Poured Over: Alix E. Harrow on Starling House

By Jenna Seery / November 4, 2023 at 6:00 am

Starling House by Alix E. Harrow is a haunted house story for those of us who love books, creepy fairy tales and Southern Gothic themes. Harrow joins us to talk about her personal connections to the novel, the ties to children’s literature, the differences in writing novels vs. short stories and more with guest host, Kat Sarfas.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Kat Sarfas and mixed by Harry Liang.         

Featured Books (Episode):
Starling House by Alix E. Harrow
The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix E. Harrow
The Once and Future Witches by Alix E. Harrow
A Spindle Splintered by Alix E. Harrow
A Mirror Mended by Alix E. Harrow
Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak
She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan
He Who Drowned the World by Shelley Parker-Chan
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin

Full Episode Transcript
Kat Sarfas
Hello, I’m Kat Sarfas bookseller at Barnes and Noble. Today we are joined by the brilliant Alix E. Harrow. Alix is the best-selling author of The Ten Thousand Doors of January, The Once and Future Witches and very short fiction, including A Spindle Splintered and A Mirror Mended a duology of fractured fables. And now Starling House. Her work has won a Hugo and British Fantasy Award and been shortlisted for the nebula World History locust and southern Book Prize. Thank you so much for being here with us.

Alix E. Harrow
Thank you so much for having me. I love this podcast so, much love it.

KS
So we’ll go down memory lane a little bit. So with The Ten Thousand Doors of January, you gifted us this gorgeous sort of portal fantasy. We’ve got our witchy tales covered with The Once and Future Witches and fractured fairytales with A Spindle Splintered and A Mirror Mended and now a Southern Gothic that sort of swirls with unseen monsters and a curse town. And that’s just the novels and novellas. You’ve given us many fantastical love letters to the written word. So first, I’ll say thank you. And I know your stories have captured so many readers. And then I have to ask what led you to Opal, Jasper, Arthur, and Starling House.

Oh, thank you so much. First of all, congratulations on saying A Spindle Splintered. And twice. It’s almost impossible. Which I didn’t know I was like alliteration. It’s very fairy tale. You know, like your calling back to oral traditions. I love that. And then I was on podcasts. And I was like, This is a nightmare. And then I was like, well, when A Spindle Splinteredcame out, I was like, I’ll just do that thing where authors refer to it by the acronym. And then I was like, spindle, splintered. And you can’t do that actually. So Starling House kind of has a bunch of different origin points. But I think the truest one is that I realized at some point that I had written a bunch of books and stories about people running away and leaving a kind of a traditional like, Hero’s Journey sense of like, you have to leave home and depart and go off on an adventure. And often they were running away from places that either literally were or looked a lot like rural Kentucky, where I am from where I grew up, and where I was living when I wrote all these things, so maybe a little bit of wistfulness there. And I think it’s interesting that it was only once we had decided to leave so me and my family two years ago moved to Charlottesville, Virginia, where we are now that I could kind of conceive of Starling House, which is very much a book about staying. It’s sort of it’s my Kentucky book in my book about home and I kind of put everything in this box of everything that I kind of really miss about Kentucky and love about it and everything that is the reason I ran all kind of in one thing and the only real vehicle that is equipped genre was to tell that story to kind of hold both of these like almost romance elements and horror elements in this sense of yearning and loss. That’s Southern Gothic that’s already built there. So I just kind of climbed aboard.

Because Starling House kind of takes place in modern Kentucky making this novel, the closest to home. Did it become more personal because of that setting?

Yeah, it definitely did. There’s a ton of stuff that I just stole straight out of my own family history, which I cannot reveal in public podcast. You know, things that happen in my childhood, then like even the details of like the texture of living there. Like I worked at Tractor Supply. I was a cashier for months. I didn’t live in Muhlenberg County, it’s set in Muhlenberg County, I lived in Allen County, and in Grayson County, and then Madison County, and if you’re a Kentucky and every place is referred to only by its County, towns are too small. So I’ve lived all over my family all over, but it was definitely kind of like pulling all of that personal stuff and still trying to weave it into something that wasn’t too navel gazing, but was still like a narrative with structure and, you know, kind of a fairy tale retelling?

And it is thinking back and, you know, with, obviously, with The Ten Thousand Doors of January, and that end, you know, with Once and Future Witches, where it was it did feel more historical. This was just like, oh, this is happening now. And this could be yes, it’s taking place in Kentucky, but it could take place in 100 different towns or counties, if you will, across the states, which I think is just and I kind of love how you how you just, you know, I’m sure it’s not easy, but it seems very seamless, you know, just kind of jumping around these different fantastical genres. So the story does have a bit of a twist on the haunted house trope. I would say more maybe a sentence house that you don’t really want to make angry. What is it about a house? A home’s if you will, that sort of gets us every time? Why are we sort of collectively drawn to these haunted house stories.

I’ve always loved a good house book, even though I wouldn’t have like seen that as a category or anything. But every time like a house is sort of alive, I’m like, Oh, my buddy, my God, I love you. And I just I think it’s really fascinating to see how the sentient houses function in different genres, it plays a very, very different role. So in horror, it’s kind of the inversion of what a home is supposed to be, which is, I think what heart does a lot like a that’s why I think evil and terrifying mothers are evil and terrifying. Children are such a common thing, because that’s the opposite of what they are supposed to fulfill. So a house is supposed to be home is supposed to be safe, it’s supposed to protect you. And when it turns on you, it’s a very, like, existentially upsetting thing. But then in children’s literature. And in fairy tales, a house that is alive is more often fulfilling. It’s kind of an exaggeration of that role of caretaker and safe place at home, sometimes a parent substitute, and I got stuck in the middle of those two houses. And I think it’s ultimately because that’s just the, the kind of two things I hold in my head simultaneously about my home is that it feels like a place I love that it’s safe for me that I always want to go back to, but I know too much about it. And I recognize it as a sometimes a violent space, a scary space, something that is not safe for everyone. And so that is why you ended up with this kind of like, is this house haunted? Or is it kind of a buddy? I’m not sure. And that’s where I’m at?

I feel like I’ve seen people be like, Oh, it’s like a haunted house. Like to me, it was like a sentient — like a cat.

Maybe it doesn’t like you.

Oh, my God, obviously, it likes Opal, you know, and it like, she cares for it. And it’s, it’s happy. But then on the other end, you know, it’s not being cared for, and then it has its mood just as it swings. And yes, it was it was so interesting that the house really is a character in the story. And speaking of stories, you really love to also write stories within stories, basically, fully fleshed out books within books. But more than that, you explore, you know, mythology, and what I really love is like the oral history and community. So what comes first for you? Is it the central story, or the many stories that it’s built on?

No, I usually, so far, I’ve started always with the central story. And then at a certain point, I feel like I have burdened myself with far too much like history that I need to be a part to understand the central story to make sense of it. And to contextualize it, I find myself just needing whole other books that don’t exist, pulling them in. This one kind of came very early with that idea, in part because I was like talking to my family and reading histories of Muhlenberg County and of the space, they’re also conflicting. And I think that is largely what history is like, I think we have this quest for like an objective reality. But in truth, history is just sort of these layered narratives that often argue with each other. And you’re trying to weave them into some like, not even a clear picture, but like a map of the truth. And I especially feel that way about the Southern Gothic, which I read a bunch of them to kind of prep for reading this, just tonally. And when you read that genre, depending on who is writing them, they’re totally very different. There’s this sense of nostalgia and yearning that comes from certain authors, I think we all know who they are. And there’s a sense of horror and fear and pain that is embedded in them. And they each partake of the other and all that from other perspectives. And so like, I wanted to write a story that kind of did not exclude any of those experiences. And the only way to do that, when you have a singular main character who is narrating is to kind of pull in other stories and to try and so that there’s like a wiki page version of the story.

I love that there’s literally and I have this copy, which is like totally trashed, because this was this is what I got. And then actually, there’s a different title, slightly different title. Yeah, I love, for me, I love reading uncorrected, and then like kind of like going back and seeing you know, if there were any changes, or there were there definitely, this is where I’m starting from, and this is where I am because I honestly couldn’t wait to get my mitts on it. I was just like, give me whatever you have. And this was it. But I remember getting to the point where you literally have and I’m trying to find them now putting notes and I was like there’s footnotes here with like, when was the last time I read a book with footnotes? And it’s just wild that it’s like, and you almost you know, you create this world where as you’re kind of reading along and then you know you go to these footnotes of these other books and references and then some of them are true like you reference is like a John Prine song and I was like okay what that’s true and then you’re like you mess with us and awake were like What sir? Like which of these notes is of an actual book or an actual reference you know or a song or you know whatnot and then what’s completely been fabricated, and it does it makes you I would say it makes the reading experience much more enjoyable it kind of you know, you go down these ridiculous rabbit holes

I’m sorry for anyone googling about half of its real and the other half of it is actually real but exaggerated you know, so like, there was at one point or tuberculosis ward in Mammoth Cave Kentucky, which is an insane thing it is not you know now currently haunted but like there’s little seeds of things throughout that John Prine song see that’s the other way you could tell the origin point of this book is very much with John Prine. I have by now seen enough blank faces to realize that he is perhaps not the household and thought he was but for those of you who did not grow up listening to John Prine, arguably his first hit is a song called Paradise came out in 1971 on his debut album, and it is he is not actually from Kentucky, but both his parents where they are from Paradise, Kentucky. You see how I named it Eden in the book.

Yeah, there we are. It’s all coming around.

Which is a real town in Muhlenberg County on the Green River. And this song tells the story of what happened to it when in 1964 Peabody Coal arrived and opened the gigantic strip-mining operation, including what was then the largest steam shovel ever, ever built. It was 20 stories high. So it’s an insane machine, when they strip mined 50,000 acres of Muhlenberg County and they also built a coal fired power plant, which was at the time the largest coal fired power plant. So it was a massive undertaking within I think, by 1969. They had the TVA had been forced to buy out and relocate all 800 people who lived in the town of paradise, because it was so unbelievably toxic to exist there. Which I always think of the president by 1969 standards, like, you know, it couldn’t have been high.

And you know, that probably at that point it was already past what…

People had been leaving voluntarily because it was just like you couldn’t survive there, the amount of fly ash in the air was apparently so bad that if you hung laundry out to dry, it would turn black. So it’s just like the disgusting place to live. And so they relocated the entire town and bulldozed it and all that is left now of Paradise is a cemetery. And so his song is sort of like a folk ecological fable. It’s a familiar narrative. And like, I just grew up knowing that story, like we were next door, my dad rode up in that steam shovel when he was a kid. So, like, these stories are very, very, like known to me, I kind of thought more universally than they are. And so that kind of became like, I knew I didn’t want to set it in an actual Kentucky town. But I could invent Eden as like, almost like, what if Paradise had survived? What would it be like now and what things would haunt it?

You have the machine and like the grave and like, so it is, I mean, if you see that when you read the book, I’m hoping that the footnote, I’m assuming the footnotes made it to the final edit. I mean, you look it up. I did, though, who John Prine was I grew up in an interesting household. My dad was very British, but also loved country music. And so we had, you know, a little bit a little bit of classical, a little bit of country. So I was kind of, I guess, in a way, even though I grew up in New York, definitely had sort of, you know, a very musical upbringing. But I was not familiar with every song but I was familiar with that one. And then it kind of was like, oh, yeah, and then like, you know, obviously, in the context of the book, you start to pull the sort of those inspirations that you may have had. Really, it’s, it’s so fun. And I love I mean, you’ve done this in your other in your other books, too. I think this one, I think the footnotes might be pretty sure that’s, that’s a new thing. I’m remembering correctly. I don’t remember footnotes.

I was allowed to keep a few footnotes in Ten Thousand Doors, but only in the book within the book. So there’s very few total.

Even what you were saying before about history is sort of the objective, you know, and in terms of what, who was telling that story, and then also, who’s reading it, and what are you taking from it and adding in your own personal experiences. So I just think that was such a treat, being able to sort of like, go through that, go through those stories and that kind of brings me I guess, to The Underland and I think for myself, I very much wish that I had a book like The Underland and I think that maybe not every kid but for me, I think I would have definitely gravitated towards it. And I love to look back at my favorite tales and books as a child and how that sort of shaped my personality in general. My outlook on the world. I also love that you say you have semi feral kids, I too have semi feral children. And I often think about the stories that I read them, and then what they’ll remember what’s sort of stretching their imaginations? So do you have any particular tales or stories that you loved as a kid that you feel kind of shaped you or new favorites that you’re sort of passing on to your kids now.

I was definitely very much in a book household. So like, I read a ton of stuff, much of it wildly inappropriate, but it is having the experience of having kids and reading out loud to them. It is consistently amazing to me which ones they latch on to. And they are not always the sweetest or the funniest. Now admittedly, I do have one kid, my older son is very sweet. He loves a cute thing. And then I have one spooky little haunted child. And the spooky little haunted child just loves, you know, ghosts, skeletons, terrifying things, he just gravitates towards them. And I just think that’s kind of true of children in general. I wrote my thesis, my master’s thesis on British children’s literature at the turn of the 20th century and kind of empire and representations of colonial spaces. Anyway, the point is I read a ton of Victorian children’s literature and an Edwardian children’s literature. A lot of what lingered and stuck culturally is not what is like morally best. And it is not the kinds of things that are trying to teach children how to be good little citizens. The things that linger are the things that have like a little bit of darkness and wildness to them. Because I think that’s kind of how kids are even something as like, seemingly wholesome as Where the Wild Things Are much later on, like, my children love that. I love that. I think it is rhythmically perfect as a piece of writing. And I also think it has this little edge of genuine strangeness and danger. And so just like thinking about Victorian moralism and children’s literature and thinking about the many waves of moralism and puritanical things, like we’re going through another period of it right now, where people are choosing to cleanse children’s literature of anything different, scary, dangerous adult. And I think that’s so bad and wrong on many levels, but also on the level of what children like, what draws them to things or like, A Series of Unfortunate Events, right? That went crazy when I was like, a kid, and it’s so dark and bleak. And every kid was like, yes, orphans, multiple murders. I’m all about it.

It’s true. And I think about the books in movies and TV shows and everything that I was gravitated for. And sometimes, when I think back, I often I guess I assign like an age that’s much older than I actually was. Because in my head, I’m like, Oh, I couldn’t have possibly been X age reading this. And then I’m like, oh, no, I was, you know, and again, it’s just, it is that like, slightly macabre. I think we’re just really, I mean, kids are just naturally curious creatures. And I think honestly, it’s, like you were saying in terms of this, in a way. It’s, it’s the often the adults that are sort of, you know, curbing that or sort of, you know, eradicating that, that natural curiosity. And it’s not that I, and I remember even, you know, my son, like early on, you know, asking me those morbid questions and you like, pause, because you’re like, Oh, my God, like this answer could ruin you. Do I give you like, do I give you the fairy tale answer? Or do I give you the real answer, or some combination of the two? Hope I’m not going to scar you?

They’re not. I mean, I think that’s genuinely true. And I like both of my kids recently got very, very, very obsessed with Greek myths, which I went through that phase. But I realized at a certain point that like, as they’re like, listening to a podcast of them, that reading picture book versions are just in so deep, and they’re all so violent, and horrifying. And monstrous, and vengeful, there’s all this stuff. But I realized, like, that’s some of the only spaces where you run into that level of intensity in storytelling as a child. So it was like, Oh, is that why we’re all like, Whoa, yeah. Hera cursed his girlfriend’s son. That sounds insane. But there’s a level of drama that they don’t really have access to in a lot of their narratives. And so I’m like, Oh, I wonder if that’s why it’s like sparking something in your weird little mammal brain.

Like it’s true and I think that there is that excitement and I always say with kids, I think that we don’t give them enough credit for what they’re able to understand. And I think that the things that they’re not able to understand they just sort of like, move on. They’re not thinking about it. Like we’re thinking about it. They’re not thinking about it. They’ve already moved on, but no I love the idea that you create either this sort of like, weird and terrifying children’s book that sort of then becomes that has this like cult following, and then it actually realize it is real and terrifying. Like how it was done, no spoilers, that sort of like whole book within a book I just loved and I know you, you know, and then again, like the notes and everything else, and I just, yeah, part of me is like, so you’re gonna make The Underland, like, that’s gonna come?

If you’d like this horrible picture book.

20:29

Oh, so can we have this because I feel like you’ve already written it like, it’s already. Like, it’s so detailed.

I will say not to brag, but huge brag of the final finished copy has five full page illustrations from Rovina Cai. And they’re very, very, very beautiful. And I would imagine the illustrations like they’re black and white, they’re pencil they’re just so good.

So yeah, so that’s why I’m that’s all I’m saying. I’m just gonna put it out there, you know, never manifest things for the next generation will have will actually have the million not that there’s plenty of books and…

Then the guys can ban it from school library.

All come full circle just like that. Just like the actual book. But yeah, it did. It did make me kind of think of and yeah, one of them was Where the Wild Things Are not that I think that that was like on the same, but it does sort of have that really can be slightly terrifying if you actually start to ask questions about, you know, the book in the child’s imagination and what the child was going through and why they sort of that escapism, all things that as adults we deal with today, and just, you know, on a different level. But so yeah, I thought that was just love it. So let’s go to characters. I loved your characters. I love all your characters, particularly, particularly this book, I think I laughed out loud on several occasions. So many of your characters and obviously knows, like I was saying in Starling House, they’re sort of in exile in a way searching for a place of their own or identity, their own meaning of home. So what draws you back to these themes? And then I have side question, who gets the Starling House spin off.

I mean, I can’t write sequels, I did have one that was like, that’s it, I just found out something about myself, I realized in writing this, that it kind of wasn’t working as a particular type of small town book. Because the characters are in many ways on the outside on the fringes of that small town. So like, if you think of a small town book, it’s like the whole community is a character, you know, everyone, everyone knows you. Everyone knows their family histories. And, and there’s like this in measurement. Which even though I’m from small town, Kentucky, I kind of never fully experienced it. Like, my family was sort of, like politically weird, we didn’t go to church and my parents kept off and on going to grad school. And so like, there was always like, this distance, you know, like, not quite being a part of the community. You know, I think it was in like first grade when my classmates tried to do an exorcism on me because I was talking about too many Greek myths, which are, to be fair, very upsetting to the first graders of Kentucky.

Yea, I can see that.

So I ended up writing the town as a snow globe that you’re on the outside of it. And I because that’s what I knew how to write were you like kind of know everybody, but you’re not tight. You’re not in the inner circle ever. And obviously, that’s just my own self. That’s my own myopic perspective.

But then within that, they have their own community. I mean, like Opal and… you know, not going to do too many spoilers, but she does have I mean, I think whether she realizes or not, she has a community

There are always more people outside the snowglobe than you realize you realize,

I think again, and maybe you’re you know, I think often you can be somewhat blind to it because again, you’re in your own space. Maybe you’re just feeling very righteous or feeling like it’s just feeling like that exile feeling like that outsider. And I often feel like it’s always there’s, you know, what’s right in front of you is that which is what you can’t like you’re too close to see the forest.

I think we have like a something of a western cultural obsession with like, the tough loner character. I love a tough loner, but I think in reality, there’s probably like three of them like there’s not that many people who genuinely exist and get by and survive in isolation like I just don’t think that’s how it works. And it hasn’t been my own experience like I’ve lived at or below the poverty line for most of my adult life until publishing and the in survival in those spaces is not something you do alone ever.

I think when you when you realize that you have that community or again, like, whether it be the misfits, the people outside this book, Love but the people that you didn’t realize were there all along. It’s just kind of a really satisfying thing. And I think that that’s another thing I really love about your books. I feel like they are, I’m not gonna give away endings, but you know, and whether you agree with it, I think that’s always the thing that I’d love to talk about, you know, how it’s how do you wrestle with like the ending that you know, readers want versus the ending that the book needs, your characters need. But I feel like you always are kind of like, yeah, that’s what had like, that’s what had to happen.

So far, the only thing that has not changed at any draft of any book is, I know, the first scene and I know the last scene, and I haven’t been — I’m sure the the next book I write, I’ve just hexed myself. And I’ll be like, Oh, this is so wrong. But like, if it doesn’t work, it means I’ve messed something up in the middle. Do you know what I mean? Like, the rest of the things have to change. Because what I was trying to write about was like this last, like a quarter of the people was where you were going, like, that’s where we’re supposed to go. Feels weird. That’s on me.

I like how you’re so honest, like, it’s my fault. I’ll take the blame. Getting kind of into your process. So you’ve written, you know, you have many short stories, many are there available in anthologies, tor.com different places. So you’ve written so many short stories, but then, you know, versus short stories versus novellas versus novels. So what would you say? And since you’ve written them all, what are sort of the highs and lows of writing each of those mediums?

I mean, I still maybe think my favorite things are short stories, because the balance of time invested to reward of having finished something is just great. I love that.

Yeah, it’s so great.

And like the whole publishing, like publishing is very slow, I finished and turned in Starling House in the version that you read, that first one, two full years ago at this point. So like, it takes a while. But with the short fiction, it’s all very much more condensed, and you can sort of write things and be receiving feedback on them and readers so much faster that I find that really fun. And I find it more possible to experiment with things that I maybe could not invest a full year or two of my writing life, and I couldn’t sustain these things totally, you can, like take risks in ways that I think they’re just really, really fun and very, like, I’m the least likely to get bored when writing short fiction. However, they’re just ideas that can’t work on that level. And when there’s kind of more serious and particularly more personal themes that I want to like, get all the messy pieces of it has to be book length and you want it really doesn’t you, you can’t be doing footnotes at a show now I have done what I know someone short story. Most of the time they stopped me, but I think that’s what’s so fun about sci fi and fantasy as a genre is that like, it has the space for any scale of idea you have like, you don’t have to have an idea and be like, I doesn’t feel like it’s enough for a novel because there’s the entire novella market, and it’s really fun to work in.

Yeah, and I think you know, and I will say obviously, well, maybe not obviously, for me, like fantasy science fiction, mostly fantasy is like a safe space. And I think it is because, like anything goes in a way and like you can make anything work and I kind of love, my favorites are like, you know, when you when you start a story and you’re like, how is this gonna, you know, like, what is going, and then by the end, you’re like, I want to fall inside this world and that relief. And so I think that is that to me, like a very special genre. And then I kind of love to see now, you know, there’s so many different spin offs from that, you know, and in terms of like, you know, you can even this one, it’s like a Southern Gothic fantasy, you know, and like, you have your witchy fantasies, you have your cozy fantasies, you have your romanticism. I mean, I love it.

I love in general, I’m anti genre as a genre, but I am not a cop about borders between them. And I love to see just the bleeding through of like romance writers who are writing fantasy books now fantasy writers who were like, maybe I’ll just do a straight up romance. I think that’s fantastic. More of that.

And I think it does, yeah, it’s just I guess to your yours. Like, it’s like genre, I kind of look at them all like genre fiction, like all it’s basically like, permitting yourself to play and to just expand and not worry about like, what worry about parameters of reality, and just kind of like this is this is how we’re going to tell our story.

I mean, I even think like I tend to do that sort of like literary or realistic fiction and genre divide two and, in a way, but I also like, I love it when those two begin to mix so much. Yes.

And I think that’s something that I think that we’re seeing a lot of and I and that’s kind of, you know, I always love to say like I think people can think about fantasy writing where they kind of like oh, it’s like an it’s an escapism, I’m like, well, all books are escapism.

I also have like, Oh, that’s a crazy way of saying you’ve never read Octavia Butler. Interesting. That’s cool.

But it kind of got to me I think, when people are talking about literary fiction and how that’s like its own thing and I keep on I feel like no, the literary merit or like that, how it’s written in the prose and in terms of, or how they talk about how they use their metaphors and whatnot like, that can be played like that can be placed into any story, like any.

So many novels today that are always on literary shelves are using genre elements to their advantage. You know, like the best Southern Gothic ever written, please, Beloved, that is also a haunted house story, like, ghost story has huge horror elements on purpose used to incredible effect. And so like, the divisions are always a little bit silly, always have more to do with like marketing and also with people’s identity making up like what kind of reader they are than they do about art making and books.

I think that it’s part of I feel like our job is kind of to like, break those barriers. And like, just try this book, you will like this, sometimes I love to like throw, Oh, you like this literary book and then throw like a fantasy at them and then watch their face. So they’d be like, no, they’re like, no, yes. Like this is, this is what you need to read not to be greedy, as you’ve just given us an amazing new novel. But I have to ask, just because I am greedy. What is next for you?

So I realized, what I’m also doing as I write is kind of going through my own, eras of stuff that was formative to me when I was a kid like I don’t — do we ever really escape, but we were obsessed with when we were 11. I don’t really think so. And for me, there’s a huge section of my pie chart that is sort of the medieval period. So like Damar series Robin McKinley, like The Blue Sword was very, very important to me, The Hero and the Crown, very, very important to me. And so it’s my lady knight book, actually, I wrote a short story as like a test of the idea called The Six Deaths of the Saints.

I wasn’t gonna make assumptions. But I was like, that’s funny.

Yeah, no, I had the book outlined and ready to go. And I was like, let me see if I can totally do secondary World Fantasy. And so that was like my, that’s actually most of the book. And in a tiny version, I’m two thirds of the way through the novel version of that right now.

That is fabulous. I’m sure many people are very, very excited. Having read that short story. It is wonderful. And yeah, I think that it’s interesting how you were saying like that, you know, you can play you can take those chances and short story and then to know that like, it feels like it feels unfinished. There’s always something else, there’s always more, there’s always more words, with more words to play with. And because I’m always looking for book recommendations from brilliant women, and I know you love to shout out books on your Instagram, which I love. Recommendations. I feel like it’s a modern way to sort of like shout from the rooftops, if you will. What are you reading now? Or, what was the last book that you just couldn’t shake, couldn’t stop talking about?

A couple of them that I’ve been very obsessed with. I read the sequel to Shelly Parker Chan’s She Who Became the Sun, the sequel is He Who Drowned the World. It’s great. It’s just I like I really, really, really liked She Who Became the Sun. But I feel like He Who Drowned the World is like all those things, but more so it’s amplified. The drama is just at a 12 at all times. And I just thought it was it worked on like every level for me as a historical novel, as kind of a palace intrigue, Game of Thrones, the kind of battle for power. And as an exploration of gender and identity. I just thought it was. It’s just really, really smart and really good. I also read a literary novel that everyone was talking about. And I was like, to the point where I was like, kind of annoyed where I was like, That is not even that good. It was so good. Like, I know, I was just like, oh my god, everyone’s right. It’s um, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. Oh, it’s amazing. It’s so good. And I just I’m obsessed with it structurally, like on a craft level. Yes. I feel like it is part of some of my favorite contemporary lit, I feel like I have I’m the person with like a string board behind me. But I feel like it is, in a lot of ways, kind of more of a 19th century social novel. Like there’s, there’s these older ways of writing where you have a very authoritative narrator. It’s almost omniscient. And the concern is so much with conceptualizing people in their social class and raising space in ways that I think is so so smart and is actually kind of throwback literature that I just I love.

Yes, I will say I also loved it and it was the it was I hadn’t read a book in a long time where I actually had to an end. I don’t wanna give any spoilers away, but you’ll know what I’m talking about what a certain chapter or certain part where I, like, felt like I couldn’t go on, like, I remember like putting the book down and being like, I need space. I need like to grieve, and to like, you know, move on in a way, like, move on. And then I was like, Okay, I’ll come back to it. And I remember like, obviously, the whole time, it was like haunting me. Like, I knew, I knew I was gonna pick it up, but it was so it was like the book had like, like, hurt me in a way. And I was like, I haven’t had that that reaction to a book in a long time. And

yet, the way it’s written, I feel like I absolutely had that experience, but it doesn’t leave you with a feeling of it being a tragedy. No, no. And I think that’s a really good trick to pull. I think it has to do with the duration of the book that comes after that event. Yes. Anyway, it’s great.

Um, anything honestly, for me anything that references Shakespeare, I’m just kind of like a, like a sucker for like, like, if I see a Shakespeare reference, I’m like, Yeah, I’m gonna read that. Whether it be good, good, bad or otherwise, like I’m at least gonna give it a chance. Well, Alix, thank you again. I want to say thank you for sort of the fire and rage the hope and wonder for giving us all a moment to believe in magic. This has been a real treat. Starling House is out now.

Thank you so so much. This was great.