Guest post written by Rogue Community College author David R. Slayton
David R. Slayton (he/him) grew up in Guthrie, Oklahoma, where finding fantasy novels was pretty challenging and finding fantasy novels with diverse characters was downright impossible. Now he lives in Denver, Colorado, and writes the books he always wanted to read. His debut, White Trash Warlock, was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. In 2015, David founded Trick or Read, an initiative to give out books along with candy to children on Halloween as well as uplift lesser-known authors or those from marginalized backgrounds. David is a regular speaker and panelist at fan cons and writing conferences. Find him online at www.DavidRSlayton.com.
Rogue Community College (Blackstone Publishing; on sale 10/15/24) is a queer fantasy full of magic and mayhem and perfect for fans of Travis Baldree and T.J. Klune! PLUS discover an excerpt at the end of the guest post.
Don’t get me wrong. I love a high stakes story. Give me a clock counting down to doomsday, an evil overlord who needs taking down, or a powerful MacGuffin that only an unlikely chosen one can destroy. The problem is that epic stakes can hit a little too close to home when you’re facing extinction by war, environmental collapse, or a previously unknown virus. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that cozy fantasy rose in popularity during the global pandemic.
Cozy fantasy, or something like it, has been around a while. Terry Pratchett mastered the art of showing how he could turn the stakes of the story from the heavy to the comical in books like Carpe Jugulum when a vampire clan is defeated by being infected with a thirst for tea.
Magic Kingdom for Sale—Sold! by Terry Brooks put an amusing spin on a portal fantasy and launched his popular Landover series, a sharp contrast to his epic Shannara books.
More recently, Gail Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate series tells stories where bad fashion and societal disgrace are often the greatest threats facing their heroines. They usually contain a well-earned happy ending for her and her love interest.
A good epic fantasy can thrill us, but it often doesn’t leave room for the quieter moments that happen between the world-ending crises. That doesn’t mean that a cozy fantasy lacks stakes. They simply tend toward the more immediate, the more personal, the more human.
Where an epic fantasy often requires a great sacrifice or that the hero experience buckets of pain, cozier books let readers escape into a story where the conflict might be resolved via a regular bribe of fresh croissants or a well brewed cup of tea. I think we all long for a world where our personal battles could be so easily won.
My recent books are a study in these contrasts. Dark Moon, Shallow Sea, came out in 2023. It’s high fantasy full of blood hungry ghosts, demons, and dead gods. While it falls short of grimdark, it’s the grittiest thing I’ve written. My 2024 release, Rogue Community College, is only a year younger and the lightest book I’ve produced. I was quick to say yes when offered the chance to write it.
I love urban fantasy worlds. They blend the supernatural with the mundane, but I often wonder about the corners left unpainted, the places the characters don’t have time to visit. Rogue Community College gave me the chance to expand on the world I created in the Adam Binder series. While Adam’s books, beginning with White Trash Warlock, explore a corner of what I’ve come to call the Binderverse, they are very much Adam’s story. They serve up a lot of hurt/comfort as he processes the trauma brought on by his upbringing, backwoods family, and the trials I concoct for him.
Rogue Community College let me explore places Adam has no cause to go. It let me show readers more of the world behind the curtain and explore some of my thoughts on education. It also let me shine a spotlight on one of my favorite characters, everyone’s favorite emo chaos monkey, Vran the sea elf.
Vran and I have a long history. He’s been in my brain longer than most of my imaginary friends. Every time I’d start writing a book, he’d pop up, taking a different form and trying to find a way into the story, loudly calling put me in, coach! Put me in. Each time I had to tell him no. I finally found a place for him in Trailer Park Trickster, where he appears on the roof of a trailer to taunt Adam with hidden knowledge. He surprised me though, joining the road trip to hell in Deadbeat Druid and taking an unexpected, heroic turn.
Rogue Community College is very much Vran’s book, but it isn’t only his, and it isn’t told from his point of view. That honor goes to Isaac Frost. I needed a main character who could experience this world for the first time, and I needed him to be very different than Adam Binder.
It helps that Isaac isn’t human. He’s a phage, a bit of vampire. Just a taste of magical blood lets Isaac absorb the creature’s memories and powers. It’s a way for an emotionally stunted young man, who is understandably guarded when you get to know him, to experience empathy. His magic is sympathetic by nature, forcing him to be the same. Isaac didn’t grow up on earth. He was raised in the spirit realm. It’s our world that’s often a mystery to him, and it was fun to flip this trope on its head, introducing a magical being to our mundane world.
There are similarities. Like Adam, Isaac is building a found family, though he’s at the school under false pretenses, so he’s got a big hill to climb. It doesn’t help that the building is alive, possibly onto him, and hiding secrets of its own.
All of the students at Rogue Community College are outcasts or misfits in the mortal realm, a feeling I know all too well. It was a natural progression that the school also be different, a character in its own right. There’s a certain whimsy in that concept. While the book isn’t a cozy fantasy, it is cozy adjacent. I like to think it’s the opposite of dark academia.
I wrote the tagline for this book: chosen ones go to elite schools of magic. This one is for everybody else, and I’d like to think that comes through in the story. The world of Rogue Community College is queer normative, one where the prejudices, phobias, and isms of our world get left behind. I wanted to focus on other conflicts, and I wanted readers to feel like this was a place they’d feel not just safe, but welcome—a magic school that would take those of us who really could have used a home when we felt we didn’t have one.
I’m excited to share this story with you. I hope you enjoy the ride, and I hope you feel like Rogue Community College is somewhere you’d belong.
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