The Book of Spirits is a follow-up to your first novel, The Book of Shadows. Where are we at the beginning of the sequel?

Yes, this book builds upon the first. As SPIRITS begins, the year is 1826. Herculine—an orphan who's "escaped" from a French convent school—arrives in Richmond, Virginia. She knows no one, and nothing. Or so she thinks. In fact, awaiting her is a spectral corps as strange as the one she left behind. Too, she has spent the Atlantic passage studying a Book of Shadows—in witchcraft lore, this is something one witch writes for another, a sort of journal, a guide to the secrets of the sisterhood—given her by her teacher, her discoverer, her Soror Mystica, Sebastiana d'Azur. She has also pored over other volumes on "the dark arts." So, even if she knows no one, there are people—or should I say beings—who have been expecting her. And she is not ignorant, not at all.

What is appealing about Herculine, I think, is that she is at once intelligent and naíve. And now that she has learned that she is the possessor of powers, and certain unusual… traits, she is struggling to embrace those hard facts while anticipating life in a new land, and in a new language.

By "unusual traits" you mean...?

Herculine has been told by her saviors, "You are a man. You are a woman. You are a witch." And that's a whole lot to take in! She is, in fact, a witch, as is Sebastiana. And she is a hermaphrodite—not so much "in fact," as "in fiction." That is, the character's hermaphrodism is more metaphorical than physiological. She represents the ultimate outsider, someone beyond our most basic definitions of man or woman. She is, by virtue of the body she was born into, a transgressor, as are all the great heroes and heroines of the gothic.

Witchcraft, too, is meant to be read both simply and metaphorically: yes, Herculine is a witch, but the Craft stands for more than mere witchery. We all have our innate "talents," and it is our responsibility to discover and hone them. To put them to purpose. That is Herculine's challenge.

So, to say that these books are about hermaphrodism and witchcraft is to miss the metaphor, and an entire layer of meaning.

Yet you refer to Herculine as a woman, though in fact she spends a large portion of the book dressing as, and living as, a man. Is Herculine confused? Or is she written as ...as a confusion of genders, of sexual traits?

I hope these novels explore what it means to be a woman, to be a man, or to exist somewhere between those poles. At the same time, I don't claim that they address these or other related, weightier issues—hermaphrodism, intersexuality, or even gender—in any overt, serious, or scholarly way. That said, Herculine's story—of confusion, of persecution—does function on the most literal level too, unfortunately, and readers of SHADOWS have identified with that.

As to the pronouns I employ: it seems to me a matter of the most basic respect to allow someone to choose his or her own pronoun, and I believe Herculine self-identifies more as a woman than as a man, regardless of her affections, passions or appearance.

I suppose my point is this: it doesn't matter what sex Herculine is, not really. Perhaps she can be said to be ambisexual, as some people are ambidextrous. And in SPIRITS, she begins to embrace her ambiguous or ambisexual state by dressing as a man to hit the town in New York City—simply because it affords her greater entrée to public places—yet traveling as a woman, so as to be left alone, or ignored. It would be my hope that, after reading SHADOWS and SPIRITS, the reader concludes, along with Herculine, that it doesn't really matter what sex she is. Herculine is Herculine, period. Labels serve a purpose on products; much less so on people.

Your work borrows from many genres—the gothic, yes, but also horror, fantasy, para-normal romance, and even flirts with "alternative" history—yet these novels are something else entirely. Do you see your work as building upon the gothic tradition in literature, primarily?

I like to think so, as I have always been a great fan of the gothic. The Book of Shadows featured dilapidated chateaux, labyrinths, lost manuscripts and the requisite evil clergy—all gothic standards—and I've continued to use such things in the sequel. My goal is to update the gothic, rendering ghost stories that feel both traditional and new: traditional in their trappings and language, but thematically new. Whatever genre that results in, so be it. After all, the gothic gave birth to those other genres—fantasy, sci-fi, horror. For me, it all begins with the gothic.

One of the great gothic writers you mention actually appears as a character in The Book of Spirits. How did that come to pass?

You refer to Poe. I toured his childhood home when I was in Richmond. This was some years ago, before I really knew where SPIRITS was headed. I was struck when our tour guide mentioned, rather off-handedly, Edgar's younger half-sister, Rosalie, whom she referred to—wrongly, I think—as "retarded." It's those little bits of tossed-off history that I cling to! I did a bit of research on Rosalie Poe Mackenzie—there is next to nothing known of her, in fact—and soon I had a character, one whom I prefer to think of as "daft."

Other historical characters appear in The Book of Spirits as well. There's P.T. Barnum and Aaron Burr, to name but two. And of course, the whole work is hung on a historical framework. There's a risk in that, is there not?

Yes. But it just happens as part of my process. I'll be researching and then all of a sudden someone just… shows up. Burr, for example. I was researching the town homes of early 19th century Manhattan and came across the Jumel mansion, far uptown, which takes its name from Eliza Jumel, a woman who rose to prominence and wealth from beginnings as a prostitute. Eventually, she married—unhappily—Aaron Burr. So, it seemed right, somehow, that Burr would know the character I refer to as the Duchess, who runs a brothel of sorts for the sisterhood, the witches with whom Herculine becomes acquainted in New York City. As for P.T. Barnum, it seems he was hard to miss in antebellum America.

But yes, it is risky. And I mean no disrespect to the historians whose work serves as a springboard for my fiction. Nor do I mean any disrespect to the dead. I am ever mindful that real people lived and died, and in so doing made the history with which I sometimes take license.

Which leads me to my next question: How much of the history in SPIRITS is true?

Nearly all of it, actually. The challenge is to let the history serve the fiction; to simply alter the history… well, where's the challenge in that? If the story is ever untrue to the history behind it, it's a minor infraction—maybe a date changed by a year or two. Other than that, nearly all of what seems true in SPIRITS, is true. …Now, as to whether ghosts, or my shadowy corps of characters, really affected our history in the way the novels claim, well, I'll let the readers decide that for themselves.

It seems to me that The Book of Spirits is, primarily, a ghost story? Are you a believer?

It is a ghost story, in the simplest sense; but as I've said, I hope the reader discovers layers beneath the simplest, surface story. …Do I believe in ghosts? Well, for better or worse, I don't really believe in anything. And that, of course, frees me to believe in everything.

The first novel took place in France. With the sequel, we're back stateside, up and down the eastern seaboard. How did you choose the book's locations?

At the close of SHADOWS, I had Herculine headed for the states; so I'd set myself up there: Richmond was preordained, but only because I'd passed through the city and sensed something mysterious there, something dark and worth discovering. Also, it's been said that the history of Virginia is, for better or worse, the history of America.

As for Florida, one night over dinner at a friend's house, I learned something very interesting. My friend—an archeologist—told me that he'd once done some work on sites very near my home in Tampa. These were Seminole Indian burial mounds, from the early 19th century. So, all of a sudden, there were ghosts in my neighborhood. A bit more research and I knew Herculine would head down into Florida, in the days preceding its statehood. It was a true frontier then, and a war zone, yet its history—its use and abuse by the Spanish, the French, the Americans and the Indians—had already given Florida a flavor, a flair all its own. In short, it seemed a setting fairly begging for characters.

Herculine's sojourn in New York City came about more naturally, I guess. It's somewhat true that when the writing is going well, the characters begin to make decisions on their own. Strange, but true. Arriving here, Herculine was wary of both America's big, northern cities and its wide-open, western spaces said to be populated by Indians and bears standing twice the height of a man; and so it is her intention to avoid both. But I always knew she'd get to New York City, because—and this verges on the metaphysical, perhaps—she always knew it. She was afraid, yes, but intrigued. Manhattan was—and remains—too central to the American experience to ignore. Too, I was writing about a character discovering herself via her talents; and so—like millions of "artists" before her, myself included—Herculine had to contend with Gotham.

What are you working on next? Will we learn more about the fate of Herculine?

Yes, my next book—which I'm calling THE BOOK OF SECRETS—will pick up the story of Herculine, somewhere in the mid- to late-19th century. Characters from SHADOWS are reappearing, and new ones—both historical and fictional—are showing up as well. I'm having a great deal of fun with it. I'm now entering an era—finally!—where photography becomes a resource for my research. And of course, the Civil War is looming. I have no idea where SECRETS will end, but I'm eager to find out. That's the great joy of writing: collaborating with one's characters and seeing what comes of it.