Cassandra Rose Clarke's novels have been finalists for the Philip K. Dick Award, the Romantic Times Reviewer's Choice Award, and YALSA’s Best Fiction for Young Adults. Her short fiction has appeared in
Strange Horizons and
Daily Science Fiction.
Clarke's latest novel is
Star's End.
Recently I asked the author about what she was reading. Her reply:
I’m a multi-reader, so here are the three books that currently have me totally ensnared:
It, by Stephen King: I have never read this before, despite reading Stephen King quite a bit in junior high. I was always 
most interested in his short stories; as a kid his novels intimidated me. Actually, they still intimidate me. The paperback version of It that I bought at Barnes and Noble the other day has a two and half inch spine. Seriously, I measured it. I’m only about a quarter of an inch in, but already I can see why this book has the reputation it does. I’m not one to really be scared by books, but already I love the complexity of the alternating timelines and the propulsion of finding out what It is.
Winter Tide, by Ruthanna Emrys: I’ve been waiting for this book since it was announced. It features a world and characters first introduced 
in a short story called “The Litany of Earth” which was one of those stories I fell in love with and tried to get everyone to read back when it first came out. The story and the novel are takes on Lovecraft, except told from the perspective of the Deep Ones, the frog people from The Shadow over Innsmouth. It’s a book that undermines Lovecraft’s racism and sexism with huge doses of pathos and empathy by presenting the Deep Ones not as monsters but as feared and misunderstood humans (ie, not frog people). I’ve never been able to get through Lovecraft’s actual writing, but I adore this book.
Fates and Furies, by Lauren Groff: I was in the mood for a literary book when I started this one, and boy has it delivered! I love unreliable narrators, and Fates and Furies has a great one in Lotto, whose voice takes up the first half of the book and who also, it turns out, could only tell half of the story. At its core, Fates and Furies is a book about a marriage, and the structure itself mirrors a marriage, in that you can’t see the whole picture without reading both parts—including all the lies of omission that ultimately make a marriage work.
Visit
Cassandra Rose Clarke's website.
My Book, The Movie: The Mad Scientist's Daughter.
The Page 69 Test: Star's End.
--Marshal Zeringue
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