Judging by the volume of forthcoming fantasy fiction that takes place in the past, historicals are having a moment. Mira editor Dina Davis, for one, has thoughts on why that might be. “People are looking for a little control,” she says, and historical fantasy offers “a version of the past where there’s a bit of a happier outcome—or where bad people get what’s coming to them.”
This season, fantasy authors are staging their stories across the world and over many eras, whether they hew closely to the historical record or use it as loose inspiration. PW spoke with authors and editors whose books draw on an enduring fascination with bygone days.
Family reunions
Davis edited Rosália Rodrigo’s debut, Beasts of Carnaval (Mira, July), which is set in an alternate version of the author’s native Puerto Rico. Freedwoman Sofia sets out to find her missing twin brother, who disappeared with their former master five years earlier at el Carnaval de Bestias, a nightly bacchanal from which no one ever leaves.
“This is a story of reclamation and healing from a violent past,” Davis says, noting that Rodrigo’s novel amplifies Indigenous Caribbean history and mythology. “One change she made to the historical timeline is that slavery ends a little earlier, before Africans were brought over, when it was the Indigenous Taíno people who were enslaved. She asks, what if we could have recaptured some of the culture that was lost?”
A Mexican American debut novelist, Veronica Chapa, reassesses a contentious figure from Mexico’s history in Malinalli (Primero Sueño, Mar.). She imagines a life for the title character, a Nahua teenager who acted as an interpreter between Moctezuma and Hernán Cortés. Malinalli, a war prize handed over to Cortés as a slave, appears sparingly in firsthand accounts and is mentioned only twice in his letters to the king of Spain. Many today view her as a traitor who betrayed her homeland and opened the door to the conquest of Mexico, but Chapa thinks she got a raw deal. Her novel fleshes out Malinalli’s motivations and gives her agency and power.
“I discovered some Indigenous chieftains who thought she might be the goddess Malinalxochitl,” Chapa says. “I wanted to reimagine her life, and put her in the center of her own story.”
The Secret Market of the Dead by Giovanni De Feo, which Saga will publish in July, takes place in 18th-century Naples, the region from which De Feo’s family hails, and where he now intermittently works as a traveling storyteller. An avid hiker, De Feo has crossed much of Italy on foot, which has shored up his worldbuilding: the smithy in the story is based on one of his travel photos.
“There was an oral tradition among the women in his family,” says Saga editor Sareena Kamath. “He grew up hearing stories told in the kitchen by his mother and grandmother and aunts, and learned about what life was like in this region of southern Italy for women of a certain class and cultural background.” The book follows a blacksmith’s daughter, Oriana, who is unfairly passed over as heir to her father’s forge in favor of her twin brother. She turns to seven immortals who run the mysterious Night, which lies just beyond the bounds of her hometown of Luceria, to find her destiny.
After writing Victorian thrillers set at Scotland Yard, Alex Grecian looked to his native Kansas for 2023’s post–Civil War weird western Red Rabbit. He expands on that world with Rose of Jericho (Nightfire, Mar.), which PW’s review called a “ghoulishly entertaining variation on the zombie theme.” Former Union soldier and Red Rabbit character Moses Burke, enraged and grief-stricken by the death of his wife, shoots the Grim Reaper in Kansas, leaving the world’s dying souls stranded. Realizing the catastrophic impact of his impulsive act, he seeks help from allies in Ascension, Mass.
Grecian says he enjoys the challenge of building a realistic historical background for his fantastical tales. “The research part is the most fun. For Red Rabbit, I spent a full day finding out about Wells Fargo for a single paragraph. I love loading up on everything I might need to know.”
Facts and fiction
Some authors of historical fantasy view history as less of a guide, more of a suggestion. “I’m not a meticulous researcher,” says M.R. Carey, known for his zombie novel and screenplay The Girl with All the Gifts. “I take what I need to build the furniture, and then I cheat.” In his forthcoming dark fantasy Once Was Willem (Orbit, Mar.), the 12-year-old son of a tenant farmer in medieval England dies and is resurrected by magic, emerging from the grave distinctly changed from how he went in. Shunned for his now-gruesome appearance and not-quite-human demeanor, Willem assembles a group of champions to fight a great impending evil.
“It’s The Magnificent Seven with monsters,” says Carey, who uses the past “as a launchpad or springboard—just a backdrop, a few historical events. What’s happening in the characters’ lives is far enough away from London and the seat of power that nothing they do will impact a larger narrative.” PW’s starred review said Carey paints “an empathic portrait” of Willem and called the book “powerful, captivating, and occasionally stomach-churning.”
Guy Gavriel Kay finds inspiration for many of his fantasy novels in real historical settings, such as Tang Dynasty China or Renaissance Europe. Written on the Dark (Ace, May) takes place near the end of the Hundred Years’ War—not in France, exactly, but in “a made-up country like it,” Kay says. “I don’t want to pretend I know the innermost thoughts and feelings of actual people in history.” Before he begins writing, he typically spends a year conducting research and speaking with academics, shaping a novel that’s “adjacent but not identical to history. I never want to map the past onto the present in any kind of one-to-one way. I want to take my cue from certain events that really happened, and I want the fantastical element to allow me to have two people who lived 30 years apart in the same story. I can do that. I can have people who never met, meet, which is liberating, ethically and creatively.”
47North’s forthcoming list includes Van Hoang’s Silver and Smoke (Feb.) and Luanne G. Smith’s The Golden Age of Magic (June), two historical fantasies set in Hollywood. In Smith’s book, a newly minted fairy godmother comes to 1920s Los Angeles to find someone who needs her services and sets her sights on an aspiring costume designer. Hoang’s novel takes place a decade later and follows Issa Bui and Olivia Nong, two young women pursuing dreams of stardom amid pervasive anti-Asian racism. According to PW’s review, “Issa turns to the magic her mother has long forbidden: communing with the dead.”
Amazon Publishing associate publisher Gracie Doyle explains the appeal and relevance of the interwar era. “This time in this place is ripe—glittering lights, people coming to live their dream and make their fortune. These authors ask: what’s the dark side of that? There are some parallels between this period and our own: the intrigue and international politics, the world feeling on the verge of a new time. For historical fiction in general, the time between WWI and WWII has enduring popularity.”
The Gentleman and His Vowsmith, an April release from Saga, mines another popular setting for fiction: Regency England. In this locked-room mystery, aristocrats are born with magic, or “the brilliance,” and couples are matched based on how strong their brilliance is. Conjurer Nic is forced into a marriage of convenience, and he finds a best friend in his betrothed despite being, as she puts it, “gay as a spoon.” Rebecca Ide, who has written epic fantasy under the name Devin Madson, wanted to do something that would dovetail with “the Bridgerton effect,” says Saga Press senior editor Nivia Evans. “I have a track record of buying historicals; I love books that infuse these eras with magic.”
The never-ending story
Some authors riff not only on historical fact but also historical fiction. In Pat Murphy’s The Adventures of Mary Darling (Tachyon, May), the mother in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan stories—from whose point of view, Murphy points out, Peter Pan is a tragic tale of child abduction—enlists the help of her uncle John Watson and his eccentric employer Sherlock Holmes to get her children back. Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle and Barrie knew each other in real life, Murphy notes, even writing a poorly received play together. “My book took more than a decade to write because I kept getting fascinated by the history,” she says. “Both Peter Pan and Holmes were created around the end of the 19th century, and those stories reflected the attitudes of the time: the sun never set on the British empire, and all girls grew up to be wives and mothers.”
Her research took her to unexpected places and underexplored characters. “How would Native Americans [such as the Peter Pan character Tiger Lily] have gotten to Neverland?” Murphy asks. “Well, historically, one job they could get was in traveling Wild West shows. I wanted to talk about the dark parts, the characters who were unrepresented.” When trying to align the Holmes and Peter Pan story lines, she hit quite a bit of fandom dispute. “Working with real historical facts seemed easy compared to figuring out the timeline of a much-studied and not entirely consistent fictional universe.”
H.G. Parry describes her next historical fantasy, A Far Better Thing (Tor, June), as a “very close retelling” of A Tale of Two Cities, whose plot hinges on the near-perfect resemblance between Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay. In Parry’s vision, faeries stole the infant Sydney from his crib and replaced him with changeling Charles, and now, Sydney wants revenge.
Historical fiction “gives you a place to start,” says Parry, an academic by training. “My instinct is to go to the texts, analyze them, see what I can pull out. In some ways, historical fiction has a lot of that same worldbuilding aspect as fantasy books.”
Those magical historical worlds, Parry adds, give readers a friendly place to land amid their daily stresses and concerns. “We go to historical fantasy the same way we go to science fiction or epic fantasy when we’re having a difficult moment. It provides a comforting distance, and it’s a rich field for talking about what we see happening in the everyday world.”
Liz Scheier is a writer, editor, and product strategist living in Washington, D.C. She is the author of the memoir Never Simple.
Read more from our Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror feature
6 New Works of Historical Horror
Tales of blood and monsters unfold in a medieval castle, a 1980s arcade, and more.
New Historical Fantasy Novels About Mermaids
Hester Fox and Kell Woods are among the authors who are diving deep.
Siren Song: PW Talks with Venessa Vida Kelley
The debut author of the novel When the Tides Held the Moon discusses merpeople both imagined and real.
Living in a Society: PW Talks with Olivia Waite
With ‘Murder by Memory,’ an author best known for queer historical romance launches a Golden Age–style mystery series in space.
