A Black Magic follows two women as they unravel a centuries-old legacy of violence, witchcraft, and supernatural forces rooted in one woman’s family bloodline. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

The whole trilogy began over cocktails, when my friend Fran told me she believed her dead mother’s spirit was still with her. A year later, she said she still felt the spirit but was no longer sure it was her mother. I had the entire series in my head about ten minutes after that.

The setup for this last book came from a problem I’d created for myself. By the end of A Blood Witch, Fran and Mary Jane have inherited three centuries of letters and diaries from the women who came before them, and not a single page explains how to be rid of Daedrian. The writers are long dead. The ghost hears every word spoken near him and cannot read, so two eighteen-year- olds sit in a Barnard library study room, passing a spiral notebook back and forth as they try to solve a murder in which every witness has been gone for two hundred years. I wanted to know what it would take for the last generation to finally read the whole archive, and what it would cost her. That question is the book.

Fran and Mary Jane have very different personalities and approaches to the supernatural. What inspired their dynamic?

Fran is the instrument, and Mary Jane is the scientist. Fran inherited the sight; Mary Jane inherited nothing but a sharp, suspicious mind and a cousin she refuses to lose. She can’t see the ghost. She has never seen anything. Everything she knows comes secondhand, through Fran, and her job is to decide what to believe.

I love that about her. In this book, she develops a filing system in the notebook’s margin: a dot for confirmed, a circle for probable, and a question mark for interesting-if-true, which she reserves for the seventeenth century and for most men. It starts as a joke against her own terror, and five months later it’s the closest thing the two of them have to a weapon.

They are, in a way, the two halves of how I write. One half wants to disappear into the story and live in it; the other half sits at the table with a pen, asking whether any of it holds up. Neither cousin could do this alone. Fran without Mary Jane would drown in what she sees, like the women before her. Mary Jane without Fran would have a very good hypothesis and nothing to test it.

How important was humor to you when writing their relationship and confronting such dark subject matter?

Essential. Horror only works if the reader is uncomfortable enough to keep turning pages, but not so uncomfortable that they put the book down. Humor is how I manage that dial. You read a novel alone. There’s no friend on the couch to laugh with, so the characters have to do it for you.

With the cousins, it’s never jokes for the sake of jokes. It’s how two people who have known each other since childhood talk when they’re frightened. Fran will pour her heart onto a page of the notebook, and Mary Jane will hand back three words and a row of exclamation points, then giggle because they’ve got one minute to get to the dinner table. That’s not a comedy beat. That’s what love looks like when you can’t say anything out loud.

I also come from a family where the women were funny, so that’s the register I hear. Aurora talks like Bette Davis; Liz talks like Blanche Devereaux. People who have survived something tend to be funny about it, and I wanted the girls to have inherited that, too.

If readers could take away one idea about inherited trauma, personal agency, or the ethics of power, what would you want it to be?

That any power you aren’t allowed to question isn’t protection, no matter how it feels from the inside. Daedrian hears everything. For three hundred years, the women in this family couldn’t speak about him, couldn’t ask what he was, couldn’t compare notes. He told each of them he loved her, and he meant it. The silence was the trap, and each generation passed it down along with the gift.

What finally breaks it isn’t a spell. It’s a girl who can’t see the ghost and refuses to stop asking questions, and another girl brave enough to go looking for answers in her own blood. Fran and Mary Jane don’t inherit a choice. They inherit an archive, and what they do with it is the only thing in the trilogy that’s truly theirs.

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