Seanan McGuire, author of Magic: The Gathering's Duskmourn story, answers a few questions from Magic Untapped.
For years, Seanan McGuire has written multiple stories for Magic: The Gathering. She has contributed to the stories for Innistrad: Midnight Hunt, Dominaria United, Phyrexia: All Will Be One, and more.
Seanan, who also writes under the name Mira Grant, recently wrote the story for Duskmourn: House of Horror. She was kind enough to talk with Magic Untapped all about it.
Magic Untapped: What were your main touchstones and influences for the story of Duskmourn?
Seanan McGuire: Since Duskmourn is the plane of 1980s horror, I drew a lot from 80s horror. 80s horror is really marked by its sincerity. We get some of our silliest, scariest monsters from this era, because everything was taken with absolute seriousness, no matter how silly it was. Cynicism hadn't hit yet, and that was my main touching point: that everything was completely sincere.
MU: Did you have a favorite character while writing this? Who did you prefer writing for - the more monstrous characters or the more human ones?
SM: Oh, Tyvar, always. I love my himbo elf boy so much. I like writing for characters with understandable motivations, which will always tilt me toward the more human.
MU: Who was the hardest character to write for?
SM: Jace. He's in a complicated place right now, story-wise, and is a guest star more than a main character. So encompassing and encapsulating Jace with very little available word count was difficult.
MU: A lot of 80s/90s horror tropes were put into Duskmourn. Was there much difficulty into putting that into a story to tie it in to the Magic storyline?
SM: The hardest thing about the story was the opening, where I had to frame a recognizable suburb entirely in Magic terms. That was a challenge I'm not dying to undertake again!
MU: Horror isn't the easiest genre to write. How did you go about finding the right ways to make the Duskmourn work?
SM: Done it before, will do it again. I just took the framework I was given--demon house swallows whole Plane, film at eleven--and followed everything to its logical conclusion.
MU: In coming up with the story, were you able to see any of the art beforehand to help integrate into your story?
SM: I had a world guide to work from. When writing Magic story, the outline really exists in advance; it's the details that we get to flesh in and play around with. So Marina, Valgavoth, Winter, they already existed. It was just down to me to figure out how it all fit together.
MU: The response to the story has been very positive from fans, similar to other horror-themed sets in the past like Innistrad. What has it been like from your perspective?
SM: Oh, it's been wonderful. The response to the Murders at Karlov Manor story was also very positive, but the set wasn't as beloved as I would have liked. Having a story and set that people adore has been just wonderful. The Magic community is so good.
MU: Would you want to visit the plane?
SM: I think I'm better off on the outside, writing all its stories down.
Thanks to Seanan for the interview.
Other MU interviews of story authors can be found below:
