I had a very good experience in my society and I had a very good experience at Yale. I wanted to examine the idea of the kind of power that is hard to name - you can say that it’s the power of wealth, and to a certain extent it is, or you could say it’s the power of connection, and to a certain extent it is, but there is a kind of additional power that exists in these places and that does operate almost like magic. When people write about secret societies, there is a desire to demystify them. How much did your own experience inform the book? I would use scents of pine and mulled wine to try to bring myself back to the idea of being cold. Sometimes, I’ll admit, too - and I’m hesitant to talk about this because I think it sounds a little flaky - but I used scent to leave Southern California and feel like I was back in the winter. Music is a way I’m also guided into a story - the track I used to get me into the world of Ninth House is called “Walk” by Ludovico Einaudi. I’ve been living with the dream of this book and the mysteries of these places for a really long time. I’m always the kid who is going to be finding out if there is a cemetery or an abandoned amusement park that I can go visit as opposed to the beach, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch to get me to the world of Ninth House. How do you get into the right mindset to sit down and write such dark material? In Ninth House, there are gruesome depictions of violence, its aftermath and dead bodies. The more I peeled back the layers, the more I discovered, and so it wasn’t really a difficulty so much as it was a different kind of exploration than what I had done in writing secondary world fantasy. It has this extraordinary history full of strange stories and mysteries. However, I was very lucky, because as it turns out New Haven is a city that rewards the people who get to know it. There were certainly inconveniences of distance and understanding the map of New Haven that came into play. It is a challenge to write in the real world once you’ve had the advantage of being able to create your own world. Because this is set in the real world, I wanted to honestly treat some of the forces at work in our world that are not magical and still have to be grappled with even if you’re casting spells, and I couldn’t do that within YA.ĭid you face any difficulties in navigating around real world elements? There is always fear associated with trying something new and temptation to stay in the place where you’ve been warmly received, but this story has been haunting me for so long. TIME: Why did you choose to write this book for adults? The day before the release of Ninth House, Bardugo spoke to TIME about her move from YA to adult fiction, writing about her alma matter and the things she fears most. Netflix is adapting her novels Shadow and Bones and Six of Crows for television. Ninth House marks Bardugo’s first foray into adult fiction, but she has proven herself in the fantasy genre, having sold more than three million copies of her YA books in English. She lands a full ride - but only under the condition that she’ll help oversee the mystical activities of the university’s secret societies, which are pulsing with magic. They haunt the campus but are only visible to a few among the living, Alex included. And it turns out there are a number of them at Yale. The 20-year-old California native is recruited from her hospital bed after surviving a terrible trauma, because of her unusual ability to see through “the veil” to the afterlife, which means she can see ghosts. 8, takes place in the halls of Yale University, where high school dropout Alex has been given a chance to join the Ivy League - for a price. But in her adult debut, she presents a more frightening premise - a bone-chilling story that brings dark magic to our own world. Leigh Bardugo has built new and unrecognizable worlds full of evil, darkness and monsters in her best-selling young adult novels.
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