In her ongoing series The Singing Hills Cycle, author Nghi Vo has sent the Cleric Chih on some engaging, and often cozy, fantasy adventures.
But as Vo explains in the following email interview about the newest novella in this series, The Bridges Of High Hill (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), this time around, Chih is kind of screwed.
When working on a story, writers will sometimes figure out the character’s back story as a way of determining what that character will do, and why.
Though in the following email interview with author Tim Akers about The Eccentrics (paperback, Kindle), the third book of his urban fantasy series Knight Watch, he explains that the idea for this book, and the one that preceded it, Valhellions, were actually conceived of us as the backstories for the series’ titular first installment.
In the following email interview about her new novel The Sins On Their Bones (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), writer Laura R. Samotin talks about how not seeing someone like her in fantasy stories led her to write this queer, Jewish, dark fantasy novel with a heavy romantic subplot, which is the first of a two-parter.
If you’ve ever eaten Mexican food or Italian food or, really, more than one dish from any country or region’s dinner menu, you know that people can use the same or similar ingredients but end up with something very different.
Which brings me to Simon R. Green’s Jekyll & Hyde Inc. series, in which monsters fight aliens. Which would seem to occupy a similar territory as Green’s Ishmael Jones novels, in which an alien fights monsters.
But as Green explains in the following email interview about Hyde & Seek (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), the second book after 2021’s Jekyll & Hyde Inc., it’s not just who’s on which side that’s different in this sci-fi / fantasy / horror / mystery mash-up.
With Zombicide: Black Plague: City Of The Undead (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), writer C.L. Werner is concluding his series of medieval fantasy novels inspired by the zombie board game Zombicide: Black Plague.
In the following email interview, Werner discusses what inspired and influenced this supernaturally scary story, as well as why it’s the end of this saga.
With Wicked Problems (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), writer Max Gladstone is presenting the middle piece of The Craft Wars Trilogy, a new subseries connected to his epic urban fantasy hexalogy, The Craft Sequence.
In the following email interview, Gladstone discusses what inspired and influenced this second book of three, how this series connects to The Craft Sequence, as well as whether or not you need to go back to the beginning of that series to comprehend this new one.
With The Hiding (hardcover, paperback, Kindle), writer Alethea Lyons is kicking off a dark, contemporary urban fantasy series called The Seer Of York, with two more books — Reawakening and The Somnia — slated for September and this time next year, respectfully.
In the following email interview, Lyons discusses what inspired and influenced this series, as well as her plans for it moving forward.
Putting a different spin on a work of literature isn’t new, but it is really popular these days thanks to books like Madeline Miller’s Circe and Jennifer Saint’s Ariadne.
It is in this tradition, but also in its own way, that we find Mariely Lares’ historical fantasy novel Sun Of Blood And Ruin (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), which not only puts a unique spin on the character of Zorro, but also sets said story in an alt-history world.
In the following email interview, Lares discusses what inspired and influenced this story, which is the first book of a duology…and (if she has her way) maybe more.
With Play Of Shadows, swashbuckling fantasy writer Sebastien de Castell is kicking off a new series called The Court Of Shadows, which is itself a spin-off from his Greatcoats series.
But before he does that, he has a prelude to present: Crucible Of Chaos (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), which, as he explains in the following email interview, has “plots and schemes” that are “harbingers of what will unfold in the main series.”