Cassandra Clare (l.) with Holly Black (r.),
who served as emcee for the Bryant Park event.

Last Saturday afternoon’s gray skies deterred no one: 300 eager fans flocked to New York City’s Bryant Park to hear Cassandra Clare discuss her Mortal Instruments series. And Clare gave news of several forthcoming projects, including a new book in the Mortal Instruments series, the creation of a prequel series and a movie adaptation of her books.

Holly Black, friend and fellow teen fantasy author, served as emcee. The joke-ridden repartee between the two authors set a light, fun tone, and Black soon waded into the audience to allow fans--teens and adults alike--to pose questions and share laudatory opinions.

Clare’s announcement of an additional Mortal Instruments book was unexpected, considering she had previously stated that the series would remain a trilogy. Clare revealed that the idea for a fourth book came about while brainstorming a potential project for a graphic novel publisher. She eventually found the format unsuited to her new ideas, but Clare felt that she’d unwittingly delved into a new story that deserved to be told.

Thus City of Fallen Angels came to be--with the twist of more peripheral character Simon coming to the forefront as narrator. People who love Simon are fewer than those who love Jace, the star of the Mortal Instruments trilogy, she declared, “but they’re more intense.” When asked what character she was most like, Clare admitted that Simon most resembled herself.

City of Fallen Angels will be published by S&S’s Margaret K. McElderry Books imprint in March 2011. But that’s not the only project on her agenda: she’s also creating a prequel series to The Mortal Instruments, which will examine the ancestry of the characters and shed more light on Magnus’s warlock background.


Clare signs a book for one of the
300 fans in attendance.

Clare's other big disclosure for fans was that her books will be adapted for the big screen. The film endeavor is in the most preliminary of stages, she said: rights have been sold to the same producers who adapted The Lord of the Rings. Though Clare will not serve as screenwriter, and the contract does not require that she supervise the interpretation of her books into film, she said she trusts that the material is in good hands.

She also discussed a variety of influences that shaped her work. Her former roommate was into Manga, and urged Clare to started reading it too. Growing up, Clare had read hard-boiled detective stories and was a huge fan of ’80-era urban fantasy, notably Terri Windling’s Borderland. Her past work as an entertainment reporter, for the likes of Star and the National Enquirer, prepared her for “the creation of a fictional narrative,” she said wryly.

When asked how she fits in amid the current vampire frenzy, she chalked it up to luck, saying that the renewed interest in this trope is something that she didn’t foresee, but doesn’t find especially surprising, considering that similar tropes have popped up regularly throughout the ages. Clare cited Victorian-era Dracula, Anne Rice, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer as previous fantasy examples that have resonated within society. And she stated that the vampire as “allegorical treatment of other” creates interesting permutations, especially in examining racial and sexual discrimination. Basically, as she told her audience, “If there’s nothing weird going on, I’m not interested.”