Lily Crozier

how he would expect someone to behave towards him.

And then when he catches himself, he's like, oh no, I'm setting this boundary.

And so Clara doesn't even notice he's doing it.

But it happens quite early on.

No, completely.

And he panics and he makes bad decisions and then he doesn't know how to get out of them.

And so he's stuck in these little ruts that he can't get out of.

And Clara kind of is the voice of reason in a lot of that.

But it's why he ends up having the ultimatum because he kind of catches himself doing something horrible and then spends the night thinking about it and comes back to it with the ultimatum.

Oh, he's a good guy.

He's a good lad.

We love him.

the other great thing about this book is all the interesting inspirations that bring different readers to it like the beauty and the beast uh angle that you already brought up and also the other one that i really love is how's moving castle yes let's talk about how's moving castle yeah so how's moving castle is like probably one of my greatest literary influences reading it as a kid i went into it fully expecting how to be 100 evil um so i it was it was the journey i wanted the reader to go on um

I don't know if House Moving Castle was actually pitched that way, but I certainly went into it thinking that he was an evil wizard who ate people's hearts.

And so I wanted to capture that same feeling.

And in the end, it ended up coming up in two different ways.

And that was their relationship dynamic and the Enchanted Castle.

Because the Enchanted Castle is always, it's not always a vampire thing, but it's certainly intertwined in some ways.

Like Dracula has like vibes of like getting lost in the labyrinth of the castle.

The castle is like actively working against you.