In “The Lies that Summon the Night” (out Feb. 3 from Delacorte Press), telling a story can get you killed.
Art is illegal. Emotion is suspect. Pleasure is a sin. Here, the Holy Continent is an unforgiving theocracy ruled by the immortal Sinless. Creativity doesn’t merely destabilize the social order; it summons monsters — quite literally. Perform a song, paint an image, tell the wrong kind of story, and you might draw a Shade: a living embodiment of forbidden expression, violent and hungry.
For Seattle-based author Tessonja Odette, this premise wasn’t conceived as a dystopian spectacle for its own sake. It grew out of unease — political, cultural, emotional — and a lingering question about what happens when power decides which parts of being human are acceptable.
Early readers have already responded on a personal level. Those raised in religious environments that cast desire or emotional expression as moral liabilities have contacted Odette to say that “The Lies that Summon the Night” made them feel incredibly seen.
Odette doesn’t claim that history wholesale for herself. Her own upbringing, she notes, was less severe. Still, the emotional architecture of that world was familiar. “It was drawn partially from past experiences,” she says. At the same time, the book was shaped by a broader curiosity about authority and control. “It was also about exploring power structures, especially how it feels (in) modern day, how religion can be weaponized.”
The result is a dark romantasy that doesn’t simply borrow the aesthetics of faith and authority, but interrogates them. Odette’s first traditionally published novel, and the opening volume of a planned trilogy, is set in a world where repression masquerades as purity and violence wears the mask of moral order. The Sinless claim to have purged themselves of desire. Their enforcers, the Shadowbanes, exist in a liminal state — half-purged, capable of wielding shadow to destroy the very manifestations of emotion they deny.
At the center of this system is Inana Westwood, a storytelling outlaw barely surviving on the margins. Alongside two fellow performers, she trades in illicit tales, risking her life each time she opens her mouth. When a Shadowbane named Dominic Graves discovers her, he doesn’t silence her. He uses her. Her art becomes bait. Her stories become weapons.
Odette understood the book would unsettle some readers. She made peace with that early. “I knew this was going to rub some people the wrong way,” she says. “But it felt really important. It felt timely and necessary.”
The urgency sharpened after the most recent U.S. election. Odette began actively building the political and religious structures of the Holy Continent. As reproductive rights, LGBTQ protections and other hard-won freedoms came under renewed threat, the world she’d been imagining suddenly felt less like fantasy.
“There were definitely some feelings,” she says. “I really needed to express that, and to show a group of people working through fear and getting out the other side. It’s dark, but I know there’s hope there.”
Hope, in Odette’s hands, is not naive or ornamental. It’s tempered by hardship, often uncomfortable and requires looking directly at what’s been buried.
One of the book’s most provocative ideas is that repression — not indulgence — is the true engine of violence. Shades are feared as embodiments of sin, yet as the novel unfolds, they begin to read less like monsters and more like mirrors.
Odette traces this idea to her long-standing fascination with the concept of the shadow in psychology and spirituality. “Integrating your shadow instead of ignoring it, looking at what you want to hide, is what makes you whole,” she says.
The Sinless, by contrast, claim righteousness by cutting those shadows away. They insist they are free of darkness. What they’ve actually done, Odette suggests, is lose the ability to see themselves clearly. In challenging that dynamic, she also deliberately subverts one of fantasy’s most familiar metaphors.
“I really wanted to challenge the dark/light binary,” she says. “Light is always good, dark is always bad. It’s beautiful, but it’s simplistic. Being whole is more complicated than that.”
For Odette, who describes herself as a “mood writer,” mood operates almost like a genre unto itself, one that cuts across fantasy and romance rather than fitting neatly inside them. “The Lies that Summon the Night” had lived in her imagination for years, but once she began shaping the world in earnest, it was clear this was the story she needed to tell. “If I’d been in a different mood, it would’ve been a different book,” she says. “But some elements were always going to be there.”
Even geography played a quiet role. Odette lives in the Seattle area, where long gray winters subtly influence her emotional rhythms. She tends to avoid rainy, overcast settings in her work, gravitating instead toward springlike landscapes, brightness as a form of resistance. This novel, however, took shape in winter. Not as a conscious decision, but an intuitive one. “It just happened,” she says. “And looking back, it makes sense.”
What remains constant across her work is a conviction about the power of creativity. In the Holy Continent, art isn’t just rebellious, it’s lethal. That was intentional. Odette wanted to imagine a world that treated creativity as genuinely threatening. “I wanted to show how transformative art is,” she says. “And what the world would be like without it, or with heavy restrictions on expression.”
Her defense of romance as a genre fits neatly into that worldview. As romantic fiction surges in popularity — and criticism — Odette bristles at the notion that it’s frivolous or unserious.
“Romance has the same transformational power as any other genre,” she says. The seed of “The Lies that Summon the Night” came from a short story she wrote as a form of personal therapy. “It helped me so much,” she says. “That’s when I really felt how powerful art is.”
The novel ends without offering an easy resolution; alliances fracture, secrets surface. Inana stands on the threshold of both political upheaval and personal reckoning. The cliffhanger is deliberate, but temporary. Odette has already written the next book in the series, and she’s eager for readers to see where it goes.
The sequel will center on Inana’s sexual awakening, an exploration that deepens the series’ interrogation of desire, control and autonomy. If repression creates monsters, what happens when a woman begins to claim her body and her pleasure?
For Odette, the answer lies in the same force that animates the book itself. Stories change us. They shift boundaries. They expose the lies we’re taught to accept. “That’s the power of stories,” she says. “They’re transforming.”
In “The Lies that Summon the Night,” transformation is dangerous, but necessary. In a world eager to label imagination as a threat, Odette’s novel argues for the opposite: that art doesn’t summon darkness. It reveals what’s already there, and shows us how to survive it.
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