With The Dragon In Winter (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), author Jonathan Maberry is bringing his Kagen The Damned series to an end…
Well, sort of. As he explains in the following email interview, while Winter concludes this trilogy of swashbuckling fantasy novels, this is not the last adventure for Kagen Vale.
We all do what we must to survive.
And in Alexandra Beaumont’s folkloric / historical fantasy novel Dissonance Of Bird Song (paperback, Kindle), what the people must do is inhale an enchanted mist from the lungs of birds.
(You can insert your own Affordable Care Act joke here.)
In the following email interview, Beaumont discusses what inspired and influenced this story, including why the mist comes from birds as opposed to some other musically-inclined animal.
In his Magicians trilogy, writer Lev Grossman put his own spin on the portal fantasy genre.
And now, with his new epic fantasy novel The Bright Sword (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), Grossman is doing the same — albeit in a very different way — to the legends of King Arthur and the Knights Of The Round Table.
In the following email interview, Grossman discusses what inspired and influenced this story, as well as why it’s about Arty and not some other King.
Not everything fits into a neat little package. Take the story Wen Spencer wanted to tell in her urban fantasy novel Harbinger, which was the sixth book of The Elfhome Series. Despite her best efforts, the story she was trying to tell in Harbinger couldn’t physically fit into one book, so she split off the second half, which has just been released as Storm Furies (hardcover, Kindle).
In the following email interview, Spencer talks about what inspired and influenced Storm Furies, as well as how the split came about, and how she originally wanted to call this second book Harbinger Book Two.
There’s been a lot of novels lately that are putting different spins on classic stories. There’s Madeline Miller’s Circe, a retelling of The Odyssey from the perspective of the titular sorceress, while Jennifer Saint’s Ariadne, puts a new spin of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur.
But in Michael J. DeLuca’s surrealist fantasy noir novel The Jaguar Mask (paperback, Kindle), he’s not so much putting a different spin on a Mayan myth as he is imagining what that mythical figure would be up to these days.
In the following email interview, DeLuca discusses where he got the idea for The Jaguar Mask, as well as what influenced how he told this story.
In the following email interview about his dark fantasy novel The Dissonance (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), author Shaun Hamill not only discusses what inspired and influenced this story, but also why — despite its timeframe and because of its location — it may or may not also be an urban fantasy story…and why he doesn’t really care either way.
Like a lot of us, writer Tobi Ogundiran knows many stories about the Norse and Greek gods. And like a lot of us, he hasn’t experienced nearly as many about the Yoruba gods; though it’s not for lack of trying, but a lack of them. None of the Yoruba gods have been recruited to be superheroes in the MCU; none have fought Kratos in the God Of War games; none have had songs sung about them by Kiss or Led Zeppelin any other rock band.
It’s why Ogundiran decided to write In The Shadow Of The Fall (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), the first in a two novella series called Guardians Of The Gods.
In the following email interview, Ogundiran talks about what else inspired and influenced this secondary world fantasy story, and this duology.
Given that he hosts a podcast about J.R.R. Tolkien, you’d expect Jared Pechaček’s dark fantasy novel The West Passage (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook) to be very Lord Of The Rings-ish.
But in the following email interview about it, Pechaček talks as much about the impact Moby-Dick, Hieronymus Bosch, and his religious upbringing had on this story as he does Frodo’s long walk.
