Author Interview: The Labyrinth of Waking Dreams by Michelle Kulwicki

Author Interview: The Labyrinth of Waking Dreams by Michelle Kulwicki

Michelle Kulwicki’s The Labyrinth of Waking Dreams is a portal fantasy set in Appalachian West Virginia, with three teens who are all trapped in different ways before they ever find the Labyrinth, queer love that costs something, and monsters with very sharp teeth. We asked Michelle about the setting, the characters, and what she wanted readers to wrestle with. Check out her answers are below and pick this one up, out now!

The Labyrinth of Waking Dreams

by Michelle Kulwicki
Published by: Page Street YA
on April 21, 2026
Genres: Fantasy, Young Adult
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In this adventure-packed portal fantasy, three teens discover a gateway to a mythical Labyrinth in the Appalachian Mountains

Barren’s Peak, West Virginia, is not a place anyone would call magical, but Thea LaGuerre calls it home. A high school drop-out whose mother died in an accident, Thea is stuck working part-time jobs just to make ends meet. The most she has to look forward to are barn parties where she can make out with Callum, the one interesting boy who moved to town six months ago.

Thea doesn’t know it yet, but Callum was sent to Barren’s Peak to watch her. He was raised within the magicians’ order, a shadowy organization meant to keep humanity safe from an underworld of monsters. Callum would sacrifice anyone, including himself, to help their cause, but he still can’t help falling into Thea’s orbit. She’s the first person he’s felt seen by since his childhood sweetheart, Oliver—who he hasn’t seen since Oliver’s banishment from the order.

But Oliver hasn’t given up on Callum or on magic. Following a magical creature’s trail to Barren’s Peak, Oliver happens upon Callum and Thea at a barn party that turns into a monster-overrun massacre. To save Callum and the girl he’s protecting from a wave of deadly fairies, Oliver opens a portal for the three of them to flee into the Labyrinth.

To get home again, Thea, Oliver, and Callum will have to work together to survive the Labyrinth’s trials and discover the threads that brought them there.

Labyrinth's End Duology Book 1

Interview with Michell Kulwicki

Barren’s Peak is described as a place no one would call magical, yet it becomes the gateway to something mythic and dangerous. What drew you to setting a portal fantasy in Appalachia, and how did you approach balancing real regional texture with the story’s supernatural elements?

I spent much of 2024 and 2025 driving from Michigan to Virginia to help care for a sick family member.  On one particular trip, a stretch of highway in West Virginia closed down due to an accident. My sister and I ended up following a long line of cars attempting to offroad our way past the blockage first through the world’s tiniest town, then through miles and miles of a one-lane dirt road full of steep drop offs and terrifying blind curves only to discover that there was no throughway and everyone had to turn back around and come back. Now there were two lanes of cars (on a one lane road.) The highway was still closed. And the odds of us ever reaching our destination seemed to be getting slimmer and slimmer. The setting was unbelievably beautiful, but I wanted to (as Thea says) get the hell out of Dodge and never come back.

As we made the trip again and again, I kept looking for that strange little town where it felt like we almost drove right off the map of existence. I kept watching all the other small towns pass by, and thinking about the mountains that surrounded us, how they are older than trees, than dinosaurs, than Saturn’s Rings. They are steeped in folklore, wildly rumored to be haunted, and an absolutely perfect setting for a book where three teens fall into a magical portal and have to fight their way back. It was a joy to be able to put Appalachia on the page!

All three main characters seem to be navigating different forms of exile. Thea is stuck in a town that feels limiting, Callum is emotionally isolated inside a rigid order, and Oliver has been literally banished. When you were building the Labyrinth, were you thinking of it as just a physical trial space, or as a reflection of the emotional mazes each character is trapped in?

When the idea for this book first came to me, it was extremely plot heavy. I had known I wanted to write another book with Greek influence, I was obsessed with the idea of heroic trials, I wanted to stick my characters through every magical disaster I could come up with, and most importantly, I wanted to write a truly YA book that my Percy Jackson obsessed daughter would love. So yes, in the early stages of drafting, The Labyrinth was very much a physical space set up to challenge and test the characters in very tangible ways.

But as I started writing, the emotional dimension began to emerge. The deeper Thea, Oliver, and Cal went into the maze, the more the physical challenges blurred with their internal ones. I’m very excited for book 2 because while the trials of their journey have ended, they’ve only just started to navigate their internal mazes, and they’re going to find themselves boxed in very quickly!

Callum’s loyalty to the magicians’ order clashes with his growing feelings for Thea and his history with Oliver. Without spoilers, how did you approach writing that tension between duty and desire, especially in a story where survival depends on trust? What did you want readers to wrestle with when it comes to sacrifice and belonging?

It’s funny—when I started this story, I viewed Callum as this ultimate sad boy who readers were going to empathize with right off the bat and fall madly in love with his stoicism and desire for duty and loyalty above all else. Then my editor read the first draft, called him a magical cop, and it completely reframed how I thought about him.From that point on, I became much more interested in interrogating his sense of duty rather than just presenting him as an inherently noble character who everyone should trust has good intentions. Callum genuinely believes in what the order has given him, but that belief comes with some major blind spots—especially around the people he cares about. He’s caught between what he’s been taught to be, and what his heart is asking of him, and I think the core of his arc is figuring out when his sacrifice stops becoming noble and starts becoming self-erasure.More than anything, I want readers to really wrestle with the idea that belonging isn’t always safe or simple. The systems and communities that give us identities can also do a lot of harm. It’s okay to question that kind of loyalty. It’s okay to push back against it or walk away entirely.