J.P. Barrow

One of my mom's favorite stories about me is that I cried when I turned eleven because I didn't get my Hogwarts letter. Magic and fantasy were always worlds I gravitated towards—and I never really grew out of it. I just found darker corners of it. I was also a horror film buff from a young age, 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 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. With a sleeping baby in my arms, my mind kept coming back to my characters, to the gendered history of witches, and the costs of magic. I needed to finish.

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.