In \u201cThe Lies that Summon the Night\u201d (out Feb. 3 from Delacorte Press), telling a story can get you killed.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t merely destabilize the social order; it summons monsters \u2014 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.<\/p>\n
For Seattle-based author Tessonja Odette, this premise wasn\u2019t conceived as a dystopian spectacle for its own sake. It grew out of unease \u2014 political, cultural, emotional \u2014 and a lingering question about what happens when power decides which parts of being human are acceptable.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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 \u201cThe Lies that Summon the Night\u201d made them feel incredibly seen.<\/p>\n
Odette doesn\u2019t claim that history wholesale for herself. Her own upbringing, she notes, was less severe. Still, the emotional architecture of that world was familiar. \u201cIt was drawn partially from past experiences,\u201d she says. At the same time, the book was shaped by a broader curiosity about authority and control. \u201cIt was also about exploring power structures, especially how it feels (in) modern day, how religion can be weaponized.\u201d<\/p>\n
The result is a dark romantasy that doesn\u2019t simply borrow the aesthetics of faith and authority, but interrogates them. Odette\u2019s 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 \u2014 half-purged, capable of wielding shadow to destroy the very manifestations of emotion they deny.<\/p>\n
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\u2019t silence her. He uses her. Her art becomes bait. Her stories become weapons.<\/p>\n
Odette understood the book would unsettle some readers. She made peace with that early. \u201cI knew this was going to rub some people the wrong way,\u201d she says. \u201cBut it felt really important. It felt timely and necessary.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019d been imagining suddenly felt less like fantasy.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThere were definitely some feelings,\u201d she says. \u201cI really needed to express that, and to show a group of people working through fear and getting out the other side. It\u2019s dark, but I know there\u2019s hope there.\u201d<\/p>\n
Hope, in Odette\u2019s hands, is not naive or ornamental. It\u2019s tempered by hardship, often uncomfortable and requires looking directly at what\u2019s been buried.<\/p>\n
One of the book\u2019s most provocative ideas is that repression \u2014 not indulgence \u2014 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Odette traces this idea to her long-standing fascination with the concept of the shadow in psychology and spirituality. \u201cIntegrating your shadow instead of ignoring it, looking at what you want to hide, is what makes you whole,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
The Sinless, by contrast, claim righteousness by cutting those shadows away. They insist they are free of darkness. What they\u2019ve actually done, Odette suggests, is lose the ability to see themselves clearly. In challenging that dynamic, she also deliberately subverts one of fantasy\u2019s most familiar metaphors.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI really wanted to challenge the dark\/light binary,\u201d she says. \u201cLight is always good, dark is always bad. It\u2019s beautiful, but it\u2019s simplistic. Being whole is more complicated than that.\u201d<\/p>\n
For Odette, who describes herself as a \u201cmood writer,\u201d mood operates almost like a genre unto itself, one that cuts across fantasy and romance rather than fitting neatly inside them. \u201cThe Lies that Summon the Night\u201d 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. \u201cIf I\u2019d been in a different mood, it would\u2019ve been a different book,\u201d she says. \u201cBut some elements were always going to be there.\u201d<\/p>\n
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. \u201cIt just happened,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd looking back, it makes sense.\u201d<\/p>\n
What remains constant across her work is a conviction about the power of creativity. In the Holy Continent, art isn\u2019t just rebellious, it\u2019s lethal. That was intentional. Odette wanted to imagine a world that treated creativity as genuinely threatening. \u201cI wanted to show how transformative art is,\u201d she says. \u201cAnd what the world would be like without it, or with heavy restrictions on expression.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her defense of romance as a genre fits neatly into that worldview. As romantic fiction surges in popularity \u2014 and criticism \u2014 Odette bristles at the notion that it\u2019s frivolous or unserious.<\/p>\n
\u201cRomance has the same transformational power as any other genre,\u201d she says. The seed of \u201cThe Lies that Summon the Night\u201d came from a short story she wrote as a form of personal therapy. \u201cIt helped me so much,\u201d she says. \u201cThat\u2019s when I really felt how powerful art is.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s eager for readers to see where it goes.<\/p>\n
The sequel will center on Inana\u2019s sexual awakening, an exploration that deepens the series\u2019 interrogation of desire, control and autonomy. If repression creates monsters, what happens when a woman begins to claim her body and her pleasure?<\/p>\n
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\u2019re taught to accept. \u201cThat\u2019s the power of stories,\u201d she says. \u201cThey\u2019re transforming.\u201d<\/p>\n
In \u201cThe Lies that Summon the Night,\u201d transformation is dangerous, but necessary. In a world eager to label imagination as a threat, Odette\u2019s novel argues for the opposite: that art doesn\u2019t summon darkness. It reveals what\u2019s already there, and shows us how to survive it.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yakimaherald.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In \u201cThe Lies that Summon the Night\u201d (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\u2019t merely destabilize the social order; it summons monsters \u2014 quite […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2255285,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[21741],"class_list":["post-2255284","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/In-Seattle-author-Tessonja-Odettes-new-romantasy-art-is-illegal.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2255284","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2255284"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2255284\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2255286,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2255284\/revisions\/2255286"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2255285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2255284"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2255284"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2255284"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}