“It is already a grieving process…” Cassandra Clare on saying goodbye to the Shadowhunters at Lucca Comics & Games 2025

At Lucca Comics & Games 2025, we had the absolute joy of catching up with Cassandra Clare (pictured above, courtesy of Lucca Comics & Games) at a roundtable, the mastermind behind The Mortal Instruments, The Infernal Devices, The Last Hours and the recent adult novels, The Chronicles of Castellane.

Few authors have built a world as beloved (and as heartbreakingly addictive) as Clare’s Shadowhunter universe, and she’s not done yet. We spoke about her first ever “vampire masterpiece” written at age 12 (“it was exactly Interview with the Vampire, just worse”), and how her publisher once panicked when she pitched The Infernal Devices as Victorian-set fantasy (“they were horrified!”).

Clare also shared her thoughts on strong female characters and how it feels to finally say goodbye (for now) to the Shadowhunters in The Wicked Powers…

What’s the first story that pushed you to start writing your own stories?

So when I was maybe 11 or 12 years old, my father gave me Interview with the Vampire. I was in love with it, and I wanted to be a vampire. I was so excited. I was decided I was going to write my own vampire book, and so I did. I looked at it a little while ago and it was very bad haha! It was also exactly like Interview with the Vampire; all the same stuff happened. But you have to start somewhere…

How did you decide to start writing in different time periods?

When I first started the books, I set them in the present day, because I didn’t want to start out writing historical fiction. It’s more difficult, there’s more research, it’s more complicated and I wasn’t sure if a publisher would buy it.

But in the middle of the Mortal Instruments, I said to my publisher that I would like to write more books in this world. And they said ‘great’.

Then I said, they’re going to take place in the 19th century and they were horrified! They said that nobody is going to read historical fiction, and teenagers don’t read that. But I convinced them and that was what we call The Infernal Devices. That was actually my favourite time period. I had a lot of fun. For six months, I only watched TV and movies that were set in the Victorian period. I only read books that were written in the Victorian period. I read the diaries of people who lived at that time. By the end of it, my husband said I was talking like someone in a historical drama!

Is there a time period you haven’t written in yet that you’d like to?

I would love to do the ’20s. We call it the jazz era. I don’t know what it’s called worldwide. This was the era when women were first getting jobs, wearing short skirts, and cutting their hair. I think of it as everybody is dancing and rebelling, and there’s all this really fun stuff. I love that era, so I think that would be really fun to do.

What made you decide to have such strong female characters in your novels?

I first started to write my books 20 years ago, and we did not have the sort of discussions about strong female characters that we have now, where that’s something much more common.

At the time when I was growing up, I loved fantasy books, and I read so many, but the hero was always a man. What if I can write a story like this for girls, where they can see themselves in the book?

Over the years, I have tried to write a lot of my books from the point of view of marginalised characters. So sometimes women, sometimes they are queer, sometimes they are neurodivergent. I always want everyone to feel like they could be a shadow hunter and they could be a hero.

I started with Clary, because I didn’t see another character like her in books, and I have continued with strong female characters. I love writing female characters, and I do want them to be strong, but I think there are lots of different kinds of strength. So sometimes you have a female character who can fight. But sometimes you can have female characters that are strong in different ways. They can be very smart. They can be very strategic, and so I wanted to represent different facets of the ways that women are strong.

For instance, someone like Charlotte is strong in the fact that she is a powerful politician, whereas someone like Emma is strong because she is a warrior.

The other thing that is important to me is also to show flaws and mistakes. Because everyone makes mistakes. Everyone has flaws. I want to write about women who are fully complete as people, and so that includes shades of grey. That includes sometimes making mistakes, sometimes even very bad mistakes.

How much have your fans influenced your work?

It’s very strange to go from being a fan to having fans. They were an influence on my work, because I interacted with them the way I did when I was a fan.

We would talk about different theories and different ideas for characters, and I knew who their favourites were. I never changed the story to please anyone specifically, but sometimes, when they really loved a character, I would give that character more to do, more space. Sometimes when they spoke about what kind of character they would like to see, I would give that real consideration, because I want them all to feel like they could be a shadow hunter.

What was it like to see your characters brought to life in the movie and TV series?

It’s strange. Because there’s both a movie and a television show, and they’re different actors, when I look at the actors, I don’t see my character. I see the person because I know them. I feel like these are people who are doing a really good job dressing up as my characters, which is not their fault.

I think when you are a writer, you have this very clear idea in your head of what your characters look like, and you can’t really change that. But I will say the thing for me, with especially the movie, when you go on the set and you see that they have created your whole world and they have filled it with all the things that the characters would have, at that point you feel this really intense sort of shock and amazement. Every writer I have ever talked to who had a movie of their book had the same experience.

I remember once reading an interview with JK Rowling, and she said that she began to cry when she saw Diagon Alley. So it wasn’t the characters, it was the place. I think there’s something about being surrounded by your world in a visual way that is just stunning.

If you were any of the characters in your books, which one would you be?

I think that I would probably not want to be in the world of my books, because it is very dangerous, and I get scared very easily haha! But I think the character that I probably relate to the most Simon from The Mortal Instruments, because he is not born a Shadowhunter. He’s just a regular human being.  So I relate the most to him. But if I could be anybody, I would probably be a warlock, because they are so powerful!

What character do you like the most?

I think Magnus Bane is the character that, in a lot of way,s I would like to be the most like because he is so confident. He loves himself, but not in a bad way, just in the sense of having confidence in himself and knowing his own worth. And he has had such an interesting life, and he still is fabulous. He throws a birthday party for his cat.

Every time I’m writing Magnus, I am thinking ‘what’s the most fun thing he could do?’ You know he’s going to think of the most unexpected thing. You know that thing will make him happy or make him laugh. And I love that he is a queer character who is never doubtful about his sexuality. He is proud of it, and that was one of the things that I really love about him.

Will Jace and Clary ever get married?

We do see them in The Wicked Powers, which is the last series of the Shadowhunter books that are coming next year, and we absolutely will see Jace and Clary, because we left the story in a place where we know that there is a villain character who is very interested in Jace and Clary. I don’t want to tell you too much, but something very big happens at the beginning of the book that separates Clary and Jace. We get, actually, a lot of her point of view, so we see what is happening to her and how the events in the book are affecting her. Because I really wanted, in some ways, at the end of the book, to bring it back the beginning, so I thought ‘let’s have Clary in here to represent the beginning and the end’.

What will you miss about the Shadowhunter Chronicles when you finish them and would you ever revisit them?

It’s so hard for me to know how I will feel, but I think that I will miss them very much. I already miss them when I am writing The Wicked Powers. I’m very conscious of, ‘is this the last time I’m going to write this character? Is this the last time this is going to happen?’, so it is already a grieving process, because before, I always knew there was more, and that infinite things were possible and now I have this feeling of saying goodbye a little.

But I would not say it would be impossible to come back and write a short story or novella. It’s a matter of whether I have a great idea. So you never know.

What can you tell us about The Wicked Powers trilogy?

There are three books, and I’ve just finished the first. It follows four major characters: Drew Blackthorne, Ash (no last name) and then Kit and Ty, who you’ve met before in The Dark Artifices, and they haven’t spoken to each other in three years. So they’re in a fight at the beginning of the book. But something happens that means that Ty needs help, and the only person he can ask is Kit. So they go on a journey together through Europe, looking for a magical object that I can’t tell you what it is yet, but in each different location, they must find a piece of it so they can put the whole thing together. So they have to work together. They have to travel together and of course, the complications of their relationship starts to be explored.

Is there anything you haven’t explored in the Shadowhunter Chronicles?

The one thing I’ve never talked about is, do Shadowhunters get involved in human wars? Where are they? World War One, World War Two, what are they doing? It’s never been addressed. If I do decide to address it, I think it would be a really interesting question, because if they live in the US, they don’t regard themselves as American. They regard themselves as Shadowhunters. So what side did they fight on? What do they do? How do they integrate with the human military? I think all that stuff would be really interesting.

How do you go about creating your worlds?

It is the most difficult part. But without it, nothing else works. So I usually start from one idea and build out from that. With Shadowhunters, I was reading about the history of tattoos, and it was the idea of, ‘okay, what if there was a race of people for whom there were tattoos that were magic and they gave them different powers?’ Well, who are they fighting? Okay, demons. And it sort of developed out from there.

The Castellane Chronicles is for older readers. What was it like writing for a different audience to the Shadowhunter books?

It’s interesting to write for a different audience. I have always believed that you can cover anything in YA, you can talk about death, you can talk about all sorts of things that feel very adult. But what I realised writing Sword Catcher is that you’re writing about people in a different part of life.

YA is all about first times – your first love, the first time you are disappointed in your parents, the first time you realise that adults are also flawed and human, the first time you encounter death. Whereas with Sword Catcher, for me, the big adjustment was to write about people who were already adults. They had already been in love, gone on an adventure, and seen death. They had jobs, one’s a doctor. I had to do a lot of recentering myself in the lives of people who are in a very different place. They don’t have issues with their parents, because they’ve already separated from their parents. The world-building, which was fun, was the same thing but the characters are really different.

What books do you have coming out next?  

So I’m in Lucca partly to promote my new books with Mondadori, which is a set of four books that I actually did originally as a Kickstarter project.

I like to experiment with different kinds of publishing. I’ve published my own books, I’ve done only audiobooks, and so this time I thought I wanted to do a Kickstarter, which was really fun, and I had a great time. At the end of the Kickstarter, I had these books. And so Mondadori has collected them, and given them new art, a new look, new covers and everything. and they’re all Shadowhunter related.

The first one is called ‘Secrets of Blackthorne Hall’, which is a story that is told in letters between the characters. There’s ‘Notable Shadowhunters and Downworlders’, which is a guide to all the characters. So there’s art of the characters, and then there’s information about them. A story called ‘A Sea Change’, which follows one of the characters from The Last Hours, which is one of my historical series. After the end of the series, we find out what happens to him, and you know whether he has a happy ending.

The last one is probably the most book-like, called ‘Better In Black’, and it’s ten romantic stories from the world of the Shadowhunters. In that one, speaking of being guided by fans… over the years, I had a sense of who their favourite couples were, who they really loved, and wanted to see more of, and so I created this.  This is basically like a gift, here are some romantic tales about your favourite characters, and you will learn some unexpected things about them…

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