Since the late 1980s, British author Jasper Fforde has been using a technique he calls “the narrative dare” to write fiction. Fforde comes up with a story idea—the more outlandish and bold the better—and dares himself to turn it into a novel. “Having ideas on their own is a kind of exercise in empty cleverness,” Fforde says over Zoom from his home in Wales. “The interesting thing about doing a dare is that you can’t not do it. And because of that, you have to rummage deeper in that authorial toolbox. You’ve got to make it work somehow. No surrender.”

Fforde used the narrative dare technique to write his 2001 debut novel, The Eyre Affair, a mind-bending adventure set in an alternate version of England, about Thursday Next, a crime-solving literary detective who must rescue Jane Eyre from a villain who has kidnapped her from the pages of Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel. The book launched Fforde’s bestselling Thursday Next series, which will come to an end this fall after 25 years.

“This is the last hurrah,” Fforde says. “The Thursday Next series is a celebration of reading, writing, and novels. I think novels are the greatest art form known to humankind.”

Dark Reading Matter, the series’ eighth and final installment, will be published in October by Soho Press, and finds Thursday trying to save the book world one last time, from entities including Martians and tech conglomerates. These forces are also attempting to disrupt the writing of Dark Reading Matter, which has footnotes, blank pages, multiple fonts, and a false ending. “I’m always teetering on the knife’s edge,” Fforde says of his writing process. “Is this going to work? Will people get it? I have to go with my gut feeling and see what happens.”

Fforde has written 18 novels that blend satire, fantasy, crime, sci-fi, romance, and metafiction, and explore the possibilities of story. He’s the author of the Nursery Crime and Shades of Grey series, the Last Dragonslayer YA fantasy series, and the standalone novels Easy Riser (2019) and The Constant Rabbit (2020). His books have sold three million copies, according to his agency, Janklow & Nesbit U.K., and have been translated into 19 languages. He’s been honored with the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic fiction, the Dilys Award, and the William L. Crawford Award.

Juliet Grames, Fforde’s editor, has been working with the author since 2023, but she has also been a Fforde superfan for two decades. “I adore Jasper, he’s madcap and one of a kind,” Grames says. “They say don’t meet your heroes, but Jasper is delightful. The way his brain works—it’s like splatter paint. There’s so many ideas.”

In Dark Reading Matter, Fforde gleefully skewers dull fiction. “I find literary fiction rather worrying,” he says. “There’s a lot of people who think they can write literary fiction, and they can’t. They’re not really writers. They’re people who want to define themselves as writers. Sometimes I read literary fiction and think, This has no soul. It’s an idea covered in glue with pretty sentences thrown at it.”

Fforde also considers the impact of AI on publishing worrying. “Big Tech will try and take over publishing because they don’t understand novels,” he says. “They think they’ll be able to churn them out. But you’ll not be able to emulate speculative and fantasy novels that push at the boundaries of imagination.”

Born in London in 1961, Fforde spent much of his childhood in Wales. He left school at age 18 and, for the next 20 years, worked in the film business, primarily as a focus puller, on films including The Mask of Zorro and GoldenEye. He began writing fiction in the late ’80s, and produced six novels—all rejected by publishers—before he sold The Eyre Affair.

“I just sat in front of a typewriter and taught myself to write,” he recalls. “There was a sense of stubbornness there.”

Fforde, who was diagnosed with dyslexia in his 50s, had a hard time studying as a kid and was labeled incompetent by teachers, which made him work overtime as an adult. “You grow up with that kind of background feeling that you want to disprove this sense that Jasper is a bit stupid,” he says.

When naming his detective Thursday Next, Fforde took inspiration from his late mother, who had a lifelong habit of saying “Thursday next” whenever she was trying to say “next Thursday.” She suffered from Alzheimer’s for several years leading up to her death in 2023, and Fforde was her primary caregiver. “I was the only person who could get her to take her medication,” he recalls.

Fforde says he isn’t feeling particularly weepy about ending the Thursday Next series, and calls Dark Reading Matter an “end-of-series party” for Thursday’s loyal fans. The author has a tight bond with his readers, who host a biennial festival—the Fforde Ffiesta—in Swindon, England, that’s devoted to his work. “I have a lot to thank them for,” he says. “I have to deliver.”

Dark Reading Matter is sure to please Fforde’s fans. The colorful, laugh-out-loud book opens in 2004, years after the events of The Woman Who Died a Lot, the series’ seventh installment from 2012. Thursday and her husband Landen are set to go on a romantic holiday, but mysterious forces pull them to Wantage, a town with a past-its-prime Shakespeare theme park called Shakesmania and a new attraction, the Gateway, which may be a portal to the underworld.

In Wantage, Thursday discovers that Shakesmania has been bought by a private equity firm and is being rebranded as a theme park devoted to Francis Bacon—the supposed real author of Shakespeare’s plays. Thursday also suspects that someone is trying to kill her and may want to change the plot of the final Thursday Next novel. In fact, a villainous entity could be trying to seize control of all of literature—and gain access to the Dark Reading Matter, a realm where book drafts and rejected ideas are stored.

Before long, Thursday finds herself in the BookWorld, a dimension where characters from literary works (such as The War of the Worlds and The Great Gatsby) dwell, as she tries to save literature and defeat those who would destroy it. An absurdist romp, where characters dip in and out of dimensions and time frames, the novel takes on culture, politics, and tech, and is a tribute to the might of the written word.

Will Francis, Fforde’s U.K. agent, says the author possesses a magnetic combination of warmth and subversiveness, and an ability to be both humorous and dark. “Jasper has one of these brains that’s just relentlessly restless and original. He was one of the early writers who challenged what genre writing can do and laid a path in some ways for other writers who’ve written books that deal with dystopias or alternate worlds.”

Fforde believes it’s a good time to be a speculative writer. “We have to up our game to stay ahead,” he says. “These AI engines can’t innovate; they can only copy. Speculative writing may be in a golden age. And it might herald the end to formulaic writing, which, perhaps, we’ve come to tolerate more than we should.”

Now that Fforde has retired Thursday Next, he plans to write more standalone fiction. For the author, the only bad narratives are the boring ones. “I like to take risks,” he says. “If I have any skills, it’s imagination. I can think up bizarre ideas.”

Elaine Szewczyk’s writing has appeared in McSweeney’s and other publications. She’s the author of the novel I’m with Stupid.