Switching Genres, Thriller to Fantasy: An Interview with Rachel Howzell Hall

I’m guessing, given Tuesday’s election, most of us have been living in a world of, shall we say, heightened reality the past few days (if not weeks, or months). So, with no desire to diminish the importance or impact of that reality, allow me to offer a bit of a diversion, one I’ve had planned for some time: here’s an interview with Rachel Howzell Hall, known for her bestselling thrillers, about her turn to romantic fantasy with her latest book.

Rachel has been on a bit of a tear lately: her most recent previous novel, We Lie Here, was both a bestseller and nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Before that she had three bestsellers in a row, What Fire Brings, What Never Happened, and These Toxic Things (also nominated for the Anthony Award, the Strand Critics Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award), with And Now She’s Gone garnering nominations for the Lefty, Barry, Shamus, and Anthony Awards.

With so much success in the thriller category, why jump ship and climb aboard an entirely different genre? I asked her that question (see below).

Meanwhile, The Last One, which comes out December 3, has garnered significant pre-publication praise:

• “Electrifying fight scenes, otherworldly creatures, and sizzling forbidden romance add fun. Romantasy readers won’t be able to turn the pages fast enough.” (Publishers Weekly)
• “Romantasy fans will devour it…lots of demand for this one.” (Booklist)
• “A whirlwind fantasy that will keep readers on their toes—much like the hero.” (Kirkus)
• “The fantasy novel The Last One introduces an intriguing universe full of love, intrigue, and revelations.” (ForeWord)

The Last One can be pre-ordered now at Bookshop.Org, Amazon, B&N, Google Books, Kobo, Apple Books, or at your favorite local bookstore.

 How did your agent (and/or editor/publisher) respond when you proposed a book so different from your past work?

Actually, it was my agent Jill Marsal who first reached out with the possibility of collaborating with publisher Liz Pelletier. I was thrilled at the opportunity—Liz is a genius. She was preparing to launch a new imprint from Entangled called Red Tower, filled with high-concept ideas she wanted to bring to life. I was honored to be one of the writers she thought would be a good fit for the project.

I get the feeling that this is a book you’ve been wanting to write for some time—have I got that right? If so, what kept you from getting to it sooner? How long did it take to imagine it, plot it out, and then get it down on the page?

I didn’t realize I wanted to write this book until I actually started. I was pretty intimidated by the idea of tackling not just one, but two new genres. I had never written a romance, and I had never written a fantasy. However, I soon discovered that I still had a lot to say—things I’d expressed before in mystery and crime—but now I had the opportunity to explore them in a world I could entirely create. A world without rules, until I made them.

I was offered the opportunity in July 2022 and began writing. I thought I was finished, but by Thanksgiving 2023, I realized I wasn’t. In fact, I had to start over. The world wasn’t big enough. There wasn’t enough romance. I had to dig deep, and it was tough, especially because I was going through a lot of grief in my personal life at the time. But by January 2024, I finally got it down. After a few more edits, I completed it in March 2024.

Did any particular author, book, or series influence or inspire you?

I have a wide range of influences. I’m a gamer, so the video games I play definitely influence me. Games like “The Witcher,” “Fallout,” “Baldur’s Gate”—all these fantasy games shaped my perspective. So, I didn’t go into this completely ignorant. I also love sci-fi, like Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings, but my real education began with reading N.K. Jemisin, Sarah J. Maas, of course, Tracey Deonn, followed by Robert Jordan’s “The Wheel of Time” series. But then, strangely, Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land influenced me almost as much as the out-and-out fantasy

If I’m not mistaken, this is the longest novel you’ve written. Did this pose any particular challenges for you? And this novel is listed as Book I—I’m assuming there’s a sequel, maybe more than one. What do you foresee for this new world and new line of novels you’ve created?

Yes, this is the longest novel I’ve ever written. Even when I didn’t write enough and had to go back, it was still the longest. The original draft was 120,000 words, but I needed it to be 150,000. After rewriting and expanding, it ended up being 200,000 words, which meant I had to scale back. Scaling down is much easier for me than adding more, so yeah, it was a big book.

It’s part of a duology, so there will be a total of four books—two from one point of view and two from another. I’m excited to keep exploring this world. I’m working on the second book right now, and I’m continuing to build out the world, discovering who Kai is and developing all the supporting characters. I’m not sure if there will be more than four books, but who knows? Why not?

Did your success in the crime-thriller genre help or hinder your switch to fantasy? What helped? What didn’t?

I like to think that my success in writing crime led to Liz’s call. Writing as many crime thrillers helped me as a newbie, especially with plotting and keeping the pages turning. Even though this is fantasy, there are still underlying mysteries—who she is, why she’s there, what she needs to do next, who the bad guy is. A lot of that comes from my crime thriller background.

However, writing mystery/suspense background didn’t really help when it came to romance, omg. Lately, I’ve been joking that I write crime scenes, not sex scenes. For a while, I thought having them kiss on page 30 was enough, but I was soon told by my editors that I needed to write more. Yeah. I really had to lean into writing love scenes, and I found myself relying more on TV and movies for inspiration rather than books–Moonlighting and Cheers were my cultural touchstones for the type of romance I wanted to depict.

One similarity I noticed: you still have a strong-willed but psychologically complex woman protagonist, one who has to face her personal shortcomings and failures. That seems to be a constant for you, all the way back to Elouise “Lou” Norton, your homicide detective in South Central L.A. Is that by accident or design?

Yay! I’m glad you noticed that Kai is strong-willed and psychologically complex, just like Lou, Coco, Yara, and the other characters I’ve written. I always start with a similar template—the lone woman who enters a new setting, often where she’s unwelcome, and has to figure out why she’s there and how she will survive in this strange place. I call it ‘the weird place.’

My characters are often like Tippi Hedren’s character in The Birds—she goes into a new environment, and then weird shit starts happening. It’s the same with Kai. She wakes up outside a town, in a forest, stripped of her identity, and she has to piece together who she is, why she’s there, and what led to her current situation. Weird monsters to fight. Evil humans and gods that want her dead. Not too unlike real life, right?

I notice a distinct change in tone in the language of the novel from your earlier works—though you’ve retained your delightful sense of humor. This kind of change would seem to be necessary given the very different reader expectations in the two genres. How much thought did you put into that?

A lot of thought went into that, and I’m still trying to find my voice when it comes to romantic scenes. I’ve written around 13 books—mostly crime stories—and I didn’t immediately find my voice with Land of Shadows. It took a few books to get there. Now, I’m stepping into romantic writing, and I don’t have a backlog of trunk novels or bad romance notebooks, so I’m still figuring out my tone and how to use humor. I’m so glad you found it delightful. I know some people won’t get it–but that wouldn’t be anything new for me. Some readers don’t get my crime-telling, either.

I’m blending two very different viewpoints here—a crime writer stepping into fantasy and romance, where the rules are different. It’s a new challenge, but I’m enjoying this journey.

A number of the Writer Unboxed community write in the fantasy genre or one of its subgenres. World building is something discussed quite a bit here, and your novel does an excellent job creating the realm of Vallendor and especially the Kingdom of Vinevridth, including maps. Did you sketch out the maps yourself in the process of writing, or did you prepare them as you were planning the novel?

I planned the entire world myself, over and over again. I sketched the maps, developed the belief systems—from politics to social and cultural—and I built it as I went. Even though I outlined extensively, there are always surprises. I thought I knew the story because it was all there in the outline, but you never really know until you get to that moment in the writing, and sometimes it doesn’t match how it’s captured in the outline.

I’m building as I go, and I have thousands of notebooks, spreadsheets, and other tools to track everything. Now that I’ve started on the second book in the series, I’ve created a kind of template to help me track continuity and the goals of each chapter. It’s been really fun to develop. You know me—I love having some form of organization, so it’s exciting to keep building it out.

So many of the other world building touches impressed me: terms like mudscraper and wanderweaver and Dashmala, the amber glow of the dying, and of course the character names—Jadon, Narder, Freyney, Aestard, Kaivara—and place names: Caburh, Peria, Chesterby, Brithellum, as well as the Sea of Devour, Baraminz Spires. We’re clearly not in South Central anymore. As with my previous question: did these names come to you as you wrote (if so, how did you keep track of them?); or did you plan this material out before you began? If the latter, how long did this planning stage take?

Some of the names I came up with on my own, but I also used a few generators to help me. My brain is very methodical, which works great for crime writing, but I had to build a new muscle for creating things that don’t exist. The fantasy name generators, like Donjon and Seventh Sanctum, helped a lot with names, creatures, and languages. That was actually pretty exciting, but I had to pull myself away sometimes because there’s so much out there.

I built the world as I went, but the one name that came easily was Kai’s. Her name, Kai Mira, just felt right because she represents her order—a chimera. Well, she’s primarily mixed blood, from two orders, and so I wanted to reflect that in her name.

Finally, you begin the book with the poem, “An Elegy by Veril Bairnell the Sapient.” Call this a wild-eyed guess, but I imagine you wrote this poem yourself. (I did not know you had poetry in your writing arsenal. Well done.) I was particularly impressed with the last stanza:

As daystar sets in foreign sky,

A requiem and a lullaby.

The quilt shrinks to a cosmic strand,

Her legend hailed in this strange land.

Given that the novel starts with our narrator suffering from amnesia, I couldn’t help but wonder as I was reading the early pages if her journey of self-discovery and remembrance would not echo back to this elegy—even though such a poem is only recited after a person’s death. That kept me guessing for quite a while. Was that planned?

Yes, oh my gosh, the poems were pretty hard to write–I knew, though, that they’d be retrospective and would relate to what happens in the book. This is where my degree in English and American literature helped me out. I still have all my books and memories of reading writers like Geoffrey Chaucer, John Keats, John Donne. I also grew up in church and reading the Holy Bible was something I did regularly. I read a lot of that before and during my writing the songs and elegies at the beginning of each part. It was fun. I wouldn’t call it poetry in the traditional sense—it’s not that good, ha—but thank you very much.

 I wanted to include these elegies because I knew that big, important epic tales often have them. I wanted this story to feel like one of those grand works, like The Canterbury Tales and The Odyssey. Even Song of Solomon and Psalms, the book of Daniel and Revelation. I also knew that great heroes had epic stories written about them. I was thinking about figures like Odysseus, the Greek and African and Mesopotamian gods, and even biblical figures like King David and King Solomon, who all have songs and celebrations written about them. I wanted to reflect all of that, even though this world of mine, this realm of Vallendor, is entirely imagined. I see Kai and her realm as a part of those great myths, and so she had to have someone write songs about her.

Does anyone else have questions for Rachel?