Book 2 Has A Title

And stop-motion is fun

Amy Coombe
June 12, 2026

I revealed the title for book 2 - THE DARK WIZARD FALLS IN LOVE - on Instagram with a stop-motion video I created with my kid’s Lego, and hello, new obsession unlocked. I wonder if Aardman offers internships…?

I knew book 2 would be about Honey, and it would be called The Dark Wizard Falls In Love, as soon as I finished writing the first draft of Stay For A Spell. Honestly, Spell went through three title changes before the publication deal was even announced, while Dark Wizard sat there, patiently waiting for me to get to work on it. I finished the first draft in November; I’m currently finalising the second draft, which is tighter and stronger and features (sorry, Jared) even more spiders.

While Spell is, in its way, my cozy riff on A Room Of One’s Own and A Room With A View, (among others), and bursting with absurdity to help offset some of its more serious themes, Dark Wizard goes anther direction. With Dark Wizard, I wanted to explore a different side of the legacy of fairytales and modern fantasy. The, you know, ‘crumbling castles and warty trolls and hideous glorping pools of sludge’ side. What if Maleficent’s castle looks like that not because she’s evil, but becuase she doesn’t want visitors? (I mean, she isn’t a nice person, but even villains like comfort, so there’s got to be a reason she doesn’t keep up with the roof repairs, right?)

Mummies, spiders and poorly filed paperwork: prepare to meet your worst nightmare.

Sensible, practical Honeyrose Brambling is the scourge of untidy desks and unsorted letters. Her life is careful, contstrained and predictable... and, after ten years as a royal secretary, boring.

So when she accepts a job at the Dark Castle, she's not sure what to expect: certainly nothing more exciting than filing paperwork, indexing the archives, and staying out of the way of the many nightmarish creatures that make the castle their home. But the Dark Castle is full of surprises, including, but not limited to, affectionate end-tables, not-actually-zombie unicorns, and at least one very large spider.

The Dark Castle is also home to Raddux, the Dark Wizard, the most powerful sorcerer in the Shining Realm, a man famous for never entertaining visitors and never leaving the castle. The more time Honey spends with Raddux, however, the more she discovers that everything she thought she knew - about magic in general and the Dark Wizard in particular - is wrong.

Life at the Dark Castle is impractical, unconstrained, and entirely unpredictable... and not at all boring. Where Honey used to spend her days preparing for the worst, now she spends them writing monographs about jellyfish and caring for orphaned bats alongside the Dark Wizard, a man as compelling as he is idiosyncratic.

But there are more nightmarish things out there than even giant spiders. And when the worst happens, it falls to one very sensible ex-royal secretary to save the day with her infinite powers of courage, love and pragmatism. Because if she doesn't, the Shining Realm could lose all its magic. Forever.

Publishing April 2027!

The story itself took me by surprise as I was writing it; I was about halfway through when I realised it was as much an ode to The X-Files (formative!) as it was to the books and films I was more intentionally drawing inspiration from. In Dark Wizard, I very much hope readers see a bit of The Last Unicorn, Beauty, North And South - but if you spot a bit of the love and respect that Mulder and Scully feel for each other in there too… well, good.

The US cover - again designed by the wonderful Jessica Chen Liu - will be revealed in July! It is wonderful. Genuinely even better than I could have imagined.

Just One More Thing!

A group of jellyfish is called a “smack” or a “smuck”.

Thanks for reading!