PASADENA, Calif. — There are many things that might attract a potential student to Yale, but the gloom of New Haven’s dead-of-winter aesthetic is not the first that springs to mind. Unless, perhaps, you come from California and you hate the sunshine and you are Leigh Bardugo, future fantasy novelist.

“It was cold and gray, and it was in January,” Bardugo said recently, describing the joy of her first visit to campus, as an alienated Los Angeles teenager. “You can’t imagine what it was like for a young Goth kid, this place of stonework and bare branches and darkness and strange wonderful buildings. I felt so at ease there.”

Bardugo, now 44 and living back in Los Angeles, had chosen as her preferred interview location Gold Bug, a Victorian-vibed jewelry-and-curio boutique named for an Edgar Allan Poe short story. With its delicate taxidermied fawn, ostrich-egg chandelier and framed prints of lethal snakes, the shop is a little oasis of anti-Californiana in a neighborhood of peppy athleisure stores. Bardugo loves it.

“Things that are dark and close to the other side are what bring me joy,” she said.

If you read young adult fantasy fiction, you may well share that view. And you will most likely have heard of Bardugo, a superstar in the crowded genre, with books like “Shadow and Bone” and “Six of Crows,” both set in the Grishaverse, a universe where people can harness magic and science in extraordinary ways, for good and for evil.