Maggie Stiefvater’s next book, ALL THE CROOKED SAINTS, is a standalone fantasy period piece involving a family in search of miracles.

Yes, Maggie Stiefvater still has the Raven Cycle spinoff coming in the form of the Ronan Lynch Trilogy, however, she has stepped away from that series for a bit to write a standalone novel. All the Crooked Saints is the upcoming novel and the cover was just released for it. Check it out and be awed!

Stiefvater spent some time with Entertainment Weekly to talk about the book, which takes place in the 1960s in the fictional town of Bicho Raro, Colorado. There we read into the lives of three members of the Soria family, who are looking for their miracle in this fantasy period piece.

About the cover:

“There are owls in the book because owls are a very scientific creature that gets credited with a lot of magical superstitions,” Stiefvater tells EW. “There are roses in the book because roses are a very magical flower that take a lot of science to truly understand. Put that together and well — as the kids say, that’s it. That’s the book.”

About the story:

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: All three of your characters are looking for a miracle. What do miracles, or the idea of miracles mean to them?
MAGGIE STIEFVATER: Miracles! Miracles! Miracles! This book is full of them. I was taught by nuns for the first dozen years of my life, and so I was raised with a pantheon of peculiar saints: decapitated saints who carried their own severed head through the streets of cities, saints who exorcised demons from the bottoms of milk pails, saints who flew unexpectedly.

The Soria family are saints as well, and the miracle they perform for pilgrims to Bicho Raro is as strange as most miracles are: They can make the darkness inside you visible. Once the pilgrims see their inner darkness face to face, it’s up to them to perform another miracle on themselves: banishing the darkness for good. It can be a tricky business to vanquish your inner demons, even once you know what they are, but the Sorias are forbidden to help with this part. They’ve all been told that if a Soria interferes with the second miracle, it will bring out their own darkness, and a saint’s darkness, so the story goes, is a most potent and dangerous thing.

The three cousins in the story all have their own relationship with the family miracles: Daniel, the current acting Saint of Bicho Raro, wants to help the pilgrims overcome their darkness through holiness and empathy. Beatriz, on the other hand, would prefer if the Sorias approached the miracle from a more logical and scientific place. And Joaquin is less interested in miracles and more interested in broadcasting rock & roll from a pirate radio station in the back of a battered box truck.

What inspired the novel’s setting?
Three years ago, I convinced Scholastic that instead of flying to all of my tour events for Sinner, the companion book to the Shiver trilogy, I would instead drive my 1973 Camaro to them. Seven thousand miles, coast to coast, just an American girl in a muscle car, seeing the breadbasket of our fine country while hawking a novel about burned-out werewolves — nothing could go wrong.

Spoiler: Everything went wrong. I spent my time evenly divided between meeting readers and repairing the Camaro by the side of the road.

At one point, the brakes went out (for the second time), and I coasted into an auto repair shop in Del Norte, Colorado. The sun was white, the air was dust, and the mountains were sharp as hell all around. While I waited for the mechanic to take a look at my brake lines, the receptionist told me tall tales and ghost stories about straight-arrow desert roads and demons dancing in the dust and strangers appearing in the night.

I thought to myself: This is where my next novel takes place.

What made you decide to set All the Crooked Saints in the ‘60s? Is there something in the history of Colorado at that time that speaks to you?
Music! Music! Music! When I was growing up in the ‘80s, my father always had the radio set to the Golden Oldies — I didn’t realize, in fact, that it wasn’t contemporary music. I thought Del Shannon and Patsy Cline and the Byrds were everyone’s current groove. Even after I discovered differently, it didn’t matter; that music had become the sound of my childhood. There’s something about ‘60s music and the ‘60s in general that I think pairs perfectly with a novel about the teen experience — ‘60s America was going through an adolescence in a lot of ways, and it was a time of mystical joy, innocence lost, increasingly uncomfortable self-awareness of the limitations of tradition, and colorful agitation for change, all of it emotional and urgent. If that’s not a description of being a teen, I don’t know what is.

Read the complete interview, including the reason for the name of the city, right here.