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The Big Idea: Michael Mammay

Posted on October 23, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      5 Comments

People are people and they will do what people will do — but would a change in circumstance and environment change that, for better… or worse? This is the question Michael Mammay confronts in the Big Idea for his novel Generation Ship.

MICHAEL MAMMAY:

I’ve had the idea for Generation Ship since 2018 when I was at Launch Pad (sponsored by SFWA) studying space with some college professors. Most notable of those was the class we had on telescopes, which led me to the realization that in a hundred years, telescope technology might be such that we could know a lot more about planets around distant stars.

But I wasn’t ready to write the book at the time. I didn’t have the skill set to bring it together the way I wanted. And while the premise of the book—a generation ship that left earth 250 years ago reaching its destination planet—didn’t change, the big idea for it did.

There’s this myth that most of us probably used to believe that if we as a society ever faced something truly life-altering, that we’d come together and form a united front to deal with it. You see it in a lot of SF movies. Take Independence Day, for example. We all get together and fight the evil aliens.

I think it’s safe to say that the last decade has put the lie to that myth.

Is there anything that we would universally come together about? Even if we could agree as a society what right was (we can’t) we’d still have infighting about how to achieve it. People would war over who got credit and proclaim that their opponents never truly wanted to do the thing.

That’s the Big Idea of Generation Ship. After 250 years and a dozen generations on the same ship, the 18,000-person crew is facing the thing that they all set out to do so many years ago. It should be a great moment where they all come together. They don’t.

Maybe the original crew were true believers in the cause. Ship history certainly portrays them that way. But they’ve been dead for centuries, and the crew now has a variety of ideas, and not all of them are in line with the laws set down so long ago. Vocal minorities across the ship push radical agendas, and while they don’t always represent the population as a whole, they fight to sway public opinion which is as fickle as public opinion has always been.

The governor wants to push ahead with a quick colonization, and he’s willing to use the full weight of the ship’s ancient Charter and all sorts of political maneuvers to make that happen. A scientist wants more time to study the anomalies that they’ve detected so that they can make better decisions before rushing into things. A crime ringleader doesn’t care who gets their way as long as he can turn a profit. A security officer sees it as an opportunity for personal advancement. An agricultural specialist and a coder want to keep their heads down and just live life, but the coming storm sweeps up unwilling participants right along with the willing. 

I’ve always liked political maneuvering, and the opportunity to set it in a closed-ship environment just added to it. I love Battlestar Galactica and CJ Cherryh and Arkady Martine, and with Generation Ship I tried to take political elements that I love and put them into a more earth-centered environment. None of the crew of the generation ship ever stood on earth, but they’re all from there, and they’ve packed along a lot of earth baggage for the journey. I think it’s fair to warn the reader that they’re probably not going to like all the characters. They’re far too human for that.
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Generation Ship: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|E Shaver Books

Author Socials: Web Site| Twitter

The Big Idea: Alex Shvartsman

Posted on October 20, 2023    Posted by Athena Scalzi      1 Comment

When opportunity comes knocking, author Alex Shvartsman is quick to answer the call. Follow along in his Big Idea for the second novel in his Conradverse Chronicles, Kakistocracy, to see just how he started crafting this sequel.

ALEX SHVARTSMAN:

Sometimes you have to work at coming up with the big idea for your next-in-series, and sometimes the idea shows up on your doorstep, inevitable and undeniable, and demands to be written.

When I first began writing humorous urban fantasy stories set in Conrad Brent’s arcane version of New York City, I wanted to populate the setting with some larger-than-life Big Apple personalities. One minor character was Bradley Holcomb, a real estate developer with a reality TV show and a penchant for gaudy gilded environs. This was long before Holcomb’s inspiration ventured into politics, and the character mostly served as local color and comic relief.

Fast forward a decade or so, when I was completing the first Conradverse novel, and suddenly Holcomb’s presence was no longer funny, at least not in the same way. It carried connotations and subtext that hadn’t originally been intended, because when you write a setting that so closely resembles the real world, sometimes the real world has its own ideas. I considered getting rid of this character entirely, but ultimately I chose to keep him, as the concept for the sequel was already taking shape in my mind.

What if a vain, amoral, and incompetent swindler gets elected mayor of New York City?

While I write silly books filled to the brim with pop culture references, I aspire to tackle real-world issues underneath all that pulp. The Middling Affliction had things to say about systemic and long-standing prejudice (and I’ve written about this here on the Big Idea–thanks, John!). In Kakistocracy, I tackle concepts of power structures and how the least capable or suitable individuals so often rise to positions of power (which also happens to literally be the definition of the title.)

But I didn’t want the book to focus on Holcomb directly. What jokes could I write that wouldn’t feel recycled, or which hadn’t already been told better by the writing staffs of John Oliver, Stephen Colbert, and the like? So, I made the intentional choice of keeping Holcomb off-screen. The characters are forced to deal with many unfortunate consequences of the policies and decisions his administration sets in place, rather than with the man himself, as is the experience for most of us with leaders and politicians. Of course, this makes handling the plethora of other problems and threats the protagonists face all the more difficult.

And there are plenty of threats, from the vendetta waged by the fae assassins to the representatives of On High and Down Below being terrible at sharing, which could lead to a literal Armageddon, to the nefarious machinations of a villain who’s been playing the long game and manipulating events to achieve goals which Conrad and his friends must decipher in order to thwart. Just because things are rotten in Gracie Mansion, doesn’t place all the other various troubles on hold. Again, just like in real life.

The true challenge of working on this book wasn’t imagining the sort of trouble the Holcomb administration might engender; current events made that part easy. Rather, it was striking a balance between what I hope will be an entertaining and funny read with a dollop of social commentary, and imagining a viable path forward for the protagonists as well as the citizens oppressed by such a regime. 

Kakistocracy: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Powell’s

Listen to chapter 1. Visit the author’s website. Follow him on Facebook.

The Big Idea: Dan Moren

Posted on October 18, 2023    Posted by Athena Scalzi      2 Comments

For some, there is magic in the ordinary. For others, magic is the ordinary. Such is the case for the main character of author Dan Moren’s newest novel, All Souls Lost. Follow along in his Big Idea as he expands a bit on the mystical world of magic and technology.

DAN MOREN:

Every speculative fiction writer knows the old Arthur C. Clarke saw: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

But it’s the transitional part of that idea that’s always caught me: when and how does technology shift into becoming magic? Or vice versa? 

Technology and magic have both been real fixations in my life. Our family didn’t have a computer until I was around 12 years old, and when my dad brought home a Macintosh LC, I immediately started to make up for lost time by delving into its every nook and cranny. I learned how to replace sprites in my favorite video game, I read The Macintosh Bible from cover to cover, I wrote shareware apps in Microsoft BASIC that I distributed on the dial-up bulletin boards of the era. To me, it was all magic that I was slowly demystifying, discovering the rules and systems beneath. 

This era of technological exploration neatly coincided with my burgeoning love of fantasy and science-fiction. One of the first things I remember doing on my brand-new computer was firing up the word processor and writing stories, the first of which was (as is contractually obligated for all pre-teens attempting to write fantasy) the continuing adventures of my D&D characters. My creative coup in that story was typing mysterious messages in “magical runes”—namely, the classic Mac font Symbol (which is basically just the Greek alphabet). While that story never saw the light of day, it did encourage me to further pursue my passion for writing, as I tried to break down something that seemed magical—a completed piece of art with the power to transport readers—into a piece of machinery, powered by a complicated set of gears and cogs. 

Both technology and magic have continued to play outsized and intertwined roles in my life: I’ve spent the last seventeen years as a journalist covering the technology industry and, at the same time, continued to pursue my dream of writing speculative fiction, with four novels under my belt. 

Throughout, that fascination with the interplay of the magic and technology—and, most crucially, the line between them—has stuck with me. Embarking upon writing All Souls Lost finally presented an opportunity to weave that theme into a narrative. Mike Lucifer, spiritual consultant, is a man for whom dealing with ghosts, demons, and the supernatural, is old hat—even if it’s a routine he’s not eager to go back to. But technology? He’s no more likely to start delving into the nooks and crannies of a computer than he is to dissect his sandwich. Technology might as well be ancient Akkadian to him—except he speaks ancient Akkadian. 

But when all the signs of the case he’s become embroiled in point back to a big tech company, he’s out of his depth. To solve this mystery, he’s going to need help from someone for whom technology is like magic is to him: mundane, boring, everyday. 

Enter Jenna Sparks. To say more would give away too much of the story, but it’s the interaction between these two characters, and what they represent, that’s at the heart of this book. They bring together the disparate threads of magic and technology, of things wondrous and explicable, and remind me that magic and technology are not a dichotomy, but a continuum. After all, the best technology feels like magic, and digging apart how it was accomplished just makes it all the more impressive—not that dissimilar from the best stories.

All Souls Lost: Amazon|Apple Books|Barnes & Noble|Kobo

Author socials: Website|Bluesky|Mastodon

The Big Idea: Tobias S. Buckell

Posted on October 18, 2023    Posted by John Scalzi      3 Comments

The power of books is undeniable. But the power of books is also fragile and constantly in danger. These are facts which inform Tobias S. Buckell’s latest work A Stranger in the Citadel — along with his own love of literature and the physical form it takes.

TOBIAS S. BUCKELL:

It’ll surprise none of you that I love books. I mean, I write them, after all! I love that faint musty odor that clings to old book stores, along with the tactile sense of flipping through the pages while hoping for a sentence that lets me fall right into the story. That moment our thoughts could end up permanently chiseled, inked, and read, it feels like history became this granite edifice. Thanks to this next level invention we could beam our thoughts to each other, and read the musings our ancestors left to us.

I’ve always felt this gift of paper, this paper-based telepathy, was a defining moment in human history. Before it lies the mists of pre-history and the unknown, and since then, words. And what would happen if we lost the books?

At the end of Fahrenheit 451, the Ray Bradbury novel that involves ‘firemen’ who have the job of burning books (which have been outlawed), there’s a scene that always chilled me. The main characters end up with a group of insurgents fighting back by memorizing sections of novels so that the words aren’t lost. This horrified me at the time because I suspected the numbers willing to commit to memorizing *my* favorite SF/F novels would be small. Bradbury’s little moment of hope at the end of his book came across much in the same way the end of a horror movie does.

I also assumed there was no way people could memorize books. I could barely memorize my own phone number at the time, and was ADHD. Listen to a rumor, or play the game telephone in a classroom, and you would get garbled nonsense out the other side. Fidelity of transmission could not be assured. Or so I thought.

It was a friend of mine that took this seed of an idea, what would a post-book society look like with distant memories of our wealth of literature to draw on, and helped me understand that this has been the case for most of our history. A professor at a nearby university, Dr. Ray Person, studies oral history and transmission. He pointed out to me that oral tradition has a self-correcting mechanism in it: the community that values the story itself.

The storyteller alone does not bear the weight of memory, the storyteller is the performer. And if they stray too far from the story, the community shouts out corrections. Thus, we are all the memory, passing on stories. In oral culture that values the stories, researchers have found startling details preserved over hundreds of years. Storytellers among the First Australians have passed on details in descriptions of ten thousand year old volcanic eruptions that climate scientists have studied.

Obviously some stories would change, mutated to meet their community’s needs, and some stories we think important now may be lost. But it wouldn’t be that deep easement, a void that I’d feared when I finished Fahrenheit 451 for the first time. It may not be the exact paper-printing world we know now, but storytelling is buried so deep in our bones I believe it speaks to something about being human.

In these days of book bans, the fights over who gets to tell what stories, and where, what is canon, what is not, I think I take heart in the fact that stories have existed for as long as we’ve had the tools to tell them. Which is why I wrote this book. To imagine the people of a society that have lost all touch with print books, who are in a world of myth and legend, who are trying to understand the world around them with what they’ve been given and what they can seek.

I think, even if we lose it, if our community values it, stories can’t be killed. They’ll try, those who manipulate and bend and demand that only their views are seen. But the words, they’re like magic, the stories live on in us, and to take on story itself is to underestimate the weight of thousands of years of stories that yearn to break free and be told.

The first line of this book “Thou shalt not suffer a librarian to live” came from a tongue in cheek exercise I teach where we reimagine common phrases as a seed for a story. But as I got deeper and deeper into the story that came from it, I found something reassuring at the heart of it.

Stories are stronger than we realize.

And the search for knowledge will always be there, because the truth and knowledge never went anywhere. They were always there for us to discover. And those who fight it, who cast it into darkness, they have to actively hide it and bury it from us. They’ll always have to be on the look out, they’ll always have to be actively censoring, they’ll always have to expend energy to take this away from us.

But the moment they tire, the moment they take their eye off the ball, the stories and words resurface. There are renaissances, even after the darkest ages.

Writing this book led to this realization for me, and regardless of who reads or champions what I wrote, that understanding will always be the lesson I learned from this book, and the big idea buried in the heart of it. There will always be characters like Lilith, from this book, who will reach out to something as forbidden as a librarian in her world, who will set aside their fears, and pick up a book.

Even if the entire world says it’s forbidden.

Honestly, if it’s a good book, we can’t help ourselves.

——

A Stranger In the Citadel: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Read an excerpt.

Author Socials: Web site|Bluesky|Instagram

The Big Idea: E. E. Williams

Posted on October 17, 2023    Posted by Athena Scalzi      11 Comments

Who do authors write for? E.E. Williams has no uncertain opinions on this matter, and in this Big Idea for No More Tomorrows, invites you along for an exploration of this topic.

E. E. WILLIAMS:

WRITING FOR YOURSELF MEANS HAVING ONLY ONE READER.

Write for yourself.

That was the advice I kept getting from many friends and family members after I wrote a humorous Facebook post lamenting the meager sales of my last mystery novel, My Grave Is Deep, the third in a series featuring an amateur detective named Noah Greene.

Just write for yourself.

My friends were trying to soothe my feelings because they knew, behind the comic musing, I was probably hurting. Truth be told, I was.

Because I don’t write for myself. I don’t believe many authors do. 

Writing a novel isn’t something you do on a lark. It’s hard. First, you need an idea, a story that will grab a reader by the throat and won’t let go. You need a plot with no holes, relatable characters with relatable backstories, authentic dialogue, a coherent beginning and middle, and an end that kicks ass. One that makes a reader laugh, cry, or reach for something to calm their nerves. It’s like wrestling a giant squid. 

Once you’ve got all that, you’ve got to write the sucker and that can be laborious, tedious, and often tortuous. Not for all of us. I know a famous Science Fiction writer (oh, you know who I’m talking about) who once scrapped a manuscript not to his liking, and is so talented and fast, he took less than a month to write a new novel that only went on to become a best-seller and win a slew of awards. 

Most of us are not that writer. 

Some days you feel it, some days you don’t, yet you slog on until you reach at least 80,000 words, the generally accepted total for a typical novel. (The average is 60,000 to 100,000.)

When you finally drag yourself across the finish line and typed THE END on your manuscript, you’re mentally exhausted and the last thing you want is do is pat yourself on the back and shout, “Now what else can I write that nobody else will read?” 

I once had a manuscript squirreled away in various desk drawers for 35 years before I finally said enough is enough and finished my first Noah Greene novel, Tears in the Rain. It didn’t take that long to write My Grave Is Deep, but many, many hours did go into composing it. Many, many more revising it. Many, many more rewriting it. Many, many more agonizing over each paragraph, each sentence, each word.

I grappled and cursed and threw too many tantrums to count while writing My Grave Is Deep, and when I finally finished, I was pretty happy with it. Then again, as that great philosopher, Snoopy, once said, I’m a great admirer of my own writing. Still, I thought My Grave Is Deep was the best of the three novels. Not high art, but not pulp fiction, either. Even Kirkus Reviews, a well-known reviewer of books, liked it, calling it “An involving installment of an offbeat detective’s journey toward redemption.” That right there!

I thought readers would buy it. Hoped they’d buy it. Prayed they’d buy it.

They didn’t buy it.

At least not in the numbers I’d have liked.

A little background here. That first novel and the one that followed—Tears of God—were published by a small independent publisher that subsequently went out of business. I don’t think it was my fault, but … maybe? Afterwards, I tried some other publishers where I thought my books would fit, but most of them didn’t take unsolicited manuscripts. Get an agent first, they told me. Good idea, except for the most part, agents want writers with a track record. My track record was maybe, perhaps putting a publisher out of business. Which meant, I didn’t have an agent. 

So, like many a couple of million other authors who are wishin’ and hopin’ and prayin’ that someone will notice them, I published the book myself through Amazon’s KDP platform.

It was an incredibly easy process, and with a little advertising dollars thrown here and there, I managed to sell more books than I ever had. 

Five is better than two, right?

Nah, it sold more than that but not a lot. I think one of my royalty checks from Amazon was for 80 cents. You either gotta laugh at that or cry.

The problem with publishing on KDP is that the only place readers can get your book is at, well, Amazon. Not Barnes & Noble, not Books-A-Million, not Powells. Not in any independent bookstore. Only Amazon. Period.

That’s going to limit your readership. A lot.

Bottom line, authors want to be read by as many people as possible. For the money, yes, because they like to eat. But there are other reasons to tackle a novel. Some do it to scratch a creative itch. Some to stroke their ego. Some because they have something to say … about themselves, the human condition, the world, life. But all do it for the reader.

As I say, My Grave Is Deep reached more readers than the first two novels. Just not the numbers I’d hoped for. My 16-year-old granddaughter recently asked me about my writing and when I told her of my disappointment she asked, “Why don’t you just quit?”

I could, I would, except for these voices in my head. (Metaphorically speaking, for any psychiatrists in the crowd.) I go to bed at every night hearing dialog of characters, fall asleep creating scenes, and rise the next morning with the characters playing out the scenes from the night before. It’s non-stop. I suspect it’s the same for most authors.

Some reading this will think this is nothing more than an unabashed play for you to buy my next Noah Greene novel, No More Tomorrows, which is available today through another small independent press, Moonshine Cove. While I wouldn’t exactly put it that way, I wouldn’t exactly not put it that way, either.

Look, I don’t have 20,000 (or even 20) followers on Twit … ah, ‘X,’ or Instagram, or an email list of hundreds (things authors need to gain traction these days), so I’m not expecting to wake one morning and find “No More Tomorrows” rocking the top of the New York Times bestseller list. And much as I’d like to believe 74 is the new 40, unless I suddenly become the Grandma Moses of mystery fiction, I’m not going to be signing John Grisham-like mega book and movie deals. My goals are much more … modest. Like having people who don’t share my last name read my work.

It might not matter as much had I another dozen books left in these arthritic fingers. But realistically, time isn’t on my side.

So, while my friends were being kind in advising me to write for myself, it’s not something I can or want to do. 

I want to write for the person who’s lonely and alone and needs to escape into another life for a while; for the person stranded in an airport because of a flight delay or cancellation and needs something to occupy their mind so they don’t go crazy and do a Karen on the gate attendant; for someone who belongs to a book club and is desperate to read something a little spicier (and a whole lot shorter) than Ayn Rand; for those who’ve had a trying, depressing day at work; for the parent staying up late waiting for their teenager to come home safely; for the sick and bedridden and hospitalized; for someone looking for a smidgen of sanity in our insane world. 

I want to write … for you.

No More Tomorrows: Amazon

Author socials: Web site|Facebook

The Big Idea: Christina Consolino

Posted on October 12, 2023    Posted by Athena Scalzi      1 Comment

Few things in life are harder than watching your parents age. Author Christina Consolino is no stranger to this struggle, and explores the difficult topic of her own parents declining with age in her newest novel, The Weight We Carry. Read on to see what drove Consolino to share this deeply personal story.

CHRISTINA CONSOLINO:

Years before The Weight We Carry existed in draft form, I watched an ABC report with Cynthia McFadden. In the video, McFadden and Blane Wilson (whose mother, Lawanda, had Alzheimer’s) spend 12 minutes as a person with dementia. Goggles limit their sight, gloves dampen their sense of touch, and headphones deliver incessant noise, all of which visibly frustrate the pair and decrease their ability to concentrate. McFadden and Wilson are each given five tasks, but neither has the ability to follow through on them. The point of the experiment? To help McFadden and Wilson—and the viewer—understand what someone with dementia is going through and increase awareness, empathy, and compassion.

At the time the report aired, my mom’s indecisiveness and forgetfulness concerned my sisters and me. By fall 2014, when Mom got lost going back to her hotel room at my sister’s wedding, it was clear she needed help. My sisters and I knew what we needed to do. The real question was, how? Up until then, Mom had been resistant to listening to our concerns about her memory, always pushing them away or getting angry and agitated when the subject arose.

As it turns out, during Dad’s health crisis in summer 2015, Mom made a large error in judgment, and we told her that Dad’s doctors had suggested evaluations for them both. Later that summer, after an appointment with a senior specialist, a cognitive evaluation, and an MRI, we received the news: probable Alzheimer’s disease.

None of us were surprised; all of us accepted it.

Except Mom and Dad. 

Even with a diagnosis in hand, they refused to see it as a time to take Mom’s health seriously in a way that neither had done before. Stubborn and hardheaded barely scratch the surface of how our parents approached this diagnosis, which meant the burden (dare I say weight?) fell to their daughters.

While trying to work and care for our children (ages 13 and under), my sisters and I alternated trips to visit Mom and Dad—everyone was either out of state or over an hour away—to nurse Dad back to health and schedule appointments for Mom. We didn’t have all the answers, but we wanted to be proactive: get Mom on medication, help slow Mom’s decline, maybe extend Mom’s good years for a little longer so she could enjoy time with us and her seven grandchildren, the flower garden surrounding her house, and the books she held so dear. We begged our parents to think about selling their house, look into independent living communities with a continuum of care, or build an addition onto my home.

They did none of those things. And as Mom’s disease progressed, which might have explained some of her resistance, Dad’s denial grew even stronger. Maybe it was indicative of his generation, maybe he didn’t have the capability of truly understanding what was happening, maybe he just hoped for a different outcome. Regardless, he was content with the status quo, doing very little to prepare himself or Mom for the future. 

The fall after that harrowing summer, I had to purge myself of all the angst, anger, and anguish, and I wrote the first draft of The Weight We Carry. I let it sit for years, not sure if I ever wanted to bring the story to life, to relive that heavy, chaotic summer. But as time passed, I realized our story, one that was so different from what was available, needed to be told. 

Which meant that during revision, instead of stripping out the denial, the hardheadedness, and the other frustrating characteristics that had made my sisters and me feel helpless, I leaned into them, bringing to life a few characters who resemble my parents more than I first intended. 

On my second pass, I thought about another side of our story that should see the light of day—the sibling relationship. Infusing humor and levity, I painted a true-to-life rendering of how my sisters and I came together during that summer of crisis. Our days were long, tempers high, and yet, we found comfort and congeniality in each other through texts, emails, blog posts, and phone calls. 

Of course, revision of the novel took much more than two passes, but in the end, the story held tight to what I wanted readers to understand: the turmoil that comes when parents refuse to acknowledge changes in abilities and behaviors, how difficult it can be to get to the diagnosis stage of a disease, and that denial is a long road to traverse. But it also spoke of the unique bond of siblings and how, when crises arise, being in it together is crucial.

At the end of the ABC video, Blane Wilson refers to those living with dementia and says, “They need your help. They need your understanding.” I hope The Weight We Carry serves in that regard. But I hope the novel also drives home the point that family members who step up need help and understanding too. Acceptance, though difficult, is important, as is trust in the people who love you. Without those, the weight carried by the family is almost too much to bear.

The Weight We Carry: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Indiebound|Powell’s|Blackwell’s

Author’s socials: Website|Facebook|Instagram|Goodreads

The Big Idea: Hailey Piper

Posted on October 11, 2023    Posted by Athena Scalzi      1 Comment

Sometimes, in the times with the most trial, a single thing can make the difference between despair and survival. In this Big Idea for A Light Most Hateful, author Hailey Piper shares what that one thing might be.

HAILEY PIPER:

What if, in the moment your life shattered to pieces and left you tumbling like you’d been thrown down a hillside, there was someone waiting to catch you?

The idea feels impossible sometimes. We’re living the curse, often misattributed as a Chinese expression but more likely a mistranslation or fabrication by British envoys, “May you live in interesting times.” There’s an invitation to mire in hurt and despair. The idea that someone unflinchingly has your back in the darkest of times might sound preposterous. But what the hell else is fiction for?

I grew up in a small town, and that plays into my book A Light Most Hateful, where Olivia has found herself in Chapel Hill, Pennsylvania three years after leaving Hartford, Connecticut as a teenage runaway. It’s clear her arrival was the most exciting thing to happen to this town in a while, and nothing much has happened since.

But an eeriness has taken up residence with Olivia on her Friday night shift at the drive-in, that sense of something lurking beneath the small town’s stillness. A pressure in the air ready to burst with storm, and it does, in the shape of a people-eating monster, the town residents falling under a violent trance, and more bizarre phenomena that follows as the night of terror rides on, straining the limits of reality and friendship.

Within that chaos, there’s potential to show devotion. Olivia’s best friend in Chapel Hill (and her secret crush), Sunflower Mason, is missing, maybe dead, maybe turned into another violent wanderer like the rest of town, but Olivia is determined to find her and escape together. She will not let this grim night split them apart if she can help it.

And then there’s the stranger, Christmas. They’re tall, broody, and they pretend they don’t care about anyone, but there’s a brightness in their eyes that suggests they care so damn much, as if the night’s lethality has forced them to either be a protector or be nothing.

Olivia has Sunflower’s back, Christmas might have Olivia’s back. Even as the residents of Chapel Hill threaten anyone who touches them and cracks begin to grow in reality itself, imagine knowing you aren’t alone, no matter what you face. Even Sunflower’s looking out for someone, albeit lost in her memories.

There’s a duality to a life-changing experience—wonder and horror, hardship and triumph—that lives in Olivia’s story. Potential for death, yes, but also the true nature brought out when the chips are down and the outlandish notion that someone can be their best self with everything else fails.

I’ve said elsewhere, but for me, horror is the most honest genre. Part of that is the breadth which horror explores different sides of people. And part of that is, you find out who people really are when they’re afraid. Sometimes, they surprise you in the worst ways. Or if you’re really lucky, they surprise you by showing the best sides of themselves.

Maybe now and then, living in interesting times is worth it for the people you meet.

A Light Most Hateful: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author socials: Website|Twitter|Instagram