Five years after Cassandra Clare concluded her blockbuster series, Mortal Instruments, she is fully entrenched in the follow-up series, Dark Artifices. She’s at BookCon to spotlight the second volume, Lord of Shadows, which continues to follow shadowhunters, first introduced in Mortal Instruments. Shadowhunters are humans born with angelic blood who protect mortals by hunting the demons who want to harm them, Now that Emma Carstairs has avenged her parents’ deaths in book one, Lady Midnight, she finds herself at the center of a love triangle between her parabatai, Julian, and his brother, Mark. Adding to the tension, the Unseelie King is tired of the Cold Peace and will no longer acquiesce to the shadowhunters’ demands.
The Lord of Shadows was released just last week, but when Clare is interviewed today by MTV’s pop culture writer Crystal Bell, expect some discussion about the 2013 film, The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, and the subsequent adaptation for television. In the series that airs on Freeform (a cable/satellite TV channel owned by the Walt Disney Company) and has been renewed for a third season, Clary Fray and her pals hunt demons while unsuspecting New Yorkers, who have no idea that they are surrounded by faeries, warlocks, vampires, and werewolves, go about their business.
According to Bell, the MTV viewers who watch shows like Shadowhunters are “young and passionate, and they are insatiable readers. Clare’s created a fun and inclusive world, with great characters—like queer characters of color—and great dynamics. Young people can relate to her characters. They’re saying, ‘Finally, characters who look like me, feel like me, love like me.’ ”
Bell, who describes herself as a “professional fangirl,” isn’t shy about talking up her passions on social media. She’s written a number of times for MTV News about Clare and her books, and says, “Generally, there’s a lot of interest, and a lot of conversations” generated among fans on social media.
Clare finds the books “are really different” from the television series, which, she says, “feels like someone’s written fan fiction, [or] like someone took the core characters of the books and decided to do completely different things with them.” Asked how that feels, Clare would only say, “I try for serenity, accepting the things I cannot change.”
Beyond the TV talk, Clare promises that much of the conversation with Bell will remain on Lord of Shadows, especially since “there is a big character death who people were not expecting to die.” She’s even braced for pushback, disclosing that she cried when she wrote the scene, partially because it was “brutal, bloody, and unexpected.”
Today, 12:15–1:15 p.m. Cassandra Clare and Crystal Bell are in conversation on the panel “Out of the Shadows,” in Room 1E14.
Today, 1:30–3:30 p.m. Clare will sign Lord of Shadows in the Autographing Area.
