Author's Note

Unlike some of my other stories, The Kindness of Ravens actually began with a specific source of inspiration. It is a very loose modernization of The Unkindness of Ravens, an atmospheric gothic **** mystery adventure written by Jason Kuhl and originally published in Dungeon Magazine #65 way back in November/December of 1997.

When I first played it, what stuck with me wasn't the plot itself, but the mood. What stuck with me wasn't the plot itself so much as the atmosphere. The image of a lonely manor house cut off from the world by a gathering storm, filled with family secrets, old grudges, and people who had spent years carefully avoiding uncomfortable truths, immediately captured my imagination.

That combination of isolation, suspicion, and decaying relationships sits at the heart of some of my favorite Gothic stories, and it felt like the perfect environment to drop Bells into and see what happened. That's the kind of Gothic horror I absolutely love.

I used it as a foundation and started asking myself what would happen if Bells wandered into that situation in modern times. The result quickly became its own thing. At its heart, The Kindness of Ravens is a classic Gothic **** mystery that Bells into a situation where she cannot simply drill the problem full of bullets.

A detective story lives and dies on its characters, and I wanted this one to feel like a house full of secrets. The challenge for Bells isn't surviving the night. It's figuring out who can be trusted before the next body drops. Of all the Jezebel James stories, this is probably the one that leans hardest into mystery and traditional Southern Gothic storytelling.

As always, thank you for reading, commenting, theorizing, and following along with Bells' adventures. Seeing readers try to solve the mystery before she does has been half the fun of writing it.

— Savannah Harrow