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Where Reality Tips Into Wonder
Shinbone Lane follows a runaway teenager in 1974 San Francisco who finds refuge and a found family in a hidden street of artists, misfits, quiet magic, and a wisecracking pigeon. What first sparked the idea for Shinbone Lane as a hidden pocket of San Francisco?
When I moved from San Francisco to Sonoma County about 20 years ago, I was looking for additional freelance writing work. I answered a Craigslist ad and met a young man at a coffee shop for an interview. The ongoing work he had in mind would have required more time than I had, so it wasn’t a good fit. Still, we enjoyed talking and shared things about our backgrounds.
He was a Gen Xer; I’m a baby boomer. I told him about arriving in San Francisco in the 1970s with about $200 in my pocket. I thought I’d visit for a couple of weeks and wound up living there for almost 30 years. He said my early adventures in San Francisco sounded like a fairytale to him—something a young person couldn’t replicate so easily anymore. Housing had already become so much more expensive.
That conversation stayed with me. The idea of writing about that time sat on the back burner for years, gradually taking shape as I returned to it from time to time, until Shinbone Lane emerged.
San Francisco does have many real hidden pockets—places so beautiful they seem magical, and people so inventive and intriguing they seem magical too. I just followed my imagination where it wanted to go. As a storyteller, I’m drawn to spaces where reality tips into wonder. This is true for both my written work and for stories I tell live in performance.
Shinbone Lane almost feels alive. Did you think of the lane as a character?
Yes, I did. The area where I situated the lane is one I’m very familiar with. I lived near the corner of 29th and Sanchez streets for eighteen years, so I walked our dog up the 29th Street hill and drove up to Diamond Heights to shop routinely. That steep hill feels like a part of me now.
Shinbone Lane, an imagined side street easy to miss when driving by, became a living, breathing presence with its own rhythms and moods.
Place has always been important in my work, and Northern California continues to shape my imagination. It was a great amount of fun bringing the lane to life and letting it influence the characters who find their way there.
Found family is central to the story. Why is that theme important to you, and why was it important that the community be imperfect, messy, and sometimes conflicted?
I think almost all of us have some issues to work out with our families when we grow independent as young adults. For some, the issues are minor and family support is a constant. For others, too much trauma stands in the way of family ties being anything but harmful at the time. And there are many shades in between.
It’s a blessing that people can find each other and build a supportive base that becomes a different kind of family. How lucky we are to be able to do that for one another.
As for the community being imperfect, messy, and sometimes conflicted, that reflects both life in this world of ours and my approach to storytelling. And while I want love to be the most powerful force in the end, I don’t shy away from the complications that come with being human.
I lost both of my parents by the time I was eleven, so there’s an undercurrent of loss and darkness that finds its way into my work. At the same time, I am optimistic and delight in my connections with loved ones, as well as the beauty in the world. That tension between light and shadow, hope and hurt is something I return to often, and I hope it resonates with readers.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?
I’m at work on another magical realism novel, Ripplewood, set in an out-of-the-way town of that name in Sonoma County, California. The town was named for a forest of ripplewood trees that once existed, though now only one remains, deep in the woods. It’s the same kind of tree that appears in front of Ted’s home on Shinbone Lane, but this book is not a sequel.
The story begins with Emlyn Grady driving home. She was raised in Ripplewood and has been attending San Francisco State University for six years, changing majors along the way and still not quite finding her footing. When she receives a text from her father urging her to come home immediately because of a crisis, she drops everything—including an important meeting her boyfriend has arranged with investors interested in his startup—and heads directly to Ripplewood.
There she finds out her mother is missing, but she’s gone missing before. So what could have happened is a mystery in a town where family roots and history are imperfect, complicated, messy, conflicted and unresolved (of course). There is folklore unique to Ripplewood, but how much is real, how much is fiction and what effect it has had on the town is a topic debated without resolution by the locals. In this setting, the story begins to unfold. And like Shinbone Lane, the story’s layers reveal themselves over time.
I’m interested in how place, memory, and inherited stories shape us, and how we decide what to carry forward. I’m still in the process of writing and discovering the full shape of the book, which is one of the things I love most about the work. I hope to finish the book this year and publish it in 2027.
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San Francisco, 1974. Sixteen-year-old runaway Maddy is escaping the blame for a crime she didn’t commit. Miles from home, she is taken under the wing of the elderly Clara and her neighbor Ted, and soon finds a place among the kaleidoscope of personalities on the oddly named Shinbone Lane.
Ted’s three-story Italianate Victorian house overflows with travelers, free spirits, and artists. His backyard is a haven for all who are willing to see its magic. But burdened dancer Eloise Watkins can’t tolerate the transient “riffraff” in her neighborhood. Their frivolity flies in the face of her grief over friendship lost and her daughter who’s missing. And nobody — nobody— understands.
But like all who tread on it, Shinbone Lane has secrets of its own. And like all secrets, they lie uneasily in the dark, until the truth emerges to lay the past to rest.
At the intersection of magic and reality lies Shinbone Lane and its lively cast of characters who intertwine in the mesmerizing brew of life.
Click ‘buy now’ to step into Shinbone Lane today!
Alchemy and Mirrors
The Name and the Key follows a woman grieving after her mother’s disappearance and death, who experiences visions and finds herself pulled into a magical world. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
As a very visual person whose brain likes to mash things together, I was inspired by a combination of images: John Everett Millais’s painting of Ophelia, and the nightmares I had after my father suddenly died while I was in graduate school. For the magical world itself, filled with demons and alchemy and mirrors, I was inspired by the anime Fullmetal Alchemist and the young adult novel Sorcery of Thorns by Margaret Rogerson. I’m also interested in medieval and Renaissance art; the colorful paintings of St. Michael slaying the devil or knights killing demons have always stuck with me. I thought there was a way to tie all these strange things I loved together, and that’s how I started developing the story.
This isn’t actually the first go-around with The Name and the Key. It was my graduate thesis in 2013 from the Writing Popular Fiction program at Seton Hill University. Lots of things were happening in my life during graduate school that made their way into the book, although the version you have read that will debut July 21, 2026, has been rewritten considerably to be developed into a trilogy.
Lily’s first-person narration feels very intimate and emotionally immediate. How did you develop her voice?
I’m so glad you feel that way about her! She was a challenging character to write. Some of her voice came directly from me when I’d reflect on certain feelings or situations from my life that were written into The Name and the Key; sometimes Edward Elric’s voice from Fullmetal Alchemist popped in there. But overall, whenever I wrote Lily, I did hear a distinctive voice in my head when I was working through her narration.
Mirrors play a particularly haunting role—what made them the right symbolic and narrative device for this story?
Mirrors have fascinated me for a long time. When I was a little girl, I used to stand in front of the mirror, either in dim light or almost total darkness, and make hideous faces until at some point I no longer resembled myself or a person, but a monstrosity. This is a legitimate phenomenon known as the Caputo Effect. In addition to trying to frighten myself as a child, I had heard over the years the stories and history of mirrors being portals or ways to see the dead. According to Kate Golembiewski of Atlas Obscura, “Ancient Romans believed that mirrors had the ability to trap the soul.” There are countless other cultural beliefs like that in existence. Mirrors are also a symbol in alchemy, suggesting the mirror of the soul in transmutation, and also relating to the mirror’s historical affiliation with mercury, which represents the spirit. I could forever go down a rabbit hole about this stuff. But the most important thing was tying alchemy together with my world of death and spirits and mirrors, and I was able to find a precedent for it, so I could do it.
Can you give us a peek inside the next installment of The Darkening Gate series? Where will it take readers?
The Step and the Walk is the second book in The Darkening Gate, written as diary entries from the perspective of Andresh, whom readers met in book one. It centers on his time at university, where he first learned about demons and dark magic. Andresh has a lot of secrets, and while readers think he might have come clean with them in The Name and the Key, they would be wrong. The Step and the Walk fills in all of the blanks regarding Andresh’s recent past right before the events of his reuniting with Lily in The Name and the Key. For example, readers will see how Andresh met and made a pact with the demon Isabelle. It’s been so much fun to write. I just finished drafting it at the end of March and am working on the second draft now. I hope to submit it to my publisher at the end of this month, if not in early May. Please look forward to it!
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
Some doors are sealed for a reason—and some names should never be spoken aloud.
At thirteen, Lily Bellamy finds her mother’s body in the marshes. What haunts her afterward is worse.
A corpselike spirit that looks like her mother follows Lily through every reflective surface—mirrors, glass, still water—whispering for Lily to open the door and let her out. Lily has no idea what the door is, how to stop the visions, or whether saving her mother is even possible. The haunting stretches into her young adulthood, eroding her sanity and dragging her closer to a breaking point she can feel but cannot escape.
When Lily is eighteen, Andresh Zatavier returns—the boy who once knew her better than anyone, and perhaps still does. Changed by years overseas, Andresh confesses his study of dark magic and forbidden knowledge beyond human limits. He believes he knows the key to Lily’s curse—and how to end death itself.
But every secret Andresh carries comes at a cost.
As Lily is drawn deeper into a world of dark gates and dangerous names, she must decide how far she is willing to go to save the woman she lost… and whether opening the door will free her mother—or unleash something far worse.
Kristina Elyse Butke launches a chilling new dark fantasy series with The Name and the Key, weaving grief, forbidden magic, and aching connection into a story where love tempts fate—and some doors should never be opened.
The Name and the Key
Kristina Elyse Butke’s The Name and the Key is a fantasy novel with a strong gothic streak, and it opens like a haunted coming-of-age story before widening into something darker and stranger. It follows Lily Bellamy after her mother disappears into the woods and is found dead, an event that leaves Lily grieving, marked by visions in mirrors, and pulled toward a hidden magical world tied to names, doors, demons, and her bond with her childhood friend Andresh. What I liked right away was how the book grounds all that big fantasy machinery in personal loss first, so the magic never feels like decoration. It feels like grief changing shape.
Lily’s first-person narration has an earnest, intimate quality that made me feel close to her even when the plot moved into more elaborate fantasy territory. The early sections are especially strong. The discovery in the marsh, the mirror hauntings, the smell of death she cannot wash away, all of that lands with real force because Butke lets the horror feel physical and emotional at the same time. I also liked that the book is not in a hurry to sand Lily down into a polished heroine. She is frightened, stubborn, curious, and sometimes overwhelmed in ways that feel believable. That gave the story a human center I could hold onto.
I also found myself interested in the author’s choices, even when they made me pause. The book blends fantasy, gothic horror, romance, and a bit of alchemical and occult imagery, which gives it a distinct texture. Sometimes that mix really works. The ideas about true names, mirrors as thresholds, and magic as Word, Deed, and Will gave the story a mythic feel without losing its emotional thread. There were moments when I felt the book was reaching in several directions at once, and I could feel the scaffolding of a larger series underneath it. Since this is the first book in a trilogy, some developments read less like a full stop and more like a door opening into the next room. I did not mind that, but I think readers who want every thread tied off in one volume may feel that incompleteness more sharply.
I’d recommend The Name and the Key to readers who enjoy fantasy that leans intimate rather than epic, especially if they also like gothic atmosphere, haunted family secrets, and a coming-of-age story wrapped around romance and dark magic. I think it will work best for someone who wants to sit with a book’s mood as much as its plot, and who does not mind following a story that begins in sorrow and keeps reaching toward deeper mystery. For me, the strongest parts were the rawness of Lily’s grief and the eerie beauty of the world behind the mirrors. That was enough to make me curious about where the trilogy goes next.
ASIN : B0GHZTX2FX
Cowboys, Wizards, & Liars
Cowboys, Wizards, & Liars is a genre-blending fantasy western that follows Noah Farmer, a young wizard and new private investigator, as he goes looking for a missing woman named Gloria and gets pulled through a magical rupture into a version of the Arizona Territory shaped by myth, outlaw energy, and time-bending consequences. What starts as a search mission opens into something bigger: a lost-gold legend, a second story unfolding inside an enchanted paperback, a growing mystery around identity and fate, and a long ride through a past that feels both dusty and unstable. By the end, the book becomes a story about how greed warps people, how stories rewrite the world, and how Noah slowly learns that solving a case is not the same thing as understanding it.
The story has that friendly, front-porch voice that makes you want to keep going, and Noah is a big reason why. He’s funny without trying too hard, unsure of himself in a believable way, and just self-aware enough to keep the story grounded. I also liked how author VJ Garske lets the western and fantasy elements sit side by side without making a big show of it. Horses, ghosts, guns, spells, prospectors, con men, and enchanted books all share the same trail dust. That mix could have felt gimmicky, but here it mostly feels natural. The book has a steady charm to it as well. It’s not slick, not overly dark, just confident in its own odd little weather.
I also appreciate the author’s choices around structure. The story inside the story could have been a mess, but instead it gives the novel an extra pulse. It creates this feeling that the ground is shifting under Noah even when he thinks he has his footing. At the same time, the book is strongest when it slows down and lets character do the work. Noah’s bond with animals, his awkwardness with people, and his reactions to figures like Jack and Fisher gave the novel its real heart for me. I liked how ambitious the book is with its many moving parts. The plot keeps introducing fresh turns and new layers, which gives the story a lively, restless energy. I found myself wishing a scene would linger a little longer, not because it lost me, but because I was enjoying the world and wanted to stay in it. I was engaged the whole way through. The whole thing has the pull of a campfire story told by someone who knows exactly when to grin and when to lower their voice.
I’d recommend this most to readers who enjoy fantasy westerns, light historical fantasy, and adventure stories that care as much about voice and companionship as they do about magic and mystery. It feels like a good pick for someone who wants genre fiction with personality, humor, and a strong sense of place rather than grimness or heavy lore. I think readers who like their fantasy a little scrappy, a little heartfelt, and a little strange will have a good time here. And if you’re the kind of reader who hears a title like Cowboys, Wizards, & Liars and immediately thinks, well, that sounds like fun, this book is very much for you.
Pages: 279 | ASIN : B0GKQSPS7J
A Corrupting Force
The Roses of Carterhaugh reimagines the old Tam Lin ballad through the lives of a noblewoman facing an arranged marriage and a knight stolen into a faerie realm. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
I’ve always had a deep love for history and fairytales. In college, I was part of a reenactment group focused on researching and recreating the Middle Ages. Given my love for story and song, I was instantly drawn to the role of Bard. My Scottish roots introduced me to the Child Ballads, of which Tam Lin is one of the most famous. I eagerly memorized the popular version and presented it as part of my bardic repertoire, but there were so many unanswered questions to the story that the tale stayed with me for some time. I finally realized that I needed to reconcile the Anglicization of the tale with the history of the Scottish people. The research rabbit hole led me on some incredible adventures and gave me some interesting plot twists to explore.
Was there a particular scene that was the hardest to write emotionally?
This is an emotional story in many aspects. The characters face loss, grief, anxiety, rejection, and danger. Still, I think the hardest scene for me to write is the one where Jonet is attacked by the oak tree at Carterhaugh. I can’t give too much away as it would reveal something essential to the plot, but the scene was difficult for several reasons. Jonet, who is usually plucky and fierce, is vulnerable here. She lets her guard down, and she is worried. She doesn’t know she’s in danger until it’s too late. The terror she feels as she blacks out was hard to put to paper because imagining it made me ill. I always feel for my characters, but the downside to that is that I feel with them too.
The book plays with the idea that love is not automatically pure—that it can be leverage. What made you want to explore the uncomfortable side of devotion?
Love itself is a true and powerful thing, but the need for love can be a corrupting force. The imperfect nature of humans, and, in this case, fae, can use love as an excuse for selfish behavior.
The queen is the perfect example of masking generational trauma with love. She fears the loss of love and holds on too tightly. She cannot see a world where it is set free. Only an expression of sacrifice and devotion can correct the imbalance that her selfishness brings.
Jonet, who has also faced tremendous loss for one so young, makes so many sacrifices in the original tale just for the sake of her love; it was easy to conclude that the antagonists would see love in a different light. My story shaped around those elements naturally.
What is the next book that you are working on, and when will it be available?
My next book is a doozy of a research project. I’m writing a grandma camping fantasy set in the Pacific Northwest sometime in the near, post-war future. There will be misadventures, mystical creatures, and a stubborn corgi in tow. My goal is to finish the manuscript sometime next year and perhaps publish it in 2028.
Author Links: GoodReads | X (Twitter) | Facebook | Website | Amazon
In a quiet souters village in Scotland, an earl’s rebellious daughter stirs up trouble with the fabled faeries known as the Daoine Sìth. Can she lift the veil on a darkened past and rescue her knight from the seelie queen’s clutches?
Based on a beloved Child Ballad, this fairytale retelling mixes magic with devotion, leading our heroine and her loved ones on an adventure worth recounting in an enchanted glade or a royal hall.
Death and Coffee
Death and Coffee follows Prudence Barlow, a Puritan-era young woman whose mother is executed for witchcraft in 1661 Hartford—an injustice that leaves Prudence raw enough to bargain with something decidedly not holy. Centuries later she’s “Death’s representative” in 2024 New York City, hustling through an afterlife gig economy with a demon-horse ride named Goose, a glowing amulet that dispatches her to the newly doomed, and an Employee Handbook that reads like corporate cruelty turned into scripture. The novel ricochets between grim history and snarky modernity as Prudence collects souls, dodges petty reaper politics, and, most fatefully, falls for Daxone, a woman whose goodness hits Prudence like sunlight she didn’t realize she’d been missing.
My favorite thing about this book is its tonal nerve. Author Lisa Acerbo doesn’t sand down death into tasteful mood lighting; she lets it stink, joke, swagger, and occasionally ache. Prudence’s voice is sharp without being hollow, funny, yes, but also threaded with old grief that keeps resurfacing like a bruise you press even when you know it’ll hurt. And the workplace satire lands because it’s not just punchlines about policies; it’s about how systems (religious, civic, corporate, supernatural) metabolize human fear and call it “order.” Even the concept of depositing souls with routine, like taking out the trash after a shift, feels deliberately unsettling in a way that makes the comedy bite.
The romance is where the book quietly sharpens its claws. Prudence has been “alive” a long time, but emotionally she’s been running on fumes and caffeine, until Daxone. Their connection isn’t written as destiny-with-a-spotlight; it’s more like recognition, that rare moment when someone looks at your whole strange self and doesn’t flinch. The book makes a bold move in tying love to consequence. Prudence herself frames it with rueful clarity: “falling in love meant certain death,” and the detour they negotiate in the gray dampness of Purgatory feels less like a gimmick than a price paid for choosing tenderness over procedure. I also appreciated that the story keeps its secondary threads lively—reaper coworkers, territorial squabbles, and the looming sense that Death is watching, without letting them drown the emotional throughline.
This is for readers who want paranormal romance, urban fantasy, and dark comedy with a side of historical fantasy, and who don’t mind their magic served alongside content warnings and the occasional flinch-worthy image. If you like the bureaucratic afterlife mischief of Neil Gaiman (think Good Omens energy) but want it kinkier, bloodier, and more explicitly romantic, Acerbo’s lane will feel familiarly strange. Acerbo turns the afterlife into a workplace, and still makes it feel like a haunting.
Pages: 388 | ASIN : B0F3V7GD67
The Roses of Carterhaugh
The Roses of Carterhaugh by Melissa Widmaier is a historical fantasy and fairy-tale retelling that reimagines the old Tam Lin ballad through two linked lives: Jonet, a stubborn noblewoman in Selkirk facing an arranged marriage, and Tam, a knight stolen into the faerie realm of Elphyne for centuries. Jonet keeps getting pulled back to Carterhaugh, the wild clearing where the white roses grow and the veil thins, and her choices ripple outward into family, faith, and the dangerous politics of the Daoine Sìth. The story builds toward Jonet trying to free Tam, while Tam pushes back against the idea that he is just a piece on the faerie queen’s board, even if resistance might cost him everything.
I really enjoyed the voice. Jonet’s narration feels authentic, sharp at the edges, and often funny in a way that comes from frustration rather than punchlines. Early on, she is grieving, bristling, and still somehow itching for freedom, all at once. I liked how Widmaier lets Jonet be difficult without punishing her for it. She can be tender with her sister and downright volcanic with everyone else, sometimes in the same scene. The writing leans into Scots flavor and medieval texture, but it usually stays readable, like the book wants you inside the world instead of standing outside it admiring the wallpaper.
The author’s bold choice is to make the faerie world feel like a real society with rules, grudges, and long memory, not just a misty backdrop for romance. You see the push and pull between Tam’s humanity and the Daoine Sìth’s expectations, and it gets tense in a satisfying way. There’s an honesty to the idea that love is not automatically “pure” just because it is intense. Love can be a vow, sure, but it can also be leverage. The book plays with that discomfort, especially when Jonet realizes how easily magic and rumor can twist what she thinks she knows, and when Tam’s anger finally stops being passive and turns into action.
By the end, what I liked most was the book’s steady insistence on agency. Jonet refuses to be managed, whether by suitors, servants, or supernatural powers, and the story keeps asking what it really costs to choose your own life. Even the closing pages feel like someone leaning in at the edge of the rose clearing and asking you what you will do with the warning you just received. I’d recommend this most to readers who enjoy romantic fantasy rooted in folklore, especially if you like fairy-tale retellings that keep the wonder, and if you have patience for court politics, messy feelings, and characters who fight hard for their right to decide.
Pages: 267 | ASIN : B0G5SKM55R
Shinbone Lane
Shinbone Lane is a work of magical realism set in 1970s San Francisco, following sixteen-year-old runaway Maddy as she stumbles into a pocket of the city that feels almost hidden from time. Taken in by warm-hearted Clara and her neighbor Ted at 346 Shinbone Lane, Maddy finds herself surrounded by artists, misfits, and dreamers, watched over by Captain, a vividly colored, opinionated pigeon with a spring for a foot. As she settles into this found family, the lane’s history starts to surface: a bitter neighbor whose daughter vanished, a house that seems to reconfigure itself, a ripple tree that hums and shimmers, and secrets that tie the past and present together until they converge at the annual Shinbone Fair, where healing and reckoning arrive side by side.
Reading it, I kept feeling like the lane itself was the main character. The magical realism sits lightly on the story, but it is everywhere, from the impossible backyard at 346 to the soft chiming of the ripple tree’s heart-shaped leaves and the way Captain quietly nudges people toward wiser choices. Laura McHale Holland writes San Francisco with such affection that I could almost smell the mix of diesel, ocean air, and bakery sweets, especially when the scent of those famous Star Bakery scones with their butterscotch maple glaze drifts up the hill. The choice to juggle many points of view, not just Maddy’s but also people like Clara, Lark, Eloise, and others, gives the book that classic ensemble feel you often get in community-centered magical realism.
What stuck with me most were the emotional currents under the whimsy. This is magical realism, but the magic never erases how hard it is to be human. You feel Maddy’s hunger for safety after months on the road, Lark’s bruised self-image as she compares herself to every woman who passes beneath her window, and Eloise’s grief curdling into control and cruelty as she clings to the idea that her missing daughter must be close by. The book does not shy away from darker turns, including violence and betrayal, or from the way people can exploit each other while insisting they are acting out of love. At the same time, there is a steady thread of resilience that feels very much in line with women’s fiction: characters keep getting knocked down, then choosing, sometimes shakily, to reach for connection again. I appreciated that the magic, whether it is a talking pigeon or a mysterious flute sending shimmering mist across the hillside, mostly amplifies what is already in the characters instead of fixing their problems for them.
By the end, I felt like I had been invited to a long, slightly chaotic block party where people sing show tunes off key, argue about renaming the street, fall in and out of love, and still manage to show up for one another when it really counts. The book sits comfortably in the genre of magical realism with a strong blend of historical and women’s fiction, and I think it will land best with readers who enjoy character-driven stories, found family, and a city setting that feels almost like a living spell. If you are up for wandering a strange little lane in 1974 San Francisco, listening to a wisecracking pigeon and a singing old house while a group of wounded people figure out how to be kinder to themselves and each other, Shinbone Lane is a very satisfying place to spend some time.
Pages: 324 | ASIN : B0F5N6Y2X4
