Book Excerpt

Joy

The first thing I realized, after I died, was that my body could walk and talk and no longer needed my help for any of it. I was in there, able to look through my eyes and hear through my ears, but even the simple task of aiming my gaze had slipped outside my control. I was a passenger inside my own mind, an observer along for the ride.

Kristen had been right, I thought numbly as I struggled to make sense of my new reality. Had it only been lunchtime today when she’d told me I’d never get ahead if I didn’t learn to assert myself? “Take control of your life,” she’d said, “or others will take it for you.”

She couldn’t have been thinking of anything quite so literal. Whatever was happening to me, it wasn’t because I’d failed to advocate for a promotion at work or refused to ask out a coworker.

Right?

My body reached my car and slid behind the wheel. A rattled thought—not my own—cursed as it tried to understand how the contraption worked. How much can cars have changed in only a century? Visions accompanied the thoughts, memories—again not my own—of a classic car, gleaming black and elegant, its top down, my bobbed hair whipping around my face as I laughed with glee, a white-faced young man at my side gripping the door, begging me to slow down. I did not.

Which brings me to the second thing I realized, after I died: I was no longer alone inside my own mind.

Whoever was in there didn’t seem to have noticed me yet. Fine. I slid into the smallest corner of my brain I could find, ignoring the intruder as they struggled to figure out how to work an automatic transmission. Maybe they’d get frustrated and give up and go find someone else’s body to possess.

Holy shit! I’ve been possessed by the ghost of someone who died in like 1930.

But why?

I tried to remember what had happened, but the images danced just out of reach. I recalled that the night had been unseasonably cold for October, the chill biting through my inadequate jacket as I hurried to my car, parked in a garage two blocks away from the shelter where I’d been volunteering. Hugging my arms around my torso for warmth, I took a shortcut through an alley and …

There was a noise. I’d startled, my heart pounding in my throat, already on edge because of the argument.

Wait. Back up. There’d been an argument. That seemed significant, but my scattered thoughts couldn’t piece it together as yet, not when a bodily intruder fumbled at the gearshift of my two-month-old Hyundai Accent with only fifty-eight “low monthly payments” left to go.

Low is such a relative word.

– Excerpted from Knot of Souls by Christine Amsden, Christine Amsden, 2025. Reprinted with permission.

Guest Post

The Inspiration Behind Knot of Souls

I spent most of 2020 working social media for two state senate campaigns. Politics is always fraught, but with COVID looming large, casting a shadow over everything we did, it was an especially hard year. Tensions and tempers were high, and being on social media, I had a front row seat to hatred-inspired trollish comments and messages that are the hallmark of online political discourse. Fueled by algorithms that segment us into echo chambers, we don’t talk to each other. We just try to score points.

At the end of that year, weary of social distancing and deeply saddened by all the hatred, I sat down to write a novel. I’ve written novels before, of course, but this time I wanted to make myself feel better. After staring at a blank cursor for a few minutes, I typed out three words:

Write something happy.

I gave Joy her name before I gave her a plot. 🙂

It’s hard to write a book that is tonally different from how you’re feeling. I recognized that early on, and I shifted my goal slightly to the idea of writing something hopeful.

The key hope I wanted to develop? The idea that two very different beings can work together for a common purpose. That even when they disagree with one another, they listen and gift the other a simple benefit of the doubt: good intentions.

The idea that they would share the same body popped into my head almost immediately, and not quite out of nowhere. I’ve long been fascinated by stories of body sharing, uncommon though they may be. In fact, the biggest challenge I had early on is the simple truth that most of these stories involve aliens, and I wanted to write fantasy (although the line between these genres is fuzzy, as I will shortly demonstrate). I spun through notions of ghosts and spirits and quickly dismissed them as being tonally off. I wanted to write something more hopeful than dark, so this isn’t a ghost story, even if Joy briefly thinks it is in Chapter 1 (as she tries to figure out what’s happening to her).

I can’t remember the moment when writing about the Fae occurred to me. It wasn’t an obvious choice because Fae don’t normally possess people, but I had run into interpretations of Fae as aliens before, an interpretation that brought me full-circle back to my initial inclination. I did mention that the line between fantasy and science fiction is fuzzy, right? I even make this observation explicit in a brief getting-to-know-you exchange in Chapter 17:

“So … you’re an alien?” Joy asked.

“That’s what you got out of my story?”

“I’m curious about your powers and how they work. I thought it was magic, but if you’re an alien, then maybe not?”

“What’s the difference?”

Once the notion of Fae as aliens clicked into place, the world sort of exploded in my mind. They’re not corporeal, they’re beings of energy, of light and sound, and their magic works through sound, through the Songs of the Fae. They can possess people … and animals and plants (although plant possession doesn’t come up in the book) … and some of them do this regularly. Some of them live in the real world, human lifetime after human lifetime, and some of them absolutely refuse to do so. This is the big rift between them. And where would incorporeal Fae hang out? Probably not somewhere where humans tend to live, so I put them on the frozen continent of Antarctica. An insight that, in a flash, had me reconnecting my interpretation with the traditional notion of the Winter and Summer Courts.

This was a fun story to write. At its heart are two damaged souls, one powerful but unable to trust, one trusting and in need of claiming power. Together, they work magic.

I hope you enjoy reading this story as much as I enjoyed writing it!