Goodreads asked M.C. Burnell:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

M.C. Burnell Well Darkbower was birthed by Richard Matheson's Other Kingdoms. Ancient and Medieval Europe are not my favored sources of inspiration, but I read this book and found myself interested in fairies. I'd never considered them before, but I fell down a wiki-hole on this one and was just fascinated by the mythology. In Matheson's story, the fay creatures are the good guys, the humans the scary ones, but I was struck by how spooky the legends were. I'm less drawn to traditions that depict nature as an enemy, but the vulnerability of humans in the face of these forces was intriguing. How the SOUI was born and this became a detective story, honestly, I haven't a clue. I wrote the first 60k in a period of weeks and then sat back like waking from a fugue, going: What just happened?

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