Romancing the Ghost: Interview with Author Mallory Marlowe
By: Brooke Kennedy (@backstagebooksandbobbins)
Edited By: Emily Quintanilla
As a believer of ghosts, aliens, and cryptids alike, it’s no surprise Mallory Marlowe became one of my favorite romance authors. I picked up her debut romance, Love and Other Conspiracies, in 2024 as a birthday present for myself and was hooked—Mallory’s books provide all the supernatural and flirty fun a romance reader could ask for. But I also love her stories because they represent asexuality in an industry where there are so few stories that have that.
We’re in for a special treat from Mallory with her next novel, Entities to Lovers. Set on the spooky streets of Boston, Massachusetts, this story follows paranormal medium Rory Woods and annoyingly attractive adjunct professor Ezra Blackwell as they haunt the city as ghost tour guides. When the two of them are hexed after disturbing a matchmaking ghost, they try everything to prevent the jinx from wreaking havoc on their lives, even making out with their super-irritating-totally-not-distractingly-sexy coworker. We talk about her new book, asexual representation in publishing, and what other sorts of paranormal hijinks are coming next.
Brooke: Can you tell me what inspired you to write spooky romances?
Mallory: I think it goes back all the way to childhood. I was always wanting to take ghost tours in the cities that I visited and watch haunted destination documentaries on the History Channel. I always had a fascination with making things spooky. Horror and watching scary movies and reading scary books—I just always liked the unsettling. Then, as I got older, I was liking romance more, and I was like, “Well, how do I marry the two of these together?” I was in high school during that 2010s paranormal romance YA boom, so it imprinted on me that you can have all these adventures and monsters and creatures and stuff, but also a lot of kissing. So, that has always just been the go-to. It was a really natural marriage of two genres I have always loved.
Brooke: What shows or programs in particular served as your inspiration?
Mallory: For Love and Other Conspiracies, definitely stuff like Buzzfeed Unsolved, which came out as I was an adult, but it was still very impressionable. I also used to watch this show on Saturday night on Discovery Kids called Mystery Hunters, and it was about teenagers hunting down ghosts. That was where I first heard about Mothman and the Chupacabra. I was always so excited to watch that every Saturday night. That was really formative.
I feel like with Love at First Sighting, stuff that [has a] “monster of the week” element. There was a whole bunch of fun stuff that came together for that book.
Brooke: Do you have any authors who have inspired you along your writing journey?
Mallory: So many. I think going back to when I was younger and really getting into reading, Sarah Dessen was a huge inspiration in learning how to write romances that felt really human and personal. . . . And then, as I got older and was reading more adult books, I started with . . . Casey McQuiston. I also love Rachel Lynn Solomon and Alicia Thompson. I really like these authors who have such a sense of quirkiness to their voices and premises. Those are the big ones that I look to as my autobuys.
Brooke: With Entities to Lovers, you stray more into the paranormal than in your past books. What was it like weaving those supernatural elements into this story?
Mallory: It was fun and kind of freeing in a way because there would be times as I was writing scenes where I was like, “How would that make sense? How did that happen?” Magic. It doesn’t have to make total sense when you are really leaning into the paranormal.
The first two books walk that line of being paranormal; this one is fully paranormal. We’re dealing with ghosts—multiple ghosts! We’re very much so leaning into the haunted of it all. And I think it’s fun to layer that element on top of the real world. They are still normal people living in the world, so Rory is seeing spirits on street corners and having them talk to her as she’s waiting at a street light or trying to go into a building. It’s really fun to pepper those little elements of the unexpected and the paranormal into their normal day.
Brooke: I’m so excited for everyone to get their hands on Entities to Lovers! You’ve said the process for this book was a very difficult one. Can you tell me more about why this book was such a challenge to write? Was there anything that surprised you along the way? And are there any particular moments that you’re excited for readers to experience?
Mallory: There are so many moments I’m excited for readers to experience. This one was hard for a variety of reasons. A lot of it was behind-the-scenes stuff that I can’t really talk about, but it led to a lot of changes to the story that ultimately I do think made it a lot better. But it was also a story that took a while to find its form. Even if none of the other behind-the-scenes political stuff and editorial things had gone on . . . it honestly still would’ve taken me a couple of drafts to figure exactly what I was trying to say with this book. It was one of the first times where I didn’t really have a structured plot around it.
In Love and Other Conspiracies, you’re following the course of the show so you can track where you’re at in the story and their relationship with how far along they’re filming. And Love at First Sighting is much more externally plot-driven, so it did take some time to be like, “Where are all these twists and turns if I don’t have that size of a plot to work with?” But there were some changes, from what time of year it took place and what their jobs were. I’m really happy with where we settled with them both working at the ghost tour and at Halloween. It makes it so much fun.
I’m really excited for people to just fall in love with Rory and Ezra in the way that I have, but also to see Hayden and Hallie [from Love and Other Conspiracies] again. They are on the page, and they play an important role in the course of the story. I’m also very excited for people to meet Micah, who is the love interest in my next book. This will be the first time I get to gauge how people are feeling about a love interest before the book arrives, so I’m very excited for people to meet him.
Brooke: For this book, you chose to head to the East Coast, whereas Love and Other Conspiracies and Love at First Sighting were set in Los Angeles. Why did you decide to set this story in Boston?
Mallory: Boston is a place that’s really near and dear to my heart. I went to college there, and I’m originally from the East Coast. So New York, New Jersey, that’s where I’m from. There’s still a lot of East Coast in me, but Boston has such an awesome sense of history to it, and I think it’s really cool because they preserve it so well. You’ll be walking down the street in Boston, and there’ll be an H&M, there’ll be four Dunkin Donuts and three Starbucks, and there’s also a building that’s been pretty much untouched and just preserved for 400 years. They’re all so intermixed . . . They also have a great ghost tour; the main one in the city of Boston is fantastic. So I felt that it was a natural fit. . . .There’s something very spooky about the city as a whole. If I’m gonna set a ghost tour book anywhere, I want to do it in Boston. It was really fun to revisit, especially because Boston in the fall is so magical. It gets to be a character in itself.
Brooke: Are there any famous spots or landmarks that have personal significance that we should be on the lookout for?
Mallory: There’s so many spooky places in Boston. One of the big ones is Boston Common. Everyone is like, “Oh, it’s such a pretty park, I’ll just walk through it, do a picnic there,” but it’s actually a mass grave. They used to do hangings there that was the execution spot back in the day. All these people are now walking through it and feeding squirrels and playing football and stuff, but there are bodies buried there, which is very scary. The Old North Church is a really iconic one that they do go to in the book. It’s a site of a very important moment in American history with the lanterns, but there’s also a crypt beneath it, and it’s haunted.
And then, it’s not so much like a real place, but there’s a lot of these row houses and brownstones in Boston that are now museums, and they are these haunted old homes that are preserved. One plays a very important role in Entities to Lovers, so that’s probably one of the spots I love doing scenes in.
Brooke: I love seeking out queer books, and I always get excited to read about queer characters. In Entities to Lovers, you’ve described your main character Rory as a gray asexual, and in Love and Other Conspiracies, Hallie is as well. At what point did you know that these characters were asexual?
Mallory: So, for Hallie in Love and Other Conspiracies, that did not come in until the very end of the revision process. I had written her pretty much the same as she is from the early drafts to the final book. It wasn’t until I had a friend read it and she was like, “Did you ever consider that Hallie was on the ace spectrum?” She’s only ever been with Kade, and she talks about how attraction is this misleading and mysterious thing to her because she’s like, “How do I know how to trust those feelings when the only other person I’ve really felt that for was the worst?” I hadn’t thought about it like that, but actually, she’s kind of being filtered through this lens that I have in my life as well, like how I view my own sexuality, so that was late.
Rory came earlier, but it was not something that when I first conceived the idea that I was like “She’s gonna be ace.” It just was sort of how she came out. She got that, she got my neurodivergence. She really took on a lot of these areas of myself that I wanted to explore. I think it suits her well, and I feel like it’s very essential to who she is. She has this very complicated relationship with her sexuality, but she’s grown to be okay with it. She’s very like, “I stopped trying to do things because I feel like I should, or stopped putting so much pressure on these things when I understand now that my brain and body just work differently.” She’s definitely someone who came in earlier, and that was a core part of how she experienced her attraction to Ezra. There’s also a comedy aspect of “Oh great, you only experience sexual attraction to five people in your life, and one of them is this guy at work who’s SO annoying. What are the odds it’s gotta be that guy?”
Brooke: I wanted to ask you about asexuality in the romance genre. There aren’t many books, let alone romances, that feature asexual characters. Can you share your thoughts on the current state of asexual representation in publishing?
Mallory: I think it’s getting better. We are seeing more ace-spec characters making their way into the world. I do think there’s still a lot of misconceptions about it. When people hear ace characters in books, they assume that means that there is no sex. In some cases, that is true; it’s a spectrum for a reason. You have people who are more sex repulsed where they’re like “I have no desire to do that ever.” Then you have people who are kind of more like Hallie and Rory and myself who are like, “I don’t mind.” It’s a thing, and it can be good and fun, but it’s not a driving factor for me.
I really hope that over the next couple of years, we get to see more experiences across the board of how people experience this and how it’s so nuanced and there are so many shades to it. My characters so far have been grey ace, but there’s also demisexuality, which I think is a really wonderful area to explore, especially in a romance. Just forming that really deep connection makes your attraction feel so much more honest and raw, and I love that so much. I hope that things continue to grow and we see more representation because I think it will also educate people and, hopefully, educate readers who maybe don’t know the words for these things.
I always hope that if people were to pick up my books, they see themselves in them. Maybe it’s giving them a vocabulary that they didn’t have before. It really means a lot to me . . . People have different views about whether or not they want to put labels on how they feel or how they identify, but even if you don’t choose to use it, for me, it’s always been helpful to at least know the words to find resources that help understand these feelings you’re having especially when it comes to neurodivergences, how you manage certain things, what methods have worked for people who have ADHD like me. Even if you choose not to say “I am this” or “I am that,” hopefully it’s just giving you more understanding on how you’re gonna navigate the world.
Brooke: Do you have any upcoming projects that readers can look forward to?
Mallory: After Entities to Lovers, which comes out in October 2026, there will be another book called Ready Player Love that comes out tentatively in the fall of 2027. It is about two exes and game developers who end up pulled into the world of the video game that broke them up, and it’s really fun. There is a sneak peek chapter at the back of the advanced reader copy for Entities to Lovers. Obviously, I mentioned Micah is Ezra’s brother, so you do meet him in Entities to Lovers, but our heroine does not make an appearance. She’s this mysterious other that we can meet later.
Keep your eye out for Entities to Lovers, which comes out October 13, 2026. In the meantime, you can add it on Goodreads and StoryGraph, and preorder it wherever books are sold. When you purchase, submit your receipt to this form to get super spooky preorder incentives to celebrate the book's release. Keep up with Mallory on Instagram (@mallorymarlowewrites) and sign up for her newsletter to be the first to hear about what’s coming next!