Author Thank You: Jonathan Stroud

Mr. Stroud,1 I was 12, I believe, when I first picked up The Amulet of Samarkand on a whim2 during a school book fair. I didn’t know anything about it save what little it told me on its back cover — curiously enough I noticed something a little different about that description.3 I’d seen footnotes […]

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Facilis Descensus Averno

Facilis descensus Averno “The descent into Hell is easy.” (Vergil, Aeneid VI.124) The above Vergil epigraph is, of all things, the creed of Cassandra Clare’s Shadowhunters — Nephilim warriors who fight demons unbeknownst to mundanes like you or me within her wildly popular series, The Mortal Instruments. It stresses that, essentially, it’s really easy to go down […]

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