Cassandra Clare & Wesley Chu Are Co-Writing a Shadowhunters Trilogy
Next November, Cassandra Clare launches a new trilogy in her mega-selling Shadowhunters universe, with a few new twists: a new publisher (Simon & Schuster’s Saga Press), a new target audience (adults), and a new co-writer: Wesley Chu, author of the supremely lovable Lives of Tao series and the forthcoming temporal thriller Time Siege.
Earlier today, Saga Press announced they have signed Clare and Chu for three novels featuring Magnus Bane, the series’ breakout character, who previously went on a standalone adventure in The Bane Chronicles.
Clare’s Shadowhunter Chronicles, and the preceding Mortal Instruments series, have been a massive hit with young adult readers since the publication of her debut novel, City of Bones. The series is set in modern-day New York City in which a young woman embarks on a search for her missing mother and discovers her destiny is wrapped up with a hidden conflict between angels and demons that has been going on behind-the-scenes for centuries. Screen Gems released an unsuccessful film adaptation in 2013; a television adaptation began running earlier this year and has met with more success.
The focus on an adult audience make this new trilogy a bit of a departure for Clare, who is this far best known by YA audiences. Magnus Bane, the centuries-old High Warlock of Brooklyn, should prove a compelling protagonist for readers of any age. In a press release, co-writer Wesley Chu promised dark times ahead for the romantic anti-hero—a Chu specialty, considering his knack for punishing the protagonists of his successful sci-fi series, including the Tao novels, which will expand to a fourth volume later this year with the publication of a spinoff volume, The Rise of Io.
The new series expands an already impressive fantasy universe: the Shadowhunters Chronicles currently rings in at 15 installments, spread across multiple series. The Infernal Devices trilogy is set in 1878 in Victorian London; The Last Hours trilogy (due to launch in 2017) in set in 1903; the chronologically third, first-published The Mortal Instruments; and The Dark Artifices, which takes place shortly thereafter—not to mention a fifth and final trilogy in the main continuity, The Wicked Powers, that will wrap up the ongoing storylines. It’s not clear exactly where these new Magnus Bane books will fall in the chronology, but come November 2017, fans will no doubt appreciate this deep dive into a popular character’s past.