Why Is Everyone Reading Those Faerie Romance–Fantasy Books Now? One Bestselling Author Thinks She Knows Why.

Fairies are having a moment, thanks to the overwhelming popularity of books like Sarah J. Maas’ A Court of Thorns and Roses. But longtime YA fantasy readers will remember that Holly Black is one of the OGs of gritty novels about the mercurial inhabitants of faerie lands. The author of Tithe, the Curse Workers trilogy, The Spiderwick Chronicles, and other books—which have collectively sold more than 26 million copies—is no stranger to the otherworldly appeal of magic, romance, and dangerous court intrigue. Now, 20-plus years into her career, Black is still ruling the genre, with her Folk of the Air trilogy’s The Cruel Prince a staple of the book-obsessed subset of TikTok known as “BookTok.” Black’s latest work, The Prisoner’s Throne—a conclusion to her The Stolen Heir duology, about the young rulers of two rival faerie courts navigating political treachery, self-acceptance, and the cost of power—was released in early March, and she is at work on a card game based on The Folk of the Air. I chatted with the author about her long career, her thoughts on the booming genre and BookTok, and why hooves are sexy.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Slate: It’s been nearly 22 years since the publication of your first book, Tithe, which was a young adult fantasy book. The genre is experiencing a renaissance of sorts. If you look at the bestseller list, a lot of them are fantasy romance books. How do you feel about this popular resurgence of faerie fantasy?

Holly Black: I tell this story a lot: Between when Tithe came out and when the first Spiderwick book came out—2002 to 2003—I went to the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators conference, which I had never been to before, and I didn’t know a lot of people who were working writers. I guess people had been told to network wherever, so there’s a long bathroom line, and the woman in front of me asked me, “What do you write?” I said, “Oh, young adult.” And she turned around to talk to somebody else. Young adult—nobody wanted to write it, it was an extremely tiny part of the children’s market, it really didn’t have the cachet. It was a time when picture books and middle grade were where you wanted to be.

There was a huge shift; I think it started with Barnes and Noble moving the YA section outside of the kids’ section so that you no longer had to go through that gateway, and for the first time it became discoverable by people who no longer considered themselves children. So you had teenagers much more willing to approach it, but also adults. Probably the first series that really blew up was Gossip Girl—that brought adults to the YA section but had teens really reading it, and just changed the genre. I just watched it blow up in this way where it became much bigger and attracted many more writers, having these huge hits.

The majority of your work is YA. What draws you, as a writer, to that age range?

I sort of stumbled into it. I had written Tithe, and it has a 16-year-old as its protagonist because it is a story of someone who’s discovering that they’re a faerie changeling. A 30-year-old figuring out they’re a faerie changeling seemed late, or maybe like they’re not the sharpest knife in the drawer; it just seemed like the wrong time for self-discovery like that.

So you never set out to write YA specifically?

I just set out to write a fantasy novel. There were lots of fantasy novels with 16-year-old protagonists. I had a friend who was a children’s librarian, and she said, “I think you should consider YA,” and I thought, I don’t know, there’s lots of swearing in this book! There’s a lot of stuff in this book. She gave me Tamora Pierce and Garth Nix—some of the most beautifully built magic systems of any books that I’ve read, just super elegant. I went into this space at such a great time because it was growing and because, when people are coming into YA, they’re not used to reading extremely specific genres, so you can mash up things. You can try things. You can be more experimental because readers don’t realize you’re being experimental—they’re reading this stuff for the first time. So it was a really fun place to write in.

What does it feel like now to be surrounded by all these other faerie fantasy books and, consequently, readers who potentially read only fantasy, who are not coming into the genre for the first time?

As a person who writes and reads a lot of fantasy, it’s been extremely gratifying to see fantasy move into a mainstream place. There are a lot of people who’ve grown up watching Lord of the Rings at a young enough age that it’s become part of their vocabulary of how the fantasy world works. Game of Thrones too. I think, for a lot of people, that barrier to entry is much lower than it was when there wasn’t so much exposure to fantasy.

I think the rise of romantasy is certainly in part because people do have the vocabulary of fantasy. Romance is one of the biggest genres in the world, so of course people want to see, or are able to read, fantasy romances in a way that might not have been true before. Romantasy is really two different genres kind of mushed together, probably in the same way that urban fantasy was. You have two streams: the romance-forward fantasy, where it’s really a romance novel with fantasy, and then you have fantasy that has romance. They’re paced really differently, and they have different focuses, but they live in the same genre. Then you had urban fantasy that came out of fantasy, and often those were the faerie books; for a long time urban fantasy was faerie, in the late ’80s.

The promotion of books is something that has probably changed a lot in the 20 years that you’ve been writing fantasy. How do you handle social media? How do you balance your personal privacy or protect your creativity from what can be a constant drain of attention?

I think that’s a constantly evolving answer because when I first came into this, LiveJournal was really big. I loved LiveJournal and spent some time posting long-form content there, and then everybody moved to Tumblr. Tumblr was very different, though. I feel like, with LiveJournal, I had my own space, whereas Tumblr felt a little bit like a public forum, yelling at one another because people were reposting your stuff with a thing at the end, and that was a whole different thing. And then I moved over to Twitter. In the beginning, I was like, What a low commitment, how great! There are a lot of things to be said for Twitter: I feel like it really did allow for a lot of voices that hadn’t previously had a platform to be heard. However, now we’re in a Twitter dystopia. I still have a Twitter. I’m trying to migrate to Bluesky, but I am mostly just on Instagram.

What do you think about TikTok? I know there’s Bookstagram, but I feel like BookTok is largely responsible for this renaissance of the dark fantasy romance genre. 

Personally, I have a lot to thank TikTok for. I’ve only made two TikToks at all, and one of them is just a thank-you. The Folk of the Air books did very well, but then TikTok came, and it was a different level, it really was. I so appreciate that. I’m not a good video editor, so I don’t make TikToks, but I certainly appreciate that BookTok has really embraced reading and gotten people excited about reading.

Do you have any cons or complaints about BookTok?

I don’t think that there is enough diversity in what is being found by TikTok, and I’m not sure why that is. I don’t understand the algorithm; I don’t understand what gets pushed out. But I definitely feel there’s a narrow range of books.

That brings us to the question of diversity in the fantasy genre itself being an issue. Now there are fantasy books with Asian, Black, Arab protagonists, etc.—Kaye, in your book Tithe, was half-Japanese, which I really latched on to as a tween, being half-Asian. You are writing about a world full of merpeople, selkies, and goblins, and characters in your books are blue- and green-skinned. How do you tackle human diversity in a faerie world? 

Making sure that they are representative of the world around us is really important. It’s a big world with room for the real people in our real world in it. I obviously can always do better. I want to write the best book I can, in the time I can. I also think that there are some things that are not necessarily appropriate for me to write. I think you just have to know what is within your wheelhouse. To me, those are the twin questions: There needs to be space in your world for everybody, and there also needs to be an awareness of what is not necessarily your story to tell. The tension between those things is always something I’m thinking about.

What’s the weirdest place you’ve drawn inspiration from for any one of your stories? 

A lot of stuff is from my friends or the people I was growing up with. I made a rule for the Modern Faerie Tale books that nothing that happens to them in the human world can be something I don’t have some secondhand experience with. So, all the messed-up stuff—all true!

I think one of my favorite stories about things I drew deliberate inspiration from was when I was writing the Curse Workers series. I wrote at cafés a lot, and so I was writing at a café with my friend Kelly Link. She, Cassandra Clare, and I are all local here, so we’ll get together and write a lot. Anyway, so I was like, “Kelly, I know you have to go on errands. I’m writing this scene where Cassel is thrown into the back of a car. Can you just put me in the back of your car while you go shopping?” I really wanted to know: Do you have to curl up? What’s it like? And she’s like, “Sure, no problem!” What you imagine is a classic kind of car, but she had a hatchback, so people behind us could clearly see that she had someone in the trunk of her car. But Massachusetts is a lawless land, so did anyone help me? They did not.

It was not too bad! Not too uncomfortable. You need a little neck pillow. If anyone kidnaps you, stock a neck pillow.

What was the most challenging part of finishing this Stolen Heir duology? Was it like closing a door?

When I was first talking about doing a duology, I was interested in what the format could do that I couldn’t do in a differently shaped story, which is why I wanted to do one story from Wren’s point of view and one story from Oak’s point of view. I was inspired a little bit by Gayle Forman, who had done a couple of duologies like that, and I found them to be really satisfying in the way that they open a door in one book and then close it in the next. It’s a way to not just have a duology be like a shorter trilogy.

I think the second challenge really was going back to Elfhame, to a cast that many people care deeply about, who are not the protagonists, and yet who are clever and smart and tricksy and could come in and solve all the problems, so why don’t they? And creating actual space for them to solve enough problems that we recognize them as clever people who can take care of things, and yet restrict them enough that they don’t take over the book.

In The Prisoner’s Throne, there’s a scene early on that I thought was going to go in the way many romantasy books would go these days, but it didn’t. A lot of readers are here for the smut, but some authors, like yourself, will go the “behind closed doors” route, where the sex isn’t explicit or it’s assumed to have happened off the page. Are you at all interested in exploring the smuttier aspect of fantasy? 

I think that I certainly could push myself a bit more out of my comfort zone, but I don’t know how much I would want to explore it. Mostly because, as a reader, I find long sex scenes to be paced strangely—you’re moving through everything else at a certain pace, and then the pace just drops off, like, OK, now we’re spending, like, two chapters like this. I know there are people who enjoy it, obviously. I recognize that readers wish I could make the scenes a little longer. I had a reader ask me, with the Folk of the Air series, if my editor had made me cut down the scenes, and I said, “No, actually, my editor told me to expand the scene.” And she said, “Well, why didn’t you?” Friend, I did.

I also had somebody talk to me recently about how, in a certain kind of book, what you have is levels of physical intimacy being symbolic of the characters achieving a greater amount of emotional intimacy. That’s just not something I’ve ever thought of as being equivalent. I’ve been like, Oh, I have to get them closer here, but I never really thought that people often are using physical intimacy as a stand-in or as a way to communicate emotional intimacy. Building up into a greater and greater level of physical intimacy is doing work that I’m just not thinking about doing in that way.

I want to talk about power because a lot of your books revolve around it. In this specific book, The Prisoner’s Throne, Oak doesn’t want it, right? Jude will do anything to defend her power. Castle, in The Curse Workers, happens to fall into having great power. In the Modern Faerie Tales, Roiben assumes power reluctantly. And in Book of Night, Charlie tries to distance herself from power but can’t fight it. What draws you to exploring power?

Power is something that we all have a relationship with. One of the things that fantasy is able to do is make power extremely explicit, whereas in life, power is often quite diffuse; there are many different axes of power. When you’re talking about a throne or a crown, we are able to make that explicit, and that is one of the great things that fantasy is able to do: to talk about our world, about things that we feel and know, but in a way where we can distance ourselves a little from them. So much of the Folk of the Air series is about Jude basically being asked or asking herself, “How much of a monster am I willing to become for power?” And through power, safety.

My last question is facetious: If Cardan’s tail was contentious, did you know you’d be writing a love interest and protagonist with hooves?

I did not. However, I cannot understand how people have any questions about how hooves are hot! The devil has hooves—they are canonically hot! Who doesn’t think hooves aren’t hot?

As you were saying earlier, our fantasy vocabulary is wider than it’s ever been. Twenty years ago, what would have been a niche fantasy book now has a huge following. Twenty years ago, when you were first starting out, we had only elves, orcs, and goblins in our vocabulary. Now we can normalize new things, like hooves as sexy!

I don’t see why not!