Love at First Fright: An Author Interview with Nadia El-Fassi

Happy Friday! With autumn right behind the corner, what better book to read than the one with ghosts and witches? Nadia El-Fassi's Love at First Fright is coming out soon and in this interview they told us all about the inspiration, characters and what to expect next in this paranormal romance series!

Nadia joined us for a podcast episode last year to talk about Best Hex Ever, the first standalone of this series. If you'd like to know more about them and their books, you can listen to episode 14 of season 3 anywhere!

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Thank you for joining us again, Nadia! For those, who don’t know you yet, could you please start by introducing yourself?

Of course! I’m Nadia El-Fassi, author of cosy and spicy paranormal romance. My debut Best Hex Ever about a cursed kitchen witch came out in 2024 and my second book, Love at First Fright about a horror author whose book is being adapted into a movie, and the actor cast in the main role, is out 16th Sept 25 in the US and 2nd Oct 25 in the UK. 

We would love to know more about Love at First Fright and what inspired you to write it!

Love at First Fright is my ghost book! It’s about Rosemary, a horror author (and best friend to Dina who was the FMC of Best Hex Ever) whose gothic horror novel is being adapted into a movie. She clashes with the main actor, Ellis Finch, because she doesn’t believe he’s right for the part. And this all goes down in a spooky English countryside mansion filled with ghosts – especially the ghosts of two Regency women who are definitely nothing more than friends. 

It’s a cosy and spicy paranormal romance, and Rosemary uses her ghost-whispering abilities to help the other ghosts of the story – both human and animal – complete their unfinished business, all the while trying not to fall in love. In terms of inspiration, I always think you should write the books you love to read! I love spooky paranormal romance, I love the TV show Ghosts (the original!) and I wanted to see a positive m/f bi for bi romance, so I decided to write it myself and I had a blast doing it!

For Best Hex Ever, you included a lot of your Moroccan culture. Can we expect to see more in Love at First Fright? Or did you channel your inspiration from a different place?

Dina from Best Hex Ever shows up a few times in Love at First Fright, so there are some instances of Moroccan bakery magic! But the focus this time around is more on Rosemary’s ghost-whisperer abilities. I think this is really a book about coming out and letting go, all wrapped up with cosy autumnal atmosphere and heaps of d/s spice. 

And what do you love most about the genre of paranormal romance?

I’ve always loved the idea of a secret world of magic that exists right alongside ours, whether it’s pronounced with secret guilds or societies or subtler and more personal as it is in my books. It’s a great genre for exploring the everyday uses of magic and that in turn is why it blends so well with cosy fantasy which often has a more small-town, domestic scope. 

Can you tell us a little bit about your characters? Which, if any, do you identify with most and why?

Sure! Rosemary is from just outside Savannah, Georgia and she was raised on her parents’ flower farm. She’s a hugely successful horror author and one of her books, When the Devil Takes Hold – a gothic possession horror – is being adapted into a Hollywood movie. While I don’t always face cast my characters, Rosemary is very much Nicola Coughlan-inspired, with ginger hair and floral tattoos from her neck to her toes. She can see ghosts, her best friend is a witch, and in her free time she curbs her feelings of writer’s block and anxiety by bird-watching – something I have also been known to do! 

Ellis Finch is an A-List Hollywood heartthrob but he’d much rather stay home tending to his garden and playing with his dog Fig than attending premieres. He’s trying to rehab his image from a blockbuster action movie star to a ‘serious actor’ and thinks that being in Rosemary’s horror movie is just the ticket. He’s also firmly in the bi closet, so this story is a real coming out for Ellis. I think there’s a lot of stigma that bi men face around not being seen as ‘masculine’ enough, and so I wanted to write a character who is very much the Hollywood face of masculinity and play with that. I think there are parts of me in each of my MCs!

And which characters do you hope your readers will connect with the most?

This is a tricky one! I suppose it depends who you are! I’m really proud of the way Ellis’ coming out story plays out on page, and I think there’s a message to be taken from Juliet (one of the Regency ghosts) on a similar note. Ellis and Rosemary both experience grief; Ellis having lost his dog Hank prior to the events of the book (but Hank is still around - as a ghost!) and Rosemary having lost her mum when she was in her late teens. I also lost my mum at nineteen, so I think there might be something for those who have lost a parent or a pet here. I think that’s the funny thing with cosy romance; I always come for the heartwarming atmosphere but find myself reading stories that deal lovingly with difficult themes. I hope I’ve been able to do so here. 

Are you a plotter or pantser? What did the writing process look like for you?

OOH I’m a plotter, sort of! I know what my rough plot arc needs to be for a romance and where the characters end up and I usually have a sense of some key scenes I want to write. From there I write a plan that goes from pov to pov – so far both my books are dual pov – and I note what I think will be in each character’s section. My plans are normally around 20 pages of word vomit that I then hone some more, but I always refer back to them as I go through. On a good writing day I can get a good 2,500 to 3,000 done but I try to write little and often. Love at First Fright took me about 7 months to write, and I finished my third book Fairy Godlover (coming 2027) in 5 months, helped in part because I was on sabbatical for two months and able to write every day! Most of the time I write in the evenings as I work 4 days a week as a Senior Commissioning Editor at a Big 5 publishing house, but Fridays are my dedicated writing day and where I get most of my weekly word count done.

Did you have to do any research for this book, especially about the film industry?

I didn’t need to research the film industry in fact, only because my husband works full-time in the UK film industry so I’ve heard a lot about how it works over the years. Any questions I had I just asked him. I will say I took some poetic license with a few things, just to give our main characters more opportunities for romance! Otherwise I did some research into the practices of wooing and marriage in Regency England, reading Rory Muir’s Love and Marriage in the Age of Jane Austen and also drew on many years of love and reading I’ve done surrounding the Regency. 

Rosemary can see ghosts. Now the real question is: would you like to see them too, and if you had the ability, how would you use it?

Unfortunately, like Rosemary, I watch too many horror films so my first thought is ABSOLUTELY NOT. However, if the ghosts were not at all creepy and didn’t hover in my bedroom while I tried to sleep, then I would love to have ghost-whispering abilities.

With this being the second book in the series, have you come across any new surprises or challenges in writing or publishing so far? How have you overcome them?

It’s certainly been a learning curve trying to work on copyedits and proofs of your first book, whilst also juggling promo and drafting your next book. To publish a book a year, you really have to draft a book in under 8 months and trying to do that whilst working full-time has taught me a new meaning to the word burn out. Still, I have loved pretty much every second of it. Writing has always been my dream, and I will never stop pinching myself every time I walk into a bookshop and see a copy of my book on the shelf. 

We’d love a hint about what readers can expect from you for the third book in this paranormal series! Are you also working on something outside of it?

So, all my books are interconnected standalones and you can read them in any order, but all three are set in the same world and the characters will pop in and out of each other’s stories. My third book, Fairy Godlover, is a sapphic romance between Annie Finch, a museum archivist (and Ellis’s sister in Love at First Fright) and Esynne, her fairy godmother who pops out of a jar to help Annie win the affections of the man she’s in love with. It’s a sapphic twist on Cyranno de Bergerac - or a falling in love with the fairy godmother book. 

Like all my books, there’s a healthy dollop of learning to cope with grief, coming out as queer and adorable animals. I would say of all my books, Fairy Godlover is my most fantasy: it’s got the fairy world combined with the magical academia of Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries, with a lot of sapphic spice. 

I am working on more projects and fingers crossed I get to talk about them very soon!

You also wrote a short horror story for an anthology, Roots of my Fears, that you described as “partly based on real experience”. Could you share more about what your story is about and how scared we should be?

I did! I don’t want to give too much away, but when I was younger in Morocco I went to visit the shrine of a rural hermitic saint in the Atlas mountains. This shrine involved me climbing into a pool of blessed water that happened to contain eels. Too many eels. I’ve been terrified of them since then and the more I learn about eels the more I feel sure of my fear. Why don’t we know how they reproduce?! Horrifying. My story, The Saint in the Mountain, takes my childhood experience but dials the horror up even more, blending in some eldritch deep water horror and female body horror. All the stories in the anthology are fantastic! 

Our podcast focuses on media we’re currently loving. Are there any books, shows, movies, or games you’re enjoying at the moment? Any recommendations for our audience? Bonus points if it includes sapphics!

Well as we’re entering spooky season I’ve been rewatching all my favourite movies which includes Jennifer’s Body, which is THE cult teen sapphic horror movie if you ask me. I’ve just started Feast While You Can which is a phenomenally disturbing queer horror, and I’ve been watching lots of shows on Dropout (it’s great to support a streaming service that regularly platforms incredible trans, queer and POC voices) and I’m watching season four of the TV show Evil. If you love campy, religious horror and a priest x sceptic romance that’s full of yearning, then you need to watch this. I’m not much of a gamer, but I am playing the D&D campaign Curse of Strahd with some friends and every session is full of horror, gore and severely overestimating our abilities to woo tavern maidens. 

About the Author

Nadia El-Fassi is a half-Moroccan, half-Australian author of cosy and spicy fantasy romance and horror. They live in Hertfordshire with their husband and perfectly round cat. Best Hex Ever is her debut novel. You can find them on Instagram @nadiaelfassiauthor or on blue sky @nadiaelfassi.bsky.social.