Devan Barlow (she/her) is the author of the Curses & Curtains series and the collection Foolish Hopes and Spilled Entrails: Retellings. Find her short fiction and poetry in various anthologies and magazines. She reads voraciously, and is usually hanging out with her dog, drinking tea, and thinking about sea monsters.
Author Links:
Website: devanbarlow.com
Itch.io shop: devan-barlow.itch.io
Universal Book Links:
An Uncommon Curse
An Uncertain Murder
Let’s talk about the series Curses & Curtains, which merges fairy tales with musical theatre and mystery. What is your favourite fairy tale, and what are the appeals of fairy tales for you?
There are so many I love, but if I have to narrow it down, either The Blue Bird or The Princess and the Pea. Fairy tales have an endless capacity for weirdness and transformation, humor and horror, which makes them excellent beginning points for most any kind of story you want to tell.
How did you choose which minor characters to refocus the stories on, and what scope did this give you to play with plot strands and themes that perhaps get overlooked in more traditional retellings of these tales?
When I finish reading a fairytale and think “Oh, but what about that random side character? We never got to hear what happened to them!” that often leads to me writing retellings.
For this series, I took that instinct and expanded on it, to look at all people and events happening just out of frame of the main stories. A lot of support structure is necessary for princesses and princes to complete these enormous quests! After all, someone has to cobble the enchanted shoes the Twelve Princesses dance in every night.
What inspired the characters of Susan in An Uncommon Curse, and Joan in An Uncertain Murder, and what is your favourite thing about them?
There are a number of fairy tales where a male love interest is transformed/kidnapped/loses his memory/etc, and often he ends up engaged or married to another woman. I became fascinated by the plight of that “other woman” and that led to Susan! I love how sensible she is, even as the world around her becomes increasingly chaotic.
Joan first appears in An Uncommon Curse as a tertiary character, but I immediately knew I wanted her to come back. I love how Joan is both very anxious but also loves to (in her way) be in the spotlight, and that helped me develop the plot of book two, which includes both a heist and having to solve a murder that hasn’t happened yet.
What inspired the idea of a cursed musical, and how did the musical itself develop as you were plotting and drafting the stories?
Plotting book one happened mostly simultaneously with building the world. A lot of my plotting process involves asking “How could I make things worse for the character” so while I originally planned that Susan would have a (rather inaccurate) musical written about her, I then realized that if I made the musical itself a vehicle for magic, I could introduce both chaos into the plot and more intricacy into the worldbuilding.
With books two and three, then, the challenge was then to still incorporate musicals (and theatrical magic) in ways that didn’t feel repetitive. The challenges of plotting, describing, and writing lyrics for the in-world musicals has been overwhelming at times, but such a fun way to push myself and deepen the worldbuilding.
The phrase ‘the magic of theatre’ is taken very literally in this series – there is actually a magical theatre! This might be a bit deep, but can you tell us a bit about your own philosophy/thoughts about theatre and its magic vs reality, and how that works its way into these books?
I think musical theatre is one of the most amazing ways to immerse people into a story. A successful production involves not only a group of people working together effectively, but also an enormous amount of different types of expertise.
It brings so much opportunity for both heartbreak and hilarity, and has always struck me as an incredible milieu for fantasy. I also believe there’s a parallel between musicals and fairy tales, in that if you only focus on the stars, you get a much shallower production/story.
Do you have any fairy tales you want to explore further? What’s next for your series?
I’m perpetually reading fairy tales, and figuring out strange new things to do to them! Next is book three, which will (hopefully) be out in the spring of 2025, and is narrated by a character series readers will recognize from books one and two! It’s still crammed with fairy tale tropes and theatrical shenanigans, this time with a magical baking competition and a healthy dose of Gothic novel spookiness.
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