Steve Thomas: Alma, welcome back to the podcast.
Alma Katsu: Thank you so much for having me, Steve. Really thrilled.
Steve Thomas: Last time you were on the podcast, we were talking about Fiend, your previous book. And we talked some about how horror is a way of exploring real world anxieties, in a maybe more supernatural way. And this new book, Incarnate, is definitely very current of the idea of people are creating identities on social media, what’s real, what’s not real. How did this story start from you? Was it the technology end of it or the emotional part of it?
Alma Katsu: I have to say it’s the technology. So this is like probably one of the weirder origin stories for your listeners. But some folks know that I had this big career for CIA, but the last third of it was in technology, and that all started in the mid 2000s when I became the first senior analyst for social media research and it really was in the R&D side. It wasn’t operational. It was exploring whether or not there was actually intelligence value to be found in social media, and this was at the very early days. So today that may sound like a really stupid question that you even had to ask it, and I’ll explain why if people are interested on why we had to ask it.
So I was there since the beginning, and when I say social media research, it’s really a lot of science. We used physics models to try to measure audiences and find key influencers and all this stuff, really high-level stuff, and worked with some of the top researchers in the world on social media at the time. But none of us except for one guy, saw it as anything but a force for good. When we started out, we pictured it as this great tool for democratization, that it was a way for the common man to make their voice heard without having to go through gatekeepers.
One of the first big events that my research team and I worked on was the Iranian Twitter revolution. I think it was 2009, so that’s the kind of thing we were anticipating. None of us saw that it would quickly become this tool for mass propaganda, and that it would have the effect on humanity really the way it did. And so in a way, Incarnate is my apology for missing the real threat, all those years ago.
Steve Thomas: How soon do you feel like you got the idea that it’s a threat? Like how many years into it do you think it was? ‘Cause I guess 2006, what’s that, Friendster and LiveJournal and things like that? What were the services around back then?
Alma Katsu: Yeah. Twitter actually hadn’t been around very long, for instance. Facebook was on the ascendancy. MySpace was already on the descendancy. But to put it in perspective, at least for some of your older listeners, 2006 was when we had the Miracle on the Hudson, when that pilot, Sullenberger, landed the plane on the Hudson River. We saw that news broke on Twitter before it broke in what were normal media channels at that time, and really opened our eyes to one of the possibilities of social media sorta changing the status quo. Hopefully that gives people a little bit of perspective.
We first saw how badly it was being used for disinformation around 2013, and one of the researchers I worked with, I had actually given them their first government contract, and now they’re one of the biggest social media, really good social media research companies in the world, but the head researcher came to me and he said, “I think I’m seeing something really funny in the Russian space.” One of the reasons we hired them was they had a very novel and yet very good approach for measuring internet activity by language, so they could help give us an idea of what people were paying attention to on the internet in certain countries. And Russia was a different bear because they went through their own index site, Yandex, at the time, so we couldn’t measure them the same way. So this company was the first company to ever really slice and dice the Russian internet, and they’d been doing it for years, so they had a leg up on every other researcher.
So when this guy told me he was seeing something different happening, I paid attention, and he was the first one that really saw the IRA, the Internet Research Agency’s disinformation activity, and he really helped us start to focus in that area. So it’s been 13 years.
Steve Thomas: And the Russians have been a big mover in that, right? That’s one of the things that they are focused on, to sow chaos is what it seems like.
Alma Katsu: Well, It’s definitely a tool that’s used by a lot of foreign actors, a lot of foreign governments. But sadly, just a few years after we saw that breaking in 2013, the same researcher came back to me and he said “you know now we’re seeing nearly as much activity in domestic actors.” So a lot of political researchers, opposition, oppo research they call it, black hat PR folks started developing, using the same methods and tools that the Russians, the Iranians, and other countries were using.
And as a matter of fact, this poor company, they ended up being one of the researchers at the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence used. They pulled three research teams to look into the 2016 allegations that one of the presidential candidates was receiving assistance from the Russians. And at that time, he was having to battle a lot of these domestic black hat operators who were using those same techniques for their own candidates.
Steve Thomas: My wife talks about this all the time where she’ll just say, “Maybe we shouldn’t have done the internet.” It seems like a good idea, but maybe… because people take, they’re taking advantage and these social media companies, specifically use psychological research to figure out how to keep people engaged and rage bait kind of things and they encourage that kind of thing and their AI algorithms, and it’s just not led to a lot of good things.
Alma Katsu: Yeah I know. But the internet does bring us a lot of good things. It brought us instantaneous asynchronous communications. It’s enabled a lot of things. But in my experience, in all those years looking at emerging technologies, the thing that you have to watch out for are unintended consequences. What happens is the companies and really the founders, the originators who usually end up becoming the CEOs, have a vision, but no one person can ever really anticipate all the things that a technology might be used for once you start getting a lot of other people jumping in and having their ideas. And we just see this over and over again, and that’s what happened with social media.
The creators had a certain vision, but now look. So the lesson that we learned is that you really need to have policy and oversight. But unfortunately, these companies also understood that this was coming, and so they put in a huge concerted effort to keep the government at arm’s length. And that’s why we’re in the situation we’re in today. We can’t have nice things if we’re not willing to do the hard work, and do some policing and not listen to people when they just doomsay and say, “Oh no, you’ve gotta leave the government out of it or else it’ll strangle it.”
No, what we end up having are these opportunists, right, who are willing to do anything. People have to remember, these are not public utilities. These companies, their number one priority is making money for their shareholders, so they’ll do anything to do that, even set us at each other’s throats. Like you said, fine-tuning the algorithm so that it pushes engagement, and what they’ve found brings you the most engagement is rage. And I know people understand that, but why we can’t fix it is frustrating, and hence why I wrote the book Incarnate, ’cause I was just so frustrated. And you have this crazy idea that if you write the story, that somehow people will read it, and it’ll help change minds. We’ll see.
Steve Thomas: We’ll see. It hasn’t come out yet, so we’ll have to see if minds are changed. Let’s focus on the book for a little bit. Can you give the elevator pitch for Incarnate? What is it about?
Alma Katsu: It’s the story of a young woman who is brilliant. But like a lot of younger people today, they’ve had a rough go of it, and social media’s partly to blame, ’cause it’s really changed the way we see each other and how we interact with each other. So she had some rough things go on in her childhood that she’s trying to overcome, and she wants to become a VFX artist, which is visual effects, the people who make Hollywood movies as fun as they are. She has the good fortune to befriend a young man who revolutionizes the VFX industry, and that character’s actually based on a real person and a lot of research I did for the intelligence community a few years ago in deepfakes, he revolutionized deepfakes. And this was pre what most people consider artificial intelligence. So she gets to work for him, and she finds out that she’s probably as talented as he is. And having all this power at your fingertips, where you can literally change what reality looks like, proves to be maybe too much of a temptation for her.
So she goes down this path. She creates what we used to call avatars, fake people, and puts her on the internet. Like most people when they try to sell themselves on the internet, they’re not met with success right away. And in her frustration, she accepts a strange, mysterious offer, and it’s a little bit like Rumpelstiltskin. It’s not only The Picture of Dorian Gray but it’s also a little bit like Rumpelstiltskin. She gets this mysterious offer. She takes it, but she doesn’t know what she’s bargained for. And so I did intend it to be a little bit of a cautionary tale of social media, that it sets us up to want attention so badly. That’s like the currency of the day. You want attention more than you want money almost. And what that really means, though.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, you mentioned Picture of Dorian Gray. That’s definitely obvious I think from the book. Was that something that you from the start intentionally made as a framework for talking about internet culture?
Alma Katsu: Yes, absolutely. I don’t know how it came to me. Partly you think as a writer and you’re thinking about what am I gonna do next, you think of stories that resonated with you and that have had a long age in the public consciousness, and there was Dorian Gray. And like a lot of people though, I probably forgot exactly what the story of Dorian Gray was, and so I kinda got that lodged in my head, and I went back and I read the book, and I thought, “Oh, no.” Some of it really doesn’t resonate today. It was a different era, and Oscar Wilde, while we all love Oscar Wilde, he had different priorities for himself back then, didn’t really translate. But the whole idea of having this false face that you present to the world while something else rots and decays, that’s really what’s going on in this book.
Steve Thomas: If you’re in a horror book, don’t ever accept an offer from some stranger for power because it’s not gonna turn out well.
Alma Katsu: It’s like in a horror movie, right? Yeah. It’s obvious don’t go in the basement or, don’t run in the woods without a flashlight. And yet it just amazes me how many people in real life when they’re confronted with this do take what looks like the big easy button, right? Aren’t willing to do the hard work. And in a way, that’s what artificial intelligence is offering us today. We can go into that if you want to.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, I do absolutely wanna get to AI. What, the first thing I wanna ask is, was it difficult, did you have to keep rewriting this book as things changed in the real world? Because it seems very current, but I can almost see that it was right on the edges, like you’ve mentioned Sora in there, and now Sora’s gone.
Alma Katsu: When you work in emerging technologies, you’re kinda used to that ’cause it does move very fast. And actually nothing moves until it moves, and then it moves very fast. So when I started writing this, I wanted to focus on social media and deep fakes. Deep fakes, as far as the intelligence community was concerned, had the potential to be a really big threat. And, again, we kinda saw it through a certain lens, and we didn’t see how much it’s really expanded. We saw it as the potential for political damage that someone and researchers did this exact thing to make examples. They would have videos of Obama speaking or Putin speaking, and they would put words in their mouth and they were so very good at manipulating both the visual and the audio that they were fairly convincing, but you could still see the glitches that would give you a shadow of a doubt.
And that’s because that’s a different technology than what we consider artificial intelligence. But now it kinda made the jump that they’re using artificial intelligence to sorta do what we call multimodal AI. So you can control the video and the audio and the story, down to a fare-thee-well, much better. And, we’re already seeing some bad applications of that, this revenge pornography and all kinds of unsavory uses for it. And the movie community is trying to figure out how to embrace it and all these other communities, and it’s gonna end up having a big knock-on disruptive effect for our society and for our economy.
These are really big, important issues. They’re not just fun, first adopter kind of things, but a lot of people do rationalize their use because it’s fun. They wanna be early adopters. They wanna see what people are talking about, but every time you do that, you’re creating more data that is plowed back into the large language models. And you’ve agreed to that by when you click on the end user agreement, and you’re saying you’re doing it, and that’s why they’re doing it. That’s why there’s so much AI embedded in everything from customer service to Microsoft Word to everything. It’s just for the data. It’s a huge data land grab. So that’s part of what you’re participating in, whether you like it or not.
There’s been a lot of talk recently, and if people are interested in this, I really encourage them to go out and see what’s been written about it and what’s been said about it but a lot of creators are speaking out, and I did a post on this recently in my Substack, but I’ll direct people to an episode of Hacks, the TV show Hacks. It’s in its last season, and it’s the fifth or sixth episode where they address the issue of AI and the effect it has on entertainers. In this particular case, a comic, a stand-up comic. A light bulb moment for me when I heard them talk about it. Because I hear people say this all the time, “Oh, it just makes my life easier. Oh, it’s just a tool.” But when you do that as a creative person, you’re refusing to do the work yourself, and that’s how you learn to do the work. You learn to become a better writer by failing and trying again and failing, and the same thing with any creative endeavor. So when you use a tool to do that, when you say, “Oh, I can’t be bothered to think through this scene,” or to come up with something creative, it’s like you’re cutting your own ligaments, you’re not doing the work. You’re never gonna get better. I really encourage people if they think they want to go into a creative position, a creative career, to watch that episode of Hacks. It was very good.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, ’cause if you’re just coming up with a new story and you go, “Oh, I’ve got Jack and Jill, they go up a hill, they get a pail of water. I can’t think of what to do next. ChatGPT, what should I do next?” And it’s no, you should come up with they go tumbling after, and all that. And that’s a reason also I think in the schools to keep it out because again, the purpose of school is to teach you how to learn and teach you how to know things, not just to give you the knowledge, and if you take that shortcut, it’s cheating in that way. It’s just like my son, he didn’t use AI, but when he was in elementary school, math, he’s like a math genius, he would always just put the answer down, and the teacher would be like the assignment was to show your work.” He’s “I don’t have to show my work, I can just do it.” But you have to show the work so that your brain, you’re figuring out those steps, and you have to learn those steps, and AI just cuts right through those steps and gives you the answer.
Alma Katsu: It does hallucinate still, so it may not be right, but it may not be the answer depending, math can be, or arithmetic I should say, can be pretty cut and dry. But in a lot of creative fields, there’s no one right answer, right? Yeah, I feel your son’s pain. But when you’re in your early stages of something and it comes easily, it’s understandable that someone thinks “why do I have to show my homework?” But eventually he’s gonna get to trig and calculus, right? And it’s gonna build on the math that he was supposed to have learned before, and if those steps like you said, those foundational steps are not really cemented in your head, it’s not gonna be so easy for him later, and he’s gonna have to go back and learn those things. So yeah, it’s a hard lesson to tell kids, ’cause they want the easy answer. They don’t wanna do hard work, and unfortunately, more and more adults are getting to be the same way.
The other thing is, for creatives to think about is large language models are basically pattern recognition. Basically, that’s what we’re talking about. It’s machine learning. It’s teaching a machine to train itself through the patterns it sees in the data, and there’s a lot of subroutines so that it learns various things, like which words should appear next to each other, or what are the words you commonly see around a certain subject matter and all this kind of stuff. Lexicons, it builds lexicons, which may not be AI in and of themselves, but when you put all those patterns together and you tell the program to apply that then to a question, that’s when it becomes AI.
So all you’re doing is you’re looking at everything that’s been fed into the machine and you’re getting what’s been done before. Do you as a creator, is that what you want to do? If so, maybe you’re aiming a little too low. That’s, maybe that’s not really what’s gonna make you happy in a few years.
And the part that I find frustrating, again, I was a tech futurist, so it’s not like I’m afraid of technology, and I’ve been around a lot of early adopters. I’ve actually been around a lot of CEOs of big, what are now big name companies, through In-Q-Tel and IARPA, these research mechanisms that the intelligence community has. And they don’t have the best- interests of mankind at heart. They just wanna solve this one problem today, and like I said, there’s unintended consequences, so they’re not even aware of the problems they’re gonna be creating.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. But it all goes back, I think, to what you said of them being profit-seeking companies and especially once they become a public company and have to please the shareholders. And as we know, Wall Street only wants grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. It doesn’t matter. Right now, Apple is a whatever, $1 trillion company or something, but if they flattened out and only stayed a trillion dollar company, Wall Street would be like, “Ah, you’re terrible.”
Alma Katsu: It is definitely the mindset of what is success these days, and it’s been fueled by these incredible expectations that maybe are unrealistic. And the other thing I’ll say, I won’t get into a lot of this now, from what I used to do at my job, and I worked with researchers who had contracts with these big companies, with the Googles and the Metas and if you knew what went on behind the scenes, your hair would turn white. They are incentivized to lie, cheat, and steal to hide the downside, and some of that has leaked out through whistleblower accounts and that sort of thing over the last few years. People should really listen to that because it’s true. They’re doing things they know are wrong, they know are harmful, and they’re just trying to get away with it to make a few extra bucks.
Steve Thomas: So in the book Dorothy has some bad experiences when she’s young, and it makes her feel very vulnerable and attacked. Much like a lot of times when people are bullied, the reaction sometimes is to bully back, but she doesn’t have the power to do that until she does have the power to do that. She doesn’t become the nicest person once she gets more power.
Alma Katsu: That was deliberate. Unfortunately, I don’t spend a lot of time around very young people. For a while after I retired and I was a consultant I was helping these tech companies. So for instance, I was helping one of them set up their Washington, D.C. office, and that included hiring staff. And so I was interviewing and then working with a lot of people in their 20s, and it was really eye-opening to me how different their outlook and their behaviors were on so many things. I’m not saying they were bad people, but I have kinda come to believe, to a certain extent, that when you’ve grown up in the internet, when there’s so much misrepresentation and outright lying, and people justify what they do for an end, that it’s made that a little more acceptable, and that maybe in young people, again, I’m not blaming them, but because they’re exposed to this, they’re more inclined to maybe take the shortcut, make the fib, whatever. And that’s what I wanted to show with Dorothy. At what point does she become aware, or does she admit that what she’s doing is actually harmful?
And, maybe I’m screaming into the void, but you want to try to wake people up. See what you’re doing. See what these rationalizations, is this the person you really wanna be? And where could you end up?
Steve Thomas: A- and I guess it goes back to what you said about, these companies need regulations. People need regulations. By regulations, it can be your friends, people to talk to. And because Dorothy in the book doesn’t really have friends. She’s kinda just doing this on her own. She’s got people, coworkers and family and such, but when she’s going through all this, she’s basically just doing all herself and not interacting with people.
Alma Katsu: Yeah. She’s alone. And that was a deliberate choice too because we hear how much the rise of social media has separated us, that there’s so many people that have fewer friendships and especially fewer deep friendships because they consider all these parasocial relationships their friendships. That isolation can make it easier, too, to lie to yourself, to justify things. But really having been so close and done so much research on disinformation on social media, on the internet, that’s really the biggest thing that just gets me. Just we have slid into the acceptability of lying for profit and that we just accept it, and how do you turn back from that?
Steve Thomas: Yeah, I was looking over our interview from last time, and you mentioned that in your work you would always look at emerging technologies that change what we consider to be the truth. And this book is very much about authenticity, too, I think.
Alma Katsu: Yeah. I don’t know that people understand really, that they’ve internalized how much of what on the internet is not true. I say that to people, and they all say “Yes, yes, I understand.” And yet they fall for lies over and over again, or they want to believe something that is obviously wrong that they’ve read. And it’s very frustrating for someone who grew up in an era where the media policed itself, and you were raised to be as truthful as possible, and lying was a shameful thing if you were caught lying. And now it doesn’t seem to be shameful at all.
Steve Thomas: No. No. And AI’s making that worse ’cause you mentioned in the book, before, people would present the best side of themselves on Instagram. “Here’s my best picture. I’m living my best life.” But now you don’t even have to actually go to the beach and be in your bikini and look all hot. You can just put it on AI and say, “Hey, here’s a picture of me. Make me look skinnier, and curvier, and in a bikini, and at a beach, I don’t know. Whatever.” And then it can create it for you.
Alma Katsu: Yeah. It’s really been a slippery slope. You can probably remember when filters first came out so people could doctor their selfies, but they were so obviously fake. But it’s incremental, right? We do that, and it’s fun, and our friends give us a great reaction, and so you just start looking for different filters and more filters. And now we have the ultimate filter where it just makes it up for us.
The technology is, it’s really sci-fi stuff, right? It’s almost the Jetson age, but I say this over and over again when I give talks, we really have to stand up and say we want the regulation and not to let the tech companies push around our congressmen and manipulate them to our detriment.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, like when I read, I’ve got my copy right here. When I read Incarnate by Alma Katsu, I want it to be by Alma Katsu. I’m buying it partially because I want it to be your voice doing it, and if it’s ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever that’s helping you do it…
Alma Katsu: I cannot imagine that artificial intelligence could have written Incarnate, ’cause there’s just aspects to it that haven’t existed before. It would depend on the program, of course, and it would depend on the data that the program was trained on but surprisingly, the reaction from Hollywood, we just started going out on submission, and I did not expect any interest, ’cause there’s so many stories out there now, so many novels that have to do with social media, but the reaction has been very gratifying. They’re coming back and they’re saying, “This is not the story I expected. This is not what I’ve read before.” And I think it’s that the background that I had in working on these technologies and I’m bringing this awareness to it, trying to make people look at them in a different light, that message is getting through in the book.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. When I was researching the book, I saw one review that said it was like body horror meets AI. And there is certainly an element of that in the book of some body horror stuff. When you’re writing the horror parts of it, is that easy for you, hard for you, just the same as anything else? Is that the part you enjoy the most?
Alma Katsu: I find writing horror to be really hard. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent so much of my life mired in reality that stepping away from it, it feels like a cheat in some ways, but it’s an emotion. It’s supposed to evoke an emotion that is not only pleasurable for humans in certain ways, but is also like a cautionary tale, right? We’re supposed to learn from that horror. That’s what I aim for when I put them together, but it is very hard for me to come up with something. Also, because I hate cliche, I wanna try to do something new, and I want it to be effective. And I find cliche is not very effective. People know what to expect, that sort of thing. Those are all my goals.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work in your favor, ’cause readers do, especially right now, they seem to like to read for comfort, and so they like repetition. They like to know that they’ve heard that story before, and they know where it’s gonna go. So sometimes it’s a hard sell trying to get people to read something that’s different. But in this case, just like in Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter, I like to think it’s gonna take you to a place you hadn’t expected and that not only will you enjoy it, but you’ll learn something from it.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. Do you see that Dorothy is someone who was corrupted by technology, or did technology just provide a place for her emotional vulnerabilities to thrive in a bad way?
Alma Katsu: Kind of both. So I don’t know how much of a spoiler we wanna give. Like I said, it’s a Rumpelstiltskin story too. This mysterious offer is made to her, and she decides to take it. I think that mysterious offer is made to each of us every day on social media. It just can’t maybe give the payoff that it gives in the book. But every day you’re tempted, “Hey, use this AI to make me look hot on the beach. Hey, lie about something in order to get more followers.” One early thing we used to see is you could buy followers, and “Hey, buy 50,000 followers for 10 bucks, and I’ll look so much more popular than I actually am.” That offer’s made every day. Are you gonna take it?
Steve Thomas: Yeah. And in horror stories there’s some kind of monster whether it’s a human or some kind of supernatural thing, and Dorothy is not really the monster of the story. The stranger that we’re talking about is more that figure. Did you approach Dorothy obviously she’s not evil, but just moral complexity with her that she is, again, you almost feel sorry for her as the victim of this, but then she’s also actively participating in it, so there’s a line there of she could make a better choice at this point, but she doesn’t, but it’s understandable and human, so it’s hard to judge her sometimes.
Alma Katsu: You know, I think I’m happy with the way she turned out and that also is like we’ve been getting great feedback from Hollywood on this, that it’s a character that they want to see portrayed on a screen.
And as you were speaking, it reminded me, one of the things I talk about when I talk about the rise of fascism is when I was watching a Marvel movie, actually the first Captain America movie, and they show the bad guy who’s like a reincarnated Nazi figure or a supernatural Nazi figure, and at one scene they show all of those henchmen, all of the minions in rows behind him, like a battalion of these Nazi wannabes, but it’s in America, and I said to myself, “Where in the world would you find,” right? So that was a wake-up call that there’s a lot of Nazis in America, but if you look at Nazis, the question to genocide scholars is how did so many people fall into this? How did so many people, when confronted with evil, say, “Sign me up”?
That’s kinda what I’m talking about here, that Dorothy is just like the rest of us, and she’s being confronted with, “Hey, if you take the shortcut, you can get everything you want.” You think you’re not gonna sign up for it, but more people sign up for it than we know.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. I read a book a long time ago, Hitler’s Willing Executioners, I think is what it was called, and it’s basically about everybody else in Germany, just the common person. It’s okay, this is happening. This is your leader. Why aren’t you doing something about it? It’s like, why did you just let this happen? But when you’re a common person, and some people might feel some reflections in today’s world, but if there’s something your government is doing and you’re just a common person, what can you do?
Alma Katsu: But the ironic answer is unless the common person stands up, it won’t ever change.
Steve Thomas: Yeah, that’s the Catch-22.
Alma Katsu: It’s a Catch-22. People just have to believe it.
Steve Thomas: That’s a lot of what a fascist government wants you to believe is that, oh, you don’t have the power to do this because they’re trying to break down the resistance before it even happens.
Alma Katsu: Yes. Yeah. Absolutely.
Steve Thomas: You’ve written historical horror in the past, some of it’s supernatural. You’ve written some espionage stuff. I know you mentioned maybe before we started recording that you do have a spy novel coming up. What keeps bringing you back to horror?
Alma Katsu: First of all hopefully your listeners know that we’re in this new golden age of horror. There are probably more people writing horror than ever. Not that they’re coming out of nowhere. I think it’s a genre that has intrigued a lot of people, but because it’s growing in popularity, it gives you the green light to explore it a little more.
But the other thing that’s so important is it’s such a diverse the writers of it are so diverse, and I don’t mean that in a DEI kind of way. For instance, we just had the big annual horror writers convention, StokerCon, and we had our highest attendance ever, over 1,000 attendees, and when you go there, you’re really struck by how young it skews. Because I write other thrillers, I go to mystery writers conferences and that sort of thing, and it’s all full of people like me with gray hair and retirees.
So we are just getting so many voices in horror, and they’re writing about things that mean something to so many parts of the population. It’s not just, excuse me, Stephen King. It’s not just old white guys writing about old white guys’ concerns, right? Female writers, especially the younger ones, are writing some of the best horror today, and they’re writing about the things that scare them. It scares them, it scares a lot of other women, believe me.
And that extends to racism. If you’ve never been affected by it, and I’m half Asian, so I’ve half been affected by it, I guess. If you’ve never been affected by it, you don’t know what it feels like, that frustration that you are facing a glass ceiling and a glass wall, maybe not even glass, maybe brick or stone, that there is nothing you can do to get over it, that nothing you do is going to is gonna help you get ahead or, like I’m thinking in the workplace for instance, that prejudice that some people don’t even realize they have, they’ll never be able to overcome it. It’s never gonna change for you, and how do you accept it? How do you deal with it?
These stories help the person who is affected by it deal with it, but hopefully it’ll open the eyes of people who aren’t and say, “Oh my God, have I been like that? Have I done that to somebody?”
Steve Thomas: Yeah, and it’s a good metaphor for that because racism is a horrible thing, so putting it in horror as, it’s the monster but you’ve turned it into an actual monster for the story.
Alma Katsu: No, absolutely true. And there’s some great work going on like that today, especially in horror.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. I’ve seen Stephen Graham Jones’ Buffalo Hunter Hunter, like in literary circles they’re talking about it like being, “Oh, this is a literary novel,” and it’s wow, a horror novel getting talked in that way. That’s amazing.
Alma Katsu: And Daniel Kraus won the Pulitzer this year for his novel Angel Down. And believe me, we talked about that a lot at Stoker Con, too. We’re very proud of Daniel. He’s an amazing writer who refuses to let himself be pigeonholed to even one genre. He writes across genres. And a lot of horror writers actually you can look at it that way. I write across genres. There’s some people who would consider Incarnate not a horror novel, but a science fiction novel.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. Yeah. I just saw a trailer to Whalefall, the movie, last night. I loved the book. I think it captured it well in the trailer. You never know with the full movie, but trailer looked good, so yeah.
Alma Katsu: Excellent. Yeah, I can’t wait. I’ve been seeing the thumbnails for the trailer and they look so good, so dramatic.
Steve Thomas: And you have a work that’s getting ready to be on TV, right? Or on a streaming service?
Alma Katsu: We have one show that’s in pre-production, Black Vault, which is based on a story I did for Amazon Original stories, and I describe it as Slow Horses meets The X-Files. It’s about a CIA officer who’s about to retire when he’s picked up and put on this task force to look into UFOs, and he’s really mad about it because 15 years earlier he actually reported on a UFO sighting and it ruined his career and it ruined his life.
So it’s the story of how, once he teams up with the right people, who happen to be younger people who work at the agency, he gets a bunch of young people assigned to the task force because they haven’t learned to fear failure. So they’re gonna make an honest effort to try to figure out what’s going on, and they uncover this huge thing.
I won’t go any further than to say this huge national security threat. So yeah, we’re in pre-production. AMC Studios is behind it, and the producers are the producers of Breaking Bad and the producers of The Walking Dead. I’ve read the pilot script. It is fabulous, and my understanding is right now we’re trying to attach the lead talent, that’s the star to it, and I don’t know where they are with that ’cause they don’t tell me.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. That’s very cool. Do they have a service that it’s gonna be on yet, or it hasn’t gotten sold to a specific service?
Alma Katsu: AMC would like to use it, but apparently their slate is full for the next two years, and we’re trying to get it out sooner than that. Fingers crossed we’ll find somebody to pick it up soon.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. I know a lot of times you option stuff all the time, but for something to actually get into pre-production that there’s some actual work getting done on it, that’s great.
Alma Katsu: It’s very exciting. Yeah.
Steve Thomas: Hopefully Incarnate will get there too someday.
Alma Katsu: I am amazed. I can’t talk about it, but some of the interviews we’ve done so far have just been mind-blowing. Yeah.
Steve Thomas: Yeah. That’s great. That’s great. Thank you. Thank you for coming on, Alma. I very much enjoyed talking to you, and this book again was very good. I think you’re the right level of horror for me where it’s there, but some people get… like, I love Stephen Graham Jones too, but sometimes he’s very good at his descriptions and I’m like, “Eh, I’m getting creeped out.” Not in a bad way, but it’s just like it’s a little much for me. But I like your level of horrors.
Alma Katsu: Oh thank you. See, I don’t think you need to be necessarily gory or bloody, and some of the worst things are the things people inflict on each other’s minds.
Steve Thomas: Again, Incarnate will be available in September. Everybody get those advance copies and vote for it on Library Reads, and then buy it when it comes out or check it out from your library. And Alma, did you want to mention the next project you had coming out, a spy novel?
Alma Katsu: There is gonna be a spy novel coming out in March. It’s gonna be with Thomas & Mercer, and it’s about Havana Syndrome. And I wrote it because a friend of mine was one of the first CIA officers who was affected by this, and he had to go on disability and it, you probably know if you follow this issue at all, is that it’s really dragged out, and his feeling, and as someone who knows what’s going on inside the building, I have to say I agreed, it was being politicized, and he was very upset that the agency would do this to their officers.
And he asked me to write the story. And I said, Mark, I don’t have to write this story. He’s already been interviewed. He’s had his story in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and he’s “No, I think if you can write a story about it, that’s gonna bring more attention to it.” Bless your heart for thinking that, so it took a long time, but yeah, we wrote it, and it’s coming out in March.
Steve Thomas: Great. And do you have another horror novel you’re working on as well,?
Alma Katsu: Not yet. Okay. I just submitted a proposal to my agents. We’ll see if it goes anywhere.
Steve Thomas: And are you thinking you’re gonna stick with contemporary, or are you looking back at historical?
Alma Katsu: The proposal that I just gave to my agents is another contemporary, but I have to say, some ideas for historicals have been coming back to me. But it might be too frustrating for my publisher to keep jumping back and forth like that.
Steve Thomas: I’ve enjoyed the last two that are contemporary, so if you want to stick there, I’ll stick with you, and I’m sure your other readers will as well.
Alma Katsu: Thank you. That’s good to hear.
Steve Thomas: All right. You have a great day, and good luck with the book.
Alma Katsu: Thank you so much. Really, thank you so much, Steve.
*****
Yaika Sabat: Hello, and welcome back to The Circ Desk. I’m Yaika Sabat, a NoveList librarian who creates content focused on helping libraries and library staff recommend books and connect with readers.
Kaitlin Conner: And I’m Kaitlin Conner, a NoveList librarian who creates recommendations content for horror, romance, and narrative nonfiction titles.
Yaika Sabat: We just heard Steve chat with Alma Katsu about her new book, Incarnate, and Kaitlin and I are both huge horror fans, so we’re excited to share a few read-alikes we think would be great options for readers who enjoy Incarnate or those who need something to read while they’re waiting for the book to be available.
Kaitlin, do you want to start things off with your read-alikes?
Kaitlin Conner: Yes. Thanks, Yaika. My first pick is Nothing Tastes as Good by Luke Dumas. It is about a 28-year-old gay man named Emmett Truesdale who’s been navigating obesity his whole life, and he’s just fed up with everything. So he decides to sign up for a new gene therapy treatment called Obexity, which is a little on the nose, but I love the name regardless. He quickly begins to drop weight. He finds a new boyfriend. He becomes an influencer. So things are really starting to look up for him, but there are some unsettling side effects to Obexity, and Emmett isn’t sure he can live with them.
So I think Nothing Tastes as Good is a great read-alike for Incarnate because both books deal with hot button issues, and they’re very of the moment. I feel like AI and weight loss drugs are on everyone’s minds these days, whether we like it or not, because there’s just so much news out there about them. So readers who like the social horror element of Incarnate will definitely want to check out Nothing Tastes as Good. And another thing that links them is that they are very visceral body horror novels with a strong “be careful what you wish for” theme. So yes, Emmett and Dorothy are in the bodies they’ve always dreamed of, but at what cost? And that’s ultimately what these novels are about.
To piggyback off of some of these themes, my second read-alike is Zakiya Dalila Harris’ debut novel, The Other Black Girl. Nella, the protagonist, is the only Black employee at a prestigious publishing house until Hazel shows up. Initially the pair become friends, bonding over the microaggressions they face at work, but then Nella begins to question some of Hazel’s intentions when she notices Hazel placating their white bosses.
I do wanna say it is almost impossible to say why this book is a good read-alike for Incarnate without spoiling anything. So I’ll simply say that much like Incarnate, The Other Black Girl questions the quote-unquote ideal when it comes to how you present yourself to others and how you’re perceived. Nella, like Dorothy in Incarnate, feels like an outsider and wants to fit in, but there are consequences. I love this book as a read-alike for Incarnate because both books are suspenseful thrillers with speculative elements, and they explore themes of identity and manipulation, and there’s actually a lot of ambiguity with both. So if you’re the kind of reader who appreciates thought-provoking novels that ask a lot of questions but don’t necessarily give you all the answers, The Other Black Girl pairs really well with Incarnate. I think it would also be a great book club pick if you’re looking for a book that will challenge you. I also want to mention that The Other Black Girl was adapted into a TV series for Hulu, so you should definitely check that out too.
And I think that about wraps up my read-alikes for Incarnate, and I’m so excited to hear yours, Yaika.
Yaika Sabat: Thanks. I will say I love that you picked The Other Black Girl because it is not a horror novel. It is that suspenseful thriller, and I think sometimes when recommending read-alikes, it’s really tempting to stay strictly within the same genre. But I think something like thrillers and suspense novels have some of those same traits that horror readers really like, so I think that works really well.
Kaitlin Conner: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of non-horror books out there that horror fans would appreciate. So I’m always happy to try to widen the net a little bit and help people find other books they might enjoy as well.
Yaika Sabat: Yes, exactly.
Now, when I was looking I thought there were a lot of different ways that I could have approached this. Part of me wanted to find other adaptations of The Picture of Dorian Gray, which there aren’t a ton of. But I decided to look at some of the main subjects of the book, like beauty and influencers, and then some of the different like, elements, like the fact that it’s body horror, it’s gruesome, it’s violent, it’s thought-provoking, and mix those together when I was searching.
And the first book that I’d like to suggest is Natural Beauty by Ling Ling Huang, and this was from, I think, 2023. In this book, there is an unnamed Chinese-American narrator who has a terrible accident, and that derails her future as a classical pianist. So she takes a job at Holistic, which is an exclusive New York wellness boutique that promises transformation, beauty, and access to a very sort of rarefied world of privilege. And at first, the shop’s treatments seem like a lifeline for the narrator, but as she becomes more immersed in Holistic, she notices unsettling changes in her own body and uncovers disturbing truths behind the company’s success. This book blends horror and satire to create a haunting look at the pressures of beauty standards, the cost of ambition, and that search for perfection, and also the often unmaintainable balance between someone’s genuine identity and their desire to fit in.
So I thought that Natural Beauty could be a great readalike for Incarnate for a few reasons. For readers who liked Incarnate, Natural Beauty also deals with disturbing transformations. Both books have protagonists who don’t feel like they belong. Dorothy is a failed influencer seeking that success and validation, and the protagonist of Natural Beauty doesn’t feel like she fits into these elite circles because of her class, her race, and her experience as a child of immigrants. I think the readers who love the idea of the secrets behind success would also enjoy this because in Incarnate, Dorothy is obviously hiding her identity by becoming Isabella, and in Natural Beauty, Holistic is guarding some very disturbing secrets for the beauty treatments that they sell. I also think that anyone who enjoyed sort of the examination of beauty in Incarnate would like this because both really look at how the pursuit of society’s ideal form of beauty can harm someone.
So I think they both work well for readers who want thought-provoking, incisive books critiquing the parts of modern society, whether it’s technology, AI, and influencer culture in Incarnate or the health and wellness beauty industries in Natural Beauty. And I also think Natural Beauty would work well as a readalike for Nothing Tastes As Good, actually, when you were talking about it.
Kaitlin Conner: Oh, absolutely.
Yaika Sabat: This is also a good pairing!
Now, my second readalike I think falls into that category of maybe not an obvious match, but when you look a little closer it works. That is Fabulous Bodies by Chuck Tingle, which is a brand-new book. This follows Poppy Stringer, who by day is building her dream life as a fashion influencer who curates beauty and style and an aspirational lifestyle for her growing audience, but by night she is funding that lifestyle through a much darker hustle of stealing and selling dead bodies. When her idol, flamboyant rock star Eddie Michaels suddenly dies, she does get the chance to finally meet him, but it’s by stealing his body in what’s supposed to be that lucrative, last job, “final job and then I’m out.” But things take a sharp left into just fully bonkers territory because Eddie wakes up and drags Poppy into a chaotic night made up of bizarre and increasingly disturbing errands, supernatural encounters, and lots of danger.
Fabulous Bodies blends gruesome, wild events with dark humor and a heaping spoonful of emotional depth that creates a story of survival and identity. So while the plot of Fabulous Bodies is pretty different than Incarnate, both stories are rooted in influencer culture these sort of created and curated online identities, and how delicate and destructive that can be for the people taking part in it. Both also focus on main characters that are making ethically murky choices, which is putting it gently, to get the life that they want for themselves. And also, both lean into either body horror or more gruesome, visceral horror. So I think those elements found in both means that any reader that connected with any of those elements, I think would be able to pick up Fabulous Bodies and appreciate it, even though it’s quite different. I think it’s a great example of how if you’re just looking at plot, this is “what are you doing with this recommendation?” But when you break down the different elements and appeals, you can find a match for a reader that you might not have initially thought of.
Kaitlin Conner: Yeah, I absolutely love that you chose this one. I do wanna mention, too, I just finished the audiobook for it, and I really enjoyed it. It was narrated by Mara Wilson, AKA Matilda. So for any listeners out there who love audiobooks, I highly recommend it. And I think Mara Wilson has also narrated Chuck Tingle’s other novels as well.
Yaika Sabat: I think so. I’m doing the audiobook for this one once I’m done with my current book club read, and I’m really excited. I am a huge audiobook fan, so I’m happy to hear that it’s well done.
Kaitlin Conner: Yeah, it’s a great one.
Yaika Sabat: I think Kaitlin and I could probably sit here and talk about horror options the entire day.
But that is all the time we have today at The Circ Desk, so we’ll check you out next time!
Circulating Ideas 