J.P. Barrow

One of my mother's favorite stories about me is that I cried when I turned eleven because I didn't get my Hogwarts letter. I gravitated toward magic and fantastical worlds from a very young age—and I never really grew out of it. I just found darker corners of it. Alongside a lifelong love of fantasy, I grew up a horror film buff, seeing movies like The Shining and Saw with my dad. That hasn't changed. There's nothing I like more on a Friday night than watching a 90-minute horror movie—why are movies so long these days?

One of the reasons that 90 minutes matters is that I'm likely up at 5am the next morning with my one-year-old son. And I can't wait for you to see how all of these things—the fantasy, the horror, the specific tenderness of loving something new and terrifying—come together in the books.

I started writing The Costs of Magic in 2023. It didn't travel in a straight line—there was a hiatus, some doubt, the ordinary struggle of finding time and energy with a full-time job, a pregnancy, and a newborn. But then something shifted. The story pulled me back in, and I found myself obsessed again.

I also designed the cover myself. The world felt like mine to build, inside and out.

What I set out to write was an epic fantasy with deep character interiority and moral complexity. Writing about feelings that happen to exist in a world with magic. The spectacle is there—but so is everything underneath it.