The bestseller sends out her Nightshade Crown romantasy trilogy with The Nightshade God, which finds its trio of protagonists torn apart by divine forces.
How do you feel about coming to the end of the series?
It’s a relief! It’s also sad in a way, because you spend so much time with these characters, thinking about them and writing and rewriting the books, but there’s an acceptance process with the end of any book, where you’re like, I have done what I set out to do to the best of my ability. Writing a trilogy was much more intimidating than writing a duology because with a duology, book one asks questions and book two answers them. Coming up with something that sustains itself and resolves itself over three books is a lot.
It’s rare to see a love triangle where all three characters are interested in each other. How did you approach this dynamic?
Honestly it’s not something that was planned from the beginning. As I was writing book one and the characters were becoming more real and bouncing off each other, everybody just had such great sexual tension and I thought it would be a waste not to explore it. But it was also really intimidating! I’m a big romance reader, but I don’t read a lot of “why choose?” so I felt like I was going in unprepared in a way. I wanted to make the love story very character focused and make it be something that felt inevitable almost.
Religion is such a big part of your worldbuilding. What inspired the religious system?
I’ve always been fascinated with fantasy religions. Religion is something that can tell you so much about the world that you’re operating in with so little. For this one in particular, I wanted to put together Catholic aesthetics with a Greek pantheon setup. And then the characters’ religious trauma and a lot of the ways that religion is interacted with comes from me growing up evangelical. I stuck all of that together and let it boil.
And what about the gods themselves?
I was really interested in the idea of treating the gods as people, just another part of the cast. Without getting into spoilers, a big part of the series is about exploring why we look for godhood, why it’s something that someone would pursue, and how so much of it can come down to fear and us wondering, Why are we here? Those are questions that you can’t really run from, regardless of what you can do and what you’ve accomplished. Treating the gods as very human characters gave me space to talk about a lot of things I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about because I’m like three seconds from an existential crisis at any given point.
