The “lesbian necromancers” are back! Or are they? Nona the Ninth, the third entry in Tamsyn Muir’s extremely popular “The Locked Tomb” series, publishes on Sept. 13, and offers a bit of a departure from the expected plot arc. Nona is a mysterious young woman who’s trying to figure out who she is, because six months ago she awoke in someone else’s body. LJ’s sf/fantasy columnist Kristi Chadwick talked with Muir—a best-selling author; winner of the Locus and Crawford awards; and Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, and Shirley Jackson nominee—about the series, her writing process, and what she’s reading right now.

Did the popularity of “The Locked Tomb” series surprise you?

I think any debut author who sells more than 10 copies ends up surprised. You get warned to keep your expectations low. My expectations were at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. I don’t look at social media, but I’m always warmly surprised when anyone turns up to see me at a convention. I think the test will be if they still want to see me by the end of the series.

Initially, Nona the Ninth was not intended to be part of the original series, though you have written shorts that fall within that same universe (e.g., “The Mysterious Study of Doctor Sex”). When did you realize that Nona was going to expand your trilogy to a quartet?

I think somewhere around the 150k mark when I realized that if this was my Act One, and I had three other acts to get through, this was going to be a very long book. I was adamant that it still needed to be one book with the original final book, Alecto the Ninth, but my editor gently told me that that was not the case. And he was right—Nona is its own thing and sits by itself. It was always going to be a weird Act One! And now it is its own weird book.

How has the emotional journey of these characters informed their actions? Are any of them ever going to be happy?

My initial reaction was to kind of rub my hands together and be like, “No… ha ha ha…NO,” which is not truthful and not the case. “The Locked Tomb” was always going to be about a really difficult journey about uncovering secrets and what happens next. You get to see the characters make decisions that they would have made in fundamentally different ways at the beginning—because now they know something, or realize they don’t know something, or they have different things to lose. There will be, at least, a chance for happiness at the end of the series. At the same time, it is the kind of happiness where you have been on fire for the last five minutes and someone put it out. You’re very glad you’re not on fire anymore, but there are some next steps now before you can say that you are over being on fire.

Which makes the whole series sound incredibly grueling. I mean, I love that it is a searing exploration of grief, but there is also a significant portion of Nona that is devoted to getting and wearing different T-shirts. It’s about the choices we make when we are given ultimate power, but it’s also about how badly dinner parties can go.

With Alecto the Ninth wrapping up the series in the future, have you heard from fans about any lingering questions that they hope will be answered?

Because death has a habit of not sticking in the universe, people are very much like, “Will we see X again?” even if X has died twice. It makes me feel immensely happy that these characters have mattered so much in anyone’s internal life other than mine. Because the fundamentals of “The Locked Tomb” are like one enormous murder mystery, where millions of people have been murdered over ten thousand years. I hope that their main questions of “whodunit” are answered satisfactorily. I generally tell people that the answer is so much [simpler] than anything they are coming up with.

Are you reading anything interesting right now?

I’m completing my Dorothy L. Sayers kick by going from her “Peter Wimsey” series straight to reading her translation of Dante’s Inferno, which is wonderful. I’m also thoroughly enjoying Rebecca Roanhorse’s space opera Black Sun, which I slept on, like a fool, but now at least the sequel will come quicker for me. Black Sun is a masterclass; I keep telling people to read the first chapter just as an example of the craft of short story.—Kristi Chadwick