Interview with Margaux Carroll, Author of “Spice Hoarders in the Sunless Realm”

Where did you get your inspiration?

Some of my favorite memories of family cookouts and barbecues are not just about the food, but about the stories that come out once everyone settles in. Someone mentions an aunt, a grandfather, a cousin, and some crazy story that happened twenty years ago, and suddenly the younger people at the gathering, or someone new to the family, is being handed a little piece of family history.

I became interested in what happens when that storytelling doesn’t happen.

Years ago, I attended a family gathering where one person, someone who had once been a very central figure in that family, simply wasn’t mentioned. No funny stories. No old memories. Nothing. I remember noticing the absence because it felt so strange. It made me think about how families decide which stories get carried forward and which ones quietly disappear. Do they even realize they are curating their own history?

That idea eventually became part of the inspiration for Spice Hoarders in the Sunless Realm: What if remembering someone were more than sentimental? What if memory itself had power? And what is lost when a family stops telling someone’s stories?

What food/spice/ingredient is magical to you?

Cardamom and cinnamon both feel a little magical to me because they transform a room before you even taste them.

Cinnamon is warmth. It immediately makes me think of kitchens, baked things, holidays, and food meant to be shared. Cardamom is different. It has this wonderful complexity to it, floral and citrusy and almost mysterious. It can be sweet or savory, familiar or unexpected depending on what surrounds it.

I love spices that carry that kind of sensory memory. That feels very much like magic to me.

What type of stories do you most love to write?

I love writing stories where ordinary people and ordinary communities brush up against something strange.

Mysteries are usually somewhere in the mix, along with family, friendship, humor, and a little bit of the supernatural or impossible. I’m especially interested in the secrets communities keep, the stories families tell about themselves, and the ways people protect, misunderstand, and ultimately show up for one another.

Even when I’m writing about magic, ghosts, monsters, or things that should not exist, I’m usually most interested in the people standing around them trying to figure out what on earth is going on.

Margaux Carroll writes cozy mysteries and speculative fiction filled with layered communities, family secrets, sharp humor, and the occasional brush with the impossible. She is the author of the Six Sisters Sewing cozy mystery series, about six magical Black sisters solving crimes in a Northern California coastal town, and the Keke Chung Paranormal Mysteries, a Scooby-Doo-for-grownups series following a San Francisco investigator who makes a living explaining the unexplained. Margaux has a fondness for complicated families, suspicious small towns, culturally relevant stories, and old myths that still have something to say about the world we live in now.

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