Guest post written by Turns of Fate author Anne Bishop
New York Times bestselling author Anne Bishop is a winner of the William L. Crawford Memorial Fantasy Award, presented by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, for The Black Jewels Trilogy. She is also the author of the Ephemera series, the Tir Alainn trilogy, the Novels of the Others, and the World of the Others novels—including Crowbones and Wild Country. She lives in upstate New York.
About Turns of Fate: A young detective investigating crimes of the uncanny will learn that bargains can change your fate—for good or ill—in this darkly enthralling fantasy from the New York Times bestselling author of the Others and the Black Jewels series. Out November 11th 2025.
In order to keep my writing fresh and fun, my Muse occasionally needs to relocate to a world filled with new characters and a different kind of magic. As I played with various ideas, I considered the elements I wanted as my foundation: a core group of characters that I could tag along with on various adventures and investigations; a supernatural world that was just a quarter turn from reality; a place that had the vibe of spooky and dangerous but could also hold sentimental stories and lighter stories as well as the grisly. I wanted stories that sometimes would shine the spotlight on my core group of characters and other times allow a “guest” character to be the star that was supported by my regulars.
In other words, I wanted to build a novel based on the template of a TV show. So that’s what I did.
Part one of Turns of Fate was the “pilot episode” where I introduced my core group of characters—both the humans and the Arcana, who are the supernatural beings—and set up the rules for the Isle of Wyrd, a place that is a convergence of the uncanny. After that, I gleefully embraced possible storylines that my special group of detectives would be called upon to investigate.
The first story after the pilot was a two-part episode spotlighting a “guest” character who would have a recurring role throughout the “season.” A lot of things happened in that first story. We saw how bargains were made, and we met other branches of the Arcana, as well as more detectives from the towns surrounding the Fate River. And we learned the tragic cost of not heeding the rules that govern the Isle of Wyrd.
Other episodes contained stories about people on ghost ships and stories about people transforming into something else. There was a lighter story about a teenager who got on a bus and ended up in a place inhabited by very unusual beings. There was a darker story when one of the detectives discovered a truth about her heritage that put her in danger, and there were episodes that explored the consequences of addiction. Woven into all of that were the mythic-inspired branches of the Arcana as well as a biologically improbable fish that I could clearly picture as providing humor and danger all in one bite. (But since we are in the uncanny, nothing is really improbable.)
Deciding to use a different blueprint was all it took for me to write a novel built on the template of a TV show. Different stories woven together by the characters’ connections to each other, and all of the stories—and most of the people—embracing the strange whether they intended to or not. As each story reached its conclusion, we saw how the characters were touched by the bargains they made with the Arcana and the Isle of Wyrd itself.
So that is Turns of Fate, the first novel (or season?) about the Isle of Wyrd. I hope you’ll join me in taking that quarter turn into the uncanny. I felt a shivery glee as I wrote a novel that is a celebration of the spooky that I’ve loved all my life and also provides a look at some truths about the human heart. After all, isn’t the heart the place where most bargains are made?
