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.
For the second novel inspired by Chaosium’s table-top role-playing game Call Of Cthulhu, the good people at Aconyte Books enlisted writer Jonathan L. Howard, who’s been playing the game longer than, well, some of the people who work on it.
In the following email interview, Howard discusses what inspired and influenced Call Of Cthulhu: The Shadow On The Glass (paperback, Kindle, audiobook).
In the new short story anthology The Chaos Clock: Tales Of Cosmic Aether (paperback, Kindle), writers including James Chambers, Jody Lynn Nye, and Jeffrey Lyman mix together the seemingly disparate genres of steampunk and cosmic horror.
In the following email interview, Chaos Clock editor Danielle Ackley-McPhail discusses how this anthology came together.
With more than twenty books released over nearly thirty years, Catherine Asaro’s Saga Of The Skolian Empire series must seem rather intimidating for people just discovering this sci-fi saga.
But in the following email interview about the newest installment, The Down Deep (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), Asaro explains that this novel — which is the start of a new subseries called Dust Knights — also serves as a new entry point.
Last year, when Tim Pratt released Arkham Horror: The Ravening Deep, his first novel connected to Fantasy Flight’s H.P. Lovecraft-inspired card game, Arkham Horror, he was a little cagey when talking about whether this was the first book in a series or a stand-alone. “…let’s just say we’re talking about things.“
Well, it turns out that talk turned into action, and now we not only have a sequel, Arkham Horror: Herald Of Ruin (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), but, as he says in the following email interview, there’s also going to be a third novel in this cycle he’s calling The Sanford Files.
For her new romantic fantasy saga The Four Winds, author Alexandria Warwick took inspiration from both the fairytale Beauty And The Beast and the myth of Hades And Persephone.
In the following email interview, Warwick discusses the first installment of this four book set, The North Wind (paperback, Kindle, audiobook).
Writer Benjamin Liar is not alone in having an idea gestate for years, or even decades. Or being inspired by things he enjoyed in his 20s and 30s. And he’s not the first to be inspired by Dinotopia, be it James Gurney’s novels or the TV series.
But all three? He’s got me there.
In the following email interview about his cross-genre sci-fi / fantasy novel The Failures (hardcover, Kindle, audiobook), the first book in a trilogy called The Wanderlands, Liar explains how this story came together, along with what else influenced it and this series.
In most trilogies, the Big Bad is usually defeated in the third and final installment, while its impact is often left as an afterthought.
But in Megan E. O’Keefe’s The Devoured Worlds series, the central antagonist was [SPOILER ALERT] beaten in the second book, The Fractured Dark, which meant she could really delve into what happened next in the last book, The Bound Worlds (paperback, Kindle, audiobook).
In the following email interview, O’Keefe explains why she altered the trilogy formula, as well as what else inspired and influenced this horror- and dystopian-infused sci-fi space opera story.