Cate Baumer, author of upcoming fantasy novel The Faithful Dark, has lived half her life in Japan but currently resides on an Appalachian mountaintop and is occasionally visited by foxes and bears. While she works as an international relocation consultant by day, she spends her nights crafting bittersweet stories set in lush and haunted worlds.
The Faithful Dark is a uniquely dark, gothic fantasy, full of dark magic, torturous love and a holy war – epic in its scope and immensely rewarding. Follow three spiritual enemies forced to team up to find a murderer, whose evil is responsible for degrading the magic that protects their Vatican-inspired city and all its people.
In this exclusive Q&A, Cate talks about her literary inspirations, writing queer characters and shares valuable advice for aspiring writers.
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What were your top three literary inspirations for The Faithful Dark and why?
One I always come back to is Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, one of my favorite books we read in college. In more recent work, I’m a massive fan of Katherine Arden and Ava Reid, and hope I’ve approached their incredible skill at atmosphere and evocative prose.
How does your day job as an international relocation consultant, and your various experiences living abroad, influence your writing?
I think living overseas and speaking other languages as well as working regularly with people from different cultures is invaluable as a writer – being able to experience different environments, cultural norms, and ways of thinking helps me think more flexibly and gives me a richer outlook when crafting characters and worlds.
How important was it to you to capture and represent a variety of queer characters in The Brilliant Soul duology?
Extremely! There are pieces of myself and my friends across my characters. In particular, as an aspec author, I find the current focus on quickly established attraction and spice in fantasy books a struggle, so I really wanted to write something that reflected my own identity and preference for, as one reader said, “a burn so slow I got frostbite”.
What are you most excited about readers discovering in book two, The Ruthless Light?
The Faithful Dark is very closed in physical scope, so I’m excited to take readers across the whole of the Immaculate Union, give them the romance payoff they’re already asking for, and bring divinity terrifyingly close.
And finally, what’s your best writing advice for any aspiring novelists?
Believe in yourself and your stories. When I look back on my more than a decade of failed writing projects, that’s eleven manuscripts, hundreds of rejections, years of watching what felt like every other writer in the world get an agent and a deal.
It’s not easy to keep faith in yourself in the face of so many nos. Very few writers I meet have a story of persisting as long as I did – either they get a deal, or they give up.
I can’t promise you will get an agent, or a deal, or a readership. I also can’t tell you that not succeeding after a certain arbitrary time frame means that you won’t. All I can tell you is that publishing is fickle, but your stories aren’t. If they call to you, honor that call and write them. Write them badly, write them in bits and pieces over years, write a little extra after every no, just for spite. Write because you can’t not write, because story craft lights up your brain and helps you make sense of the world. Write.
The heretic, however, makes Csilla a counteroffer: clear his name by helping him catch the real killer, and he'll use his angelic gifts to grant her very own soul. Meanwhile, ruthless Ilan, desperate to earn back his position as Church Inquisitor, sees the case as his chance at redemption: he'll bring in the murderer - or, failing that, Csilla and the heretic - and regain his title.
But as the death toll rises, and their hunt pits them against the all-powerful and callous Faith, Csilla finds herself torn. Will her salvation come at the cost of everything she believes in?