It’s 9:30 on a freezing Monday night in January and there’s a line stretching down the block outside of Manhattan’s Book Club Bar. The occasion: a midnight release party for fantasy author Sarah J. Maas’ House of Flame and Shadow, the third entry in her Crescent City series. The twist—there’s always a twist where Maas is concerned—is that Maas is on her way to surprise the throng of almost exclusively female fans willing to wait in the cold to get their hands on her book the minute it becomes available.
When she enters through the front door, fans are so busy sipping on themed drinks and prepping for trivia that she goes unnoticed. There are a few stunned gasps. Then the cheering begins. “I feel like this will go down as one of the best nights of my life,” she tells me at
