Every author has their unique approach to writing: Whether they start with a theme, character, or plot, the page is where their story blooms to life. As a contemporary fantasy author, Holly Black finds joy in writing the kinds of things she loves to read.
“As a person who thought of myself as kind of a weirdo growing up,” she says, “it has been an immense surprise and a great pleasure to find out that the stuff I like is also the stuff other people like. And sometimes the weirder the stuff is that I like and then I put out there, the more people actually do resonate with it.”
She isn’t wrong. In her career so far, she’s published more than 30 fantasy novels for middle-grade, young adult, and adult readers, spent weeks on the New York Times bestseller list with several books, been a finalist for an Eisner Award and the Lodestar Award, and is the recipient of the Mythopoeic Award, a Nebula, and a Newbery Honor. Among these books are tales of siblings discovering faeries after moving to a grand estate (The Spiderwick Chronicles, co-authored with Tony DiTerlizzi), people who can change someone’s emotions, memories, and luck just by touching them (The Curse Workers trilogy), and a woman working for magicians who manipulate shadows into obeying their every command (Book of Night).
While some of these books stray into that nebulous area of dark fantasy, there’s one thing that ties them all together: “The line between horror and fantasy is that sense of awe and wonder. You can write some truly horrific things, but if that sense of awe and wonder is there, to me, it sits in the fantasy space.”
This is exemplified in her latest release, , the first in a duology. It focuses on Suren—called Wren—a faerie living on the outskirts of the human world. When her past comes calling in the form
