Nyx in the House of Night

“Night in the House of Good and Evil” Copyright © 2011 by Karen Mahoney
    “The Dangerous Dead” Copyright © 2011 by John Edgar Browning
    “By Their Marks You Shall Know Them” Copyright © 2011 by Jana Oliver
    “The Divine Cat” Copyright © 2011 by Ellen Steiber
    “Reimagining ‘Magic City’” Copyright © 2011 by Amy H. Sturgis
    “The Magic of Being Cherokee” Copyright © 2011 by Jordan Dane
    “Freedom of Choice” Copyright © 2011 by Jeri Smith-Ready
    “The Otherworld Is Greek to Me” Copyright © 2011 by Stephanie Feagan
    “The Elements of Life” Copyright © 2011 by Bryan Lankford
    “Misunderstood” Copyright © 2011 by Kristin Cast
    “She Is Goddess” Copyright © 2011 by Yasmine Galenorn
    “Worshipping the Female Deity” Copyright © 2011 by Christine Zika
    Introduction and “Cruithne Mythology and the House of Night” Copyright © 2011 by P.C. Cast
    “Behind the House of Night Names” and other materials Copyright © 2011 by BenBella Books, Inc.
    All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
    All illustrations copyright © 2011 by Alan Torrance
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    ISBN 978-1-935618-55-3
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{ Introduction }
    P.C. Cast
    EVEN BEFORE I hit national bestseller lists, the two questions readers asked me more than any other were: 1) Where do you get your ideas? And 2) How much research do you do?
    Okay, the two answers go hand in hand. Research has always been the foundation of my ideas. I actually enjoy researching, and I like doing it old style—paging through giant history and humanities textbooks in a musty research section of a library. As I go through tomes on history and sociology and mythology, my mind starts creating stories and pictures: changing, shifting, modernizing, rewriting. This process has always seemed totally normal to me. Ancient mythological tragedy? Bah! Everyone dies tragically with no happily ever after in history? No way! For as long as I can remember I’ve revised mythology, created worlds based on history, and then made the stories read the way I wanted them to read—quite often giving unexpected characters happily every afters and turning patriarchy and misogyny upside down.
    That’s usually how I begin my writing process, with research. But from my very first book I realized that I created better, more believable worlds if I mixed textbook research with legwork. That’s one of the reasons so many of my novels are set in Oklahoma. When I describe the Centaur Plains in my fictional world of Partholon, it’s really Oklahoma’s Tall Grass Prairie. I’ve been there—walked its paths—gotten lost in its majesty. As I’m there I create worlds of my own and populate them with unusual characters. I tell their stories first in my mind, and then on paper.
    Now, enter the House of Night and bestsellerdom. There are lots of awesome things about being a bestselling novelist. Meeting my literary heroes, like Pat Conroy and Sue Monk Kidd, is one big plus (but that’s a different kind of essay!). Another plus is that being successful has provided me the means to expand my research legwork. So when I made the Vampyre High Council’s headquarters on San Clemente Island just off the coast of Venice, I did so because I’d been there and become enchanted by that tiny island within view of Venice’s Saint Mark’s Basilica.
    I decided to incorporate Capri into the history of the House of Night world, and to make the site of the ancient home of the High Council there, after