It is a truth universally acknowledged that a good story starts with a good first line. In TODAY’s “Cold Open,” authors tease their buzzy upcoming release by revealing and explaining its first line, paragraph or page.
Leigh Bardugo doesn’t enjoy writing finales.
“If you’ve read my books before, you know that I like complicated characters and complicated resolutions that aren’t always entirely happy,” she tells TODAY.com.
For “Dead Beat,” the third and final book in the trilogy that kicked off with 2019’s “Ninth House,” that means balancing a satisfying yet slightly hopeful ending with a desire to leave readers feeling “shaken.”
To wrap up the trilogy, protagonist Alex Stern must face increasing ranks of demons creeping in to prowl New Haven. Other obstacles in her way include: a corrupt Lethe Board, a deadly vampire and deep secrets in Yale’s societies, according to the novel’s synopsis.
TODAY.com has an exclusive first look at the book’s beginning, including the audiobook recording for Chapter 1, which opens with the following sentence:
When he had been a man only and not both man and monster, Darlington had understood his city and the bad bargains it had made.
That line establishes a key difference from “Dead Beat” compared to the rest of the trilogy: Darlington’s point of view.
“He has been a massive presence in the previous books, but we’ve only ever gotten a few chapters from his point of view,” she says. “He is much more present on the page in the third book.”
Darlington may be back in his human form, but he’s in a very different place, warring with specific impulses (Chapter 1 mentions a passing “pulse of desire” felt while looking at Alex), dealing with internal changes — and trying to combat both.
“Dead Beat” will feature a prologue, like the rest of the trilogy, told from Alex’s perspective at a key moment. The rest of the book moves backward “to figure out how we got there,” Bardugo says.
“The relationship between Alex and Darlington, the balance of power between them is very important to this third book. Alex’s relationship to all of her friends and allies — Alex is a character who has been fighting alone for a very long time. It is not natural for her to have to rely on other people,” she says.
Bardugo says ending the “Ninth House” trilogy brought “decision fatigue,” plenty of emotions and reflections on why she wrote the series, which marks her adult debut, in the first place.
“These are very strange books, and so I always feel like they somehow found people like me who would have loved to read these books,” Bardugo says. “This one’s for the weirdos, basically.”
It also marks the end of her “excavating” process reflecting on her own time at a student at Yale University. For her protagonist, Bardugo says that means leaving Alex in a place of “resolution” with her relationship to Yale and its institutions.
