a way that made each chapter in a new point of view naturally flow from the last.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of The Helm of Midnight.

What's one thing you would suggest a reader keep in mind as they read this book?
Each character is moving through the narrative acting on what they believe to be true, rather than what is true.

What's next for you?
I have another book coming out this year! Activation Degradation will be released on September 28, 2021. It's a thriller-esque sci-fi novel set in Jovian space, featuring soft robots, queer space pirates, action-adventure and unreliable narration.

Author photo © Jeff Nelson.

In The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina, the acclaimed young adult and romance author Zoraida Córdova takes inspiration from her Ecuadorian heritage to create a family saga that’s more than worthy of its comparisons to works by Isabel Allende and Gabriel García Márquez. An instant classic, Córdova’s tale is complex but ceaselessly compelling, and features some of the most beautiful writing to be found in any genre this year.

You’ve won acclaim for your YA and romance novels, and Orquídea is your first adult fantasy. Who did you write Orquídea for? Was it for a specific audience, or more of a story you felt you just needed to tell?
Every book I write is for myself. My YA is for my teen self, who hungered for magical stories. My middle grade is for the painfully shy kid I once was, one who wanted adventure. My adult romance is for the version of myself that denies being a romantic (though I am). The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina is for the person I am now. It was always meant to be an adult novel, though its inspiration came from a short story I wrote for the YA witch anthology Toil & Trouble. The more I explored the characters, who’ve changed quite a bit from the short story source, the more I knew there was no way this book could be YA.

Many of your previous novels have belonged to series or collections. Do you envision Orquídea as the start of a new series?
No, the story of the Montoyas was always going to be a standalone. I’m starting to become very partial to standalones. There are a lot fewer rules to keep track of from book to book.

“I wanted to pose the question, ‘What price would you pay for survival?’”

All of the names in the book have meanings that are important to the plot, but you only explicitly explain some of them. Where did you get the inspiration behind the names you chose?
As with all my books, I reach for family names first. Orquídea’s name [which means orchid in Spanish] was originally Rosa, but the more I wrote her backstory, it didn’t feel right. As for Marimar, Orquídea’s granddaughter, I borrowed the name from “Marimar,” my favorite telenovela starring Mexican superstar Thalia. I spend way too much time on names and will sometimes fill entire pages with a character’s name, plus alternates, until it looks, sounds and feels right when I speak it.

How did the story change between when you started writing it and when you finished?
This book taught me how to slow down. Young adult editors tend to give suggestion notes like “cut for pacing” quite a bit. When it came to Orquídea, my editor at Atria gave me breathing room and space to explore the heart of the story. Every editorial round was another layer of a large house, but that house needs a strong foundation.

There’s an amazing amount of detail in your characterizations! How did you go about deciding which details mattered and how to weave them into the final book?
I wish I had a better answer than “I write for myself first.” But I do. I’m a visual writer and spend a lot of time thinking about what a scene looks like. Smells like. Sounds like. I need to want to live there first. Then, my editor comes in and tells me when I’ve gone too far or not far enough.

You draw on your own family stories throughout the novel, but were there other key inspirations behind the fantastical elements of this book?
The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina is perhaps the first time some readers are going to read about an Ecuadorian family. That is both exciting and terrifying. Exciting for obvious reasons, but terrifying because it’s hard to encompass all the experiences of any one place. I pulled from my own family stories for inspiration. For instance, when I was a little girl, my uncle had a visible scar on his belly, and he told 5-year-old Zoraida that he’d wrestled a crocodile in the river. I don’t know if that actually happened, but that was the inspiration for the River Monster that Orquídea meets. It was also important to me to include bits of history about Guayaquil, Ecuador, which is why I set pivotal scenes on the Cerro Santa Ana, the birthplace of the city, as well as La Atarazana, which is where I grew up. I hope readers enjoy those details.

How did the need to incorporate both English and Spanish impact your writing, especially with a story that’s in conversation with classic Spanish-language magical realism?
Spanish is my first language. When I was in junior high school, I was embarrassed to speak it because there were a few kids who made fun of me. We’re also living in a xenophobic climate where we see videos of Spanish speakers getting screamed at or accosted for speaking something that isn’t English. I’m proud to speak two languages, and when I write a Spanish-speaking character or family, it’s only natural that Spanish should be incorporated, even if it’s in small phrases. Magical realism, as a literary movement, sprung from Latin America, which is another reason why I didn’t pull back from any instance where a character speaks Spanish.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of The Inheritance of Orquídea Divina.

Do you think of the magic in your book as an intrinsic part of the world you built or as a foreign entity?
Absolutely intrinsic. The magic is a part of Orquídea’s journey and the very thing that gives her the ability to transform and survive. I did want to balance the magic with the contemporary world. I wanted to pose the question, “What price would you pay for survival?” The answer is of course extrapolated into the magical.

Author photo by Melanie Barbosa.