There’s a line about the road to Hell being paved with good intentions. It’s a good way to describe the situation that the people in Sharon Shinn’s new novel The Shuddering City (paperback, Kindle) find themselves in, thanks to a well-meaning god. In the following email interview about it, Shinn discusses what inspired and influenced this romantically-tinged fantasy tale.
With Into The Riverlands (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), author Nghi Vo is continuing the Singing Hills Cycle of fantasy novellas she launched with 2020’s The Empress Of Salt And Fortune and continued later that year with When The Tiger Came Down The Mountain.
In the following email interview, she discusses where she gets the ideas for these stand-alone but connected stories, as well as her hopes for the Cycle going forward.
While writer R.B. Lemberg is not alone in creating their own fictional fantasy universe, the one they’ve created – the Birdverse — is quite unique. In the following email interview, Lemberg not only discusses the creation of this universe, but also the first novel they’ve set in it, The Unbalancing (paperback, Kindle).
In her now classic novel Interview With The Vampire, Anne Rice cleverly treated vampirism not as a mystical or demonic issue, but instead as a medical condition, paving the way for more realistic stories about bloodsuckers. Which is where we find David Carrico’s new urban fantasy vampire tale, The Blood Is The Life (hardcover Kindle). Well, mostly. As Carrico explains in the following email interview, his story puts a rather interesting spin even Rice wouldn’t have seen coming.
In the following email interview about her new fantasy novel Into The Broken Lands (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), writer Tanya Huff says, “…there’s a quest for a mystical object … [and] … a devastating mage war…” But as she also explains, despite its obvious, scope, Lands isn’t an epic fantasy story.
They say that “evil begets evil.” But not always. Take Dan Koboldt’s new fantasy heist novel Silver Queendom (paperback, Kindle, audiobook) which — as he says in the following email interview — was inspired in part by a TV show about a heist crew with a very different moral compass than the crew in this novel.
The fantasy genre is full of ordinary people who step up and become heroes. But in his sword & sorcery fantasy novel The Coward, writer Stephen Aryan gave us an ordinary person who not only didn’t do anything heroic, but he feels bad when he’s rewarded for what he didn’t do.
Unfortunately for him (but fortunately for us), that isn’t where his story ends, as Aryan has now released a companion novel called The Warrior (paperback, Kindle), in which the non-hero’s undeserved rewards drive him to do something, well, heroic.