For Leigh Bardugo, the Ninth House series is very personal

This post was originally published on Audible.com.

Note: Text has been lightly edited for clarity and does not match audio exactly.

Patty K. Rivera: Hi, listeners. This is Audible Editor Patty K. Rivera, and today I have the pleasure of welcoming number one New York Times bestselling author Leigh Bardugo to talk about Dead Beat, the final installment in the Ninth House series. After following Alex Stern from the secret societies of Yale to the depths of hell, Dead Beat brings her story and the mystery surrounding Lethe to their conclusion. Welcome, Leigh.

Leigh Bardugo: Thank you for having me, Patty.

Thank you so much for being here. Candidly, I am so excited that I got to listen to Dead Beat already, because the anticipation was killing me. But let's start at the beginning. The Ninth House series was a departure from your Grishaverse series, taking you somewhere darker and more grounded in the real world. What drew you towards telling this kind of story?

Early on, when I signed with my agent, when I first signed with her well over a decade ago, she asked me, "What else are you interested in writing?" I had this idea, but we couldn't figure out where it fit. It didn't feel like a YA story, and candidly, I hadn't made my bones enough for people to want to take a chance on me on adult. So, we really had to wait it out, and while I was waiting, I was sort of cooking on what this really was about. I always knew there would be horror elements and fantasy elements, but that I wanted it to be rooted in the experience of going to college but also figuring out where you fit in the world after college.

I think with young adults, there's an end, right? There's an end to the adventure. It could be prom, it could be a revolution, but there's an end, and that's where the story ends. Whereas I think as we enter the adult world, we understand that one day follows another follows another, and that the real trick is surviving in the long run and finding ways to support the people you love in the long run. That's Alex's challenge from the start of this series, is how do I make the most of this opportunity and how do I, who have this one second chance, and I'm surrounded by people who burn through second chances, how do I survive this place?

Oh, I absolutely love that. Alex is such a complicated protagonist. She is angry, she's deeply guarded, and she's willing to make choices that aren't always easy to defend. What has it been like to write a character who isn't necessarily interested in being likable? And did your understanding of Alex change as you wrote the three books?

I love writing Alex. I'm going to miss writing her, in part because there's an element of chaos to her that she brings into the narrative, and I'm never quite sure what she's going to do or how she's going to respond to a situation. I think it's funny because people often talk about Alex's anger, but I think of Alex as a pragmatist more than anything. She, unlike the people who surround her in this freshman class when Ninth House begins, she has lived a lot of life, and it has been a hard life. She looks at the world very differently from them, and that creates a kind of chasm between her and the bright-eyed, optimistic freshmen of Yale. She is coming at everything from a different perspective.

Initially, that's very alienating for her, and she thinks that this is a disadvantage. But really, it turns out to be her superpower. Yes, she has some magical abilities, but her real superpower is that she's been through it. She can take a beating and get back up. She knows that she can keep going. She has this tremendous ability to survive, and she sees things that other people don't see because she's lived a very different life from most people in her class.

I like writing a character with that level of determination, that level of ambition, and a certain amount of ruthlessness. Again, she is in a situation where this is not a lark for her, this is not, "Oh, I'm gonna do this and then I'm gonna take an internship at The New Yorker." Like, she is trying to carve out a future because she's lived a long time thinking she has no future, and now she has this opportunity to change her life in such a radical way.

At least for me, going to college for the first time, I felt like I had crash-landed on an alien planet. I felt like I did not speak the language. I did not understand the vocabulary. Classes were one thing, but there was this whole social thing happening that I really didn't understand, and especially because coming from the West Coast and then going into this East Coast world of old money and influence, I truly sometimes felt as if the people around me were speaking a foreign language and I was desperately trying to keep up. I wanted that to be part of Alex's story, too, because I think in some ways, the stakes of a college story are kind of inherently low, like, "Oh, boo-hoo, you gotta go to school for four years and learn something."

I have a very clear memory of I was dating a guy who was a year younger than me, so I graduate and I remember standing on a subway platform with him in New York and he was talking about like, "Oh, I don't have any money and I can't buy any CDs." It was the '90s. And I lost it. I absolutely lost it. I was like, "Oh, no, you won't be able to have dinner out this week? You won't be able to buy CDs? Meanwhile, I will get evicted if I'm out of money. Like, come on." So, the stakes are different depending on where you are in life. And for me, I needed to ratchet those stakes up for Alex as high as I could possibly get them.

No, truly, as the series goes on, the stakes feel like they're just higher and higher and higher. Things keep happening to our girl Alex, and as things come along, she's trying to have this college experience. There are some moments throughout the series where she kind of—but then something else just comes back and gets our girl right back on that demon trail. Yale, in this series, it's almost a character. It feels like a character.

And New Haven, too, I hope.

Yes. This entire series, the entire Ninth House series, and I've been saying this the entire week, feels like a love letter to New Haven.

It is. It absolutely is, and it was a letter I did not expect to write when I had the idea for this book. I thought, "Oh, I'm writing a campus novel and I'll go back.” I hadn't been back to campus since I left. I worked at a free weekly in New Haven for a while. But it had been well over 20, 25 years. I went back and I thought I would be just researching Yale, and instead, I really fell in love with New Haven. I had a real sense of embarrassment because I had spent four years at this institution in this city, and I knew nothing about the city, nothing about it.

I think it's very easy to live in your bubble, but the history of New Haven, its relationship with the university, those became really important to me. Darlington's character was shaped by that as well, because originally he was just going to be a rich kid from a fancy family, and I thought, "Oh, no, no. I'm gonna root him right here in this city because it's gonna be a way for me to help people understand the very peculiar history of this town."

Truly, him and Alex are fascinating because they begin Ninth House with completely different ideas about Yale, Lethe, magic, and even each other, yet somehow they become two people who are willing to literally go to hell for one another. How did you approach building their relationship across the trilogy without rushing?

My thing as a viewer, as a reader, as a listener, my thing is grudging respect. I love grudging respect, and I love people recognizing each other's competence. I find that very thrilling. When you think you know someone and they reveal something to you that makes you step back and reexamine, not just them, but why you leapt to that conclusion about them in the first place. And so that was a dynamic that was gonna operate between these two characters from the start.

I think, too, they kind of represent very different sides of me. There's a lot of Alex in me who has always felt alienated from this world. But then I also have a lot of Darlington in me and the love of magic, the desperate desire to see a secret world unfold for you. I think anybody who reads fantasy or science fiction has this pull, this deep desire to believe there's a secret world beneath our own. So, I sympathize with both of them. I get where both of them are coming from. And even Dawes, too. These are all different ways to be a person in the world and to be a student in the world and to relate to an academic institution. I think they all gave me different opportunities to shift the lens of the story.

I love Dawes.

For those who have not started the series, Dawes is a graduate student. She's been working on her dissertation for year upon year. We get the sense she may never finish it. I wanted to really ask what that meant and what this asks of you, and the way we kind of hide from the world in a project or that initially has a goal and that then the goal behind it, it vanishes, and you just live in the pocket of trying to complete this task.

I have so many friends who are in academics, who are on the job market, who are in that world, and they're asking themselves the question of “What did I do? Why did I choose this? And what path forward is there?” I wanted all of that to be built into Dawes. Somebody asked me recently, "If you could go on a road trip with any one of your characters…" I was like, "Dawes, because she would plan everything. She can cook. She's on top of it all of the time." I am usually the person in my household who's like, "Here's our itinerary and here's our boarding passes, and here's what we're gonna do, and this..." No, Dawes would be on top of all of that.

She has one of the best arcs in the series. Dawes, oh, my goodness, and there's this one moment towards the end where our girl suffers. Our girl Dawes suffers just a little bit. I won't ruin why, but like, ugh.

That was emotional to write.

It was?

Yeah. I used to laugh at people who would say that they cried while they were writing something, because it always sounded so arrogant to me, like, "Oh, my genius." It felt so egotistical. But I will admit, I've had a few moments in writing the Grishaverse books and these books where the emotion sort of overtakes the craft, and that is always actually a good sign for me that there's something real happening on the page. I usually will cry when I write it, and then again when I revise it, and then again when I edit it.

So, there were just a couple of moments in this book, and I think it's partially because I'm sad to leave these stories. This was a world that is so strange, and I almost can't believe it got to be a book series, in the sense that my publisher treated it as the lead title. And readers came to it, and I didn't know if that would happen. It is profoundly weird, and I think there's something gratifying to me because it's so deeply personal. The kinds of connections I've made with people because of this series, the stories people have brought to me because of this series, are very different from those brought to me from the Grishaverse, and I'm sad to leave it behind.

I am also sad it's ending. This series is just, the way I've devoured it, it's just so good.

Thank you.

It's just so gothic. It's that love letter to New Haven. Everything just came together so beautifully. And while I'm here telling you things I love, I love chapter 37. Thank you so much for it.

I'm not sure what chapter that is (laughs).

When Alex and Darlington finally get to…

Okay! Okay (laughs). I mean, you're welcome. Like, man, I love a slow burn. I love a slow burn. And when people are like, "Oh, it's slow burn," I'm like, "Oh, did it take three books? Because if it didn't, it's not slow enough a burn for me." I like a slow, slow burn.

Since we're talking about personal versions of hell, I'm sitting here like, "Will they, won't they? Am I crazy?”

I think I've realized that my whole thing is damaged people doing damage. I love people who struggle to connect, who are carrying around a lot of their own baggage, who desperately long for connection, but don't quite know how to get to it. If you think about it, every character in this book is struggling with that. Alex more profoundly, right? She does not trust human connection. She does not understand that there are battles she truly cannot win alone.

Dawes is isolated by her shyness, by her fear of the world. Darlington is isolated by a variety of things, first by this strange life he leads in Black Elm, and then by his journey to hell and by the changes it affects in him. Turner is isolated by his job, by his fear of not connecting with his own community, and his desire to not have anything to do with magic and these weirdos who are running around talking about the occult.

So, all of these characters are isolated in some way, but they are hungry for connection as well. I think that that's sort of a fundamental human thing. I think we are living in an increasingly isolated age. So, for me, getting to put these characters together to fight with each other, for each other, is satisfying in a really profound way.

They're fighting together, but they're also growing together. We see them support each other through so many things. For me, listening to it and emotionally connecting with each person, being almost as invested as they are in their own futures, and I feel like what made that so much more palpable and special was the audio. Lauren Fortgang has been the voice of Alex since Ninth House. She's then joined by Michael David Axtell as Darlington in Hell Bent and in Dead Beat. Now, after spending so many years with these characters, what has it been like hearing Lauren and Michael shape the way that listeners experience them?

Lauren has been narrating my books since Shadow and Bone. I still remember hearing her sample. I was in a hotel room in Germany, and these were my very first audiobooks. They sent me a bunch of samples, and I remember hearing her voice for the first time and thinking, "Oh, yeah, that's who I want for this." I think in some ways, I was just going on gut instinct, and boy, was I right, because she's just fantastic. I can't tell you how many people have come to me to say, "Oh, I listen to the books. I love the audio." I think they become attached to the characters because of the way that she voices them.

We are always in communication before books, and I always apologize for all the difficult terms I'm gonna throw at her, and sometimes scenes where there's 12 characters talking. But I felt just incredibly grateful to be in partnership with her on these stories and to have her talent on them. And then Michael is phenomenal, and I think Darlington's not an easy character. He's got a lot going on, and he has a lot of emotional change, physical change, happening to him throughout these stories, and he's had less page time.

So, for me, Dead Beat was also this opportunity to bring Darlington to the forefront in a way that he really hadn't been in Ninth House and Hell Bent. He is very present in the sense that people are always thinking about him, talking about him, and he really lives in Alex's head, but then now he is really on the page and is a part of the action. That was sort of fun to explore with the characters, too, because there's a very big difference between a voice in your head and the physical presence of another human being. And Darlington is a spectacularly beautiful human being.

He is. I mean, you don't get a nickname like the Gentleman Demon. There has to be a level of sophistication.

That is right. Manners make the man, as they say.

Exactly. I mean, we can talk all day about Darlington. I just adore him. Now, one thing that you actually did throughout the series that as a native Spanish speaker, I found it absolutely beautiful, was the way you wove in the Ladino language. I do want to ask how did you manage to weave Ladino in there?

My grandmother on my father's side spoke Ladino, and that was my first experience with it. Ladino is usually passed down through refranes, because very few people speak the language anymore, and so you have these little sayings, and the one I remembered from being a kid was Kyen no rizika, no rozika, which is, “Who doesn't laugh, doesn't bloom,” which is basically your grandma being like, "Smile! Go ahead and smile."

I grew up knowing that, without actually knowing what the language was, or really even what it meant. So, I reconnected with that language, and then I wanted to bring that language into Alex's story. It also plays a major role in The Familiar, which is my historical fantasy that Lauren narrated as well, and that I forced her to sing in because I wanted that part of that tradition to be in there, too.

But when I created Alex, I told you I needed to raise the stakes for her. Part of the way I did that was by cutting her off from anything that would give her strength and something to rely upon. She doesn't have family to rely on. Her mom loves her deeply but is kind of a New Age hippie who will fall for any MLM in her path, and [Alex] doesn't have a connection to her biological father, and she doesn't have a connection to her culture. She's been cut off from that, too. Those are the things that sort of root you and that allow you to have a kind of resilience in the face of change and in the face of adversity.

So, she is without these things, and then she begins to create threads to these people she begins to think of as friends, and she begins to create connection to even the place that she's in, but she also begins to seek out resolution and to seek connection with her mother, with her culture, with her grandmother. I don't wanna spoil it, but there's a reason the book is called Dead Beat. So, yeah, her father, too.

Okay, listeners, we are heading into spoiler territory, so if you have not finished Dead Beat, this is your warning to come back to this part of the chat later. Alex has spent so much of the series trying to understand what she is and why she can do the things that she can do, and Dead Beat finally gives us answers through her history. What made this the right moment for you to finally reveal that part of Alex?

I mean, this was my last chance to do it. It's the third book. If I didn't do it now, and in some ways, I don't like revealing my hand. I think there's a lot of pleasure in drawing out those mysteries. But I knew Alex's story and the relationships between her parents, and that was something I had locked in from the start. There are hints of it throughout. All of that, I knew, was going to be important.

I think I have an inclination to push against magical lineage. I think people are very drawn to, and I understand that, the idea that you are a secret fairy princess or you are the secret heir to the throne or that your bloodline somehow determines that you have the right to a particular position or a particular kind of magic or whatever it is. I absolutely understand that. I was like every other kid who wanted to believe that I had this secret destiny inside of me and somebody was gonna finally see it.

I think that's so deeply built into us and built into our fantasy stories. But I think I'm always pushing against it because I think it's kind of a gross message that your blood determines who you are. I don't like that. I think magic and greatness and adventure should belong to anyone who's bold enough to claim it. I think that, for me, I wanted to be very careful about building Alex's origin story in a way that held true to that.

Oh, I love that. I'm not going to ruin the ending, I promise, but I love that you also, at the end, you don't necessarily make it so easy for them to get from, "Hey, these final battles and things that need to be fought” to, like, “the end."

I don't write stories without hope. I'm not really interested in them. I don't want my readers to feel like they've just been kicked in the teeth at the end of the story. That said, I don't think there's ever going to be an ending of a book for me that's wholly perfect and happy and where everybody gets exactly what they want, in part because I think it would feel dishonest. I think readers would pick up on that, too. We think we want a happily ever after, but I think particularly with a story like this, there has to be a sense of the cost to get there.

Now that the Ninth House series is over, what's next for you?

I'm working on a really big horror project, actually, with a bunch of other authors, and I can't announce it yet, but it's an incredible lineup and we're taking on something kind of huge. I'm excited to see where we go with that. I'm also working on a graphic novel, and then I also have another adult book coming, but I won't really be able to dig into that probably for another year, which is a bummer.

I mean, we'll be waiting for whatever's next. I'm waiting patiently.

It's very strange to be at the end of the series. The Grishaverse was such a long-running series, and at the end, I was alternating books. I was alternating those books with the Ninth House books, and it's very strange to think, "Okay, my series are over now and I'm going to be stepping into new territory."

Would you ever revisit the Ninth House world again?

Never say never. You don't know. I want to let the story guide me. If I wake up tomorrow and suddenly have an idea for another story set in this world, I'm never gonna close the door on that. I can say that, right now, I'm ready to step away and to be doing some other things. But I was going through photos because I was looking for stuff for posts to promote the book, and I was trying to find old photographs. I went to school when we didn't have cell phones, and so finding photos is very challenging. I had to go searching through all these old bins. It is strange to look back at that person at this great distance of now 30-plus years and think she had no idea what the future held and that I was going to write my own version of Yale. I don't think I ever could have predicted.

I absolutely love that. Just hearing how you went there, had to go back to do research and then are looking for the photos now, it just feels kind of full circle.

We're going to do the launch of this book in New Haven, at a church on the green that is actually mentioned in Dead Beat. It's a beautiful church, the one Gothic church on the green, which I love. I will be there with Kelly Link and Holly Black, and I'm really looking forward to it. I think it's going to be really special.

What a lineup. If there's anything that the series has made me want to do is, we're in New Jersey, New Haven's not that far.

No, it's not. You should come.

Right? Get in the car, take a quick stroll through Yale and just be like, "That's where Darlington and Alex did X, Y, Z."

You can follow that map. Everything on that map is real. And you can walk the gauntlet in Sterling Memorial Library. You can literally follow the path to hell. You can't complete the circuit because there's a door that's in the college librarian's office that you can't get to. But probably for the best, everybody should stay in this realm. But for me, that's also the pleasure of it, is seeing people post that they went to New Haven, that they took photos there, that they spent time there, instead of just driving through, is really meaningful to me.

I have one last question while we wait for whatever's next, patiently: If Alex and Darlington could recommend an Audible Listen to me, what would it be?

Murderbot.

Oh!

I mean, Darlington would probably be like, "You should listen to the newest translation of The Odyssey." But I'm not listening to him. I'm listening to Alex, and Alex would recommend Murderbot. Murderbot is, weirdly, my comfort listen. I love listening to those books, and they're so smart and funny and deep, and I just adore them. So, that's a great one.

Leigh, it has been such a pleasure speaking with you today about Dead Beat and looking back at the Ninth House series. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today.

Thank you. This was so much fun. I really appreciate it.

Of course. And listeners, you can pick up Dead Beat along with the rest of the Ninth House series on Audible now. Happy listening!