Alma Katsu – The Fiend

Steve Thomas: Alma Katsu, welcome to the podcast.

Alma Katsu: Thank you so much for having me. I’m just thrilled to be here and to get to talk to librarians.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. That’s my first question I was gonna ask before we get into the book and your writing, what was your experience with libraries when you were growing up, and what’s that relationship like now as an author?

Alma Katsu: Well, I’m glad you asked because I actually got my first job ever as a page in a library in my teeny tiny hometown of Maynard, Massachusetts. I spent so much time in the library, I think they took pity on me and just offered me a job so I could make some money. But you know, I loved it. I lived there. If it weren’t for that, I wouldn’t have the relationship that I have with books now.

Now, I have to say regretfully, I don’t get to the library as often, for one reason is because I live in a very remote area, and so while there are libraries around, it’s just not as easy to get to them and their hours are pretty restricted, but they do a great job serving the community, especially the young folks.

It’s interesting, before we moved out here, I lived in a pretty big city outside of DC and just amazing to see what libraries are doing these days and how they really rise to meet the challenge, support the community in the way the communities need to be supported. It’s one of the best resources that we have in America and a real shame for what’s going on. I don’t wanna get too political, but what a waste of energy pulling resources away from libraries. It serves nobody.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. Do you do a lot of author events at libraries?

Alma Katsu: I’d like to do more, actually. I’ve done a few, but not as much as I’d like to. Is there a secret door into that?

Steve Thomas: I’m not sure. I’ll look for the key and see if I can pass it along to you.

Alma Katsu: That’d be awesome. Thank you.

Steve Thomas: They have like things like the Summer Scares program that Becky Spratford and other people are doing to help get it into libraries, but what do you think the broader view of horror is, and what do you see horror as these days?

Alma Katsu: Well, I definitely think horror has changed a lot. My first horror novel was The Hunger, which came out in 2018. And honestly, when we were working on it, nobody at the publishing house thought of it as horror. I think we were planning to market it more as mainstream fiction, but the horror community really embraced it, so my future was set.

But it’s been a really great community to be in. And the thing I noticed is that, I call it a big tent. Horror right now is a big tent. It really includes a lot of different types of stories with the only common theme is these stories are all investigating, what is it that scares us? How do we react? Why are we reacting the way we are? And hopefully gives us tools for how we can manage those types of anxieties. They’re also really great tools for building empathy. It really makes you see very closely what other people are afraid of, even if it’s not something maybe that necessarily is part of your life, but you see how people have gone through abuse and other things that shape them as people and just make you more sympathetic, which is interesting ’cause it’s probably the opposite of what most people think of when they think of horror.

And I get this all the time when I go to events. I guarantee you at least one person, but probably a few more will come up to me and say, after hearing me talk, “I’d really love to read your book, but I don’t do horror.” And I wanna say to him, you probably do. You just don’t think of it as horror. ’cause there’s a lot of books out there. A friend of mine, Riley Sager, Todd Ritter is his real name, he writes what’s known as thrillers, but he’s starting to come out a little bit more that he also overlaps in the horror realm, and there’s certainly a lot of movies that fall in this category that I guarantee you most people have probably watched. They just don’t think of it as horror.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, there’s a thin line between thriller and horror because all horror does not have to be supernatural. There’s plenty of horrific things that happen without the supernatural involved. That’s a big sub part of the horror genre is the supernatural part, but that’s not necessary to it.

Alma Katsu: Right. That’s not all of it. And increasingly we’re seeing more stories that are super interesting, but the horror element is sort of undefined. Actually, my three books are all sort of like that, that I just present what’s going on and there are clues, but it’s really up to the reader to decide what’s going on. And that’s certainly true in Fiend. I tried to construct it so that you would… you know, what’s at the heart of it? A demon. It’s the 21st century. We don’t believe in demons anymore, right? Only children believe in things like that, and so it challenges the reader to make a decision as to what’s really going on in the story.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, you could read it in that maybe it’s a metaphor for something else and it’s not actually, it’s like something that’s happening, and that’s something that you can explore with that of like, sure, in this story there’s a demon, but in a real family like this, it’s not an actual demon, but they’re still compelled by the same thing. Like, this family’s doing it ’cause they have a demon. Why is this real life family doing it?

Alma Katsu: Well, I’ll tell you why I came up with that for Fiend. This is gonna be a long answer, I’ll warn you right now, but there were a couple inspirations for Fiend and one is the Sackler family. I saw the film Dope Sick on cable. I didn’t read the book, unfortunately. I understand it’s very close to the book, which was fabulous. It might have won a Pulitzer or something, but looking at the crimes the Sackler family committed in pushing Oxycontin on the population, the lying, the manipulating, it just goes on and on. And it makes you wonder, why did they feel like they were justified in going to that extreme, to the point where they do have a judgment against them by the government, but they were able to secure that the family itself was not gonna lose money. How can you kill thousands of people and not feel like maybe you should pay somebody back? That maybe you, anyway, that there should be justice. How does a family get there, to that point?

Well, you know, this is no secret. I brought it up in many interviews that I’ve done. When I worked for the government in intelligence, I spent some of my time as an analyst looking at genocides and mass atrocities. And there you often had, you always had, I shouldn’t say often, you always had an autocrat at the center of it who was demonizing his neighbors in order to consolidate their power. And sometimes, you know, I was in intelligence, I actually got to listen to conversations where these people who would later be indicted by the International Criminal Court as war criminals, talking, and to listen to the way they ridiculed the very people that they were lying to, to bring them to power. How they looked down on them, they had no respect for them. They were just using them in every way. And it just made me wonder, why don’t more people see these monsters for what they really are?

There are still people who defend the Sacklers. There are still people who, for instance, in Bosnia will defend what the Serbian government did and it made me wonder, is it easier to see evil when you dress it up in a trope that’s recognizable. If I say, and I’ve always thought this is a really interesting thing that people have. When we’re young, we’re conditioned to believe in superstition and to sort of delight in it in a way, because it’s an explanation. A bad thing happened, “Oh, it was a witch!” Whatever. And then you grow up and you realize, and I hate to break it to some people, but there is no devil. But we certainly have those really bad instincts within us. But for some people, for whatever reason, they cannot bring it upon themselves to recognize that truth, but they’ll listen to it if you dress it up. Did I just lose everybody you think?

Steve Thomas: No, no, no, no. I think that, no, I think that was a good explanation of that and a good way of kind of tying it into the real world of just, again, in the real world.

No, the Sacklers probably don’t have some demon bound to their family, but they’re acting the same way as the the Berisha family do in this book and have for generations. And so it’s like, well, at least they have the excuse of having a demon!

Alma Katsu: In some ways, yes!

Steve Thomas: It’s kinda like a genie that gets stuck with a bad master.

Alma Katsu: Yeah. You know, when we were pitching this to Hollywood, and I’m really amazed to be able to say that it’s been optioned for TV. I can’t reveal who picked it up, but I would be talking to producers and they’d be trying to wrap their head around the demon. “What is the demon?” Because I do, again, sort of obscure it a little bit in the book, but you can think of it as like a genie. It’s a spirit of some kind that’s tied to a talisman in order to be able to command it. So that’s actually a great way to think of it.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, and a lot of the descriptions of it are coming from like the flashbacks of the kids. So it’s like, well, is this just the kid interpretation of their parents are fighting and so they’re coming up with this, and all those questions are answered in the book. But you know, throughout the book, you’re kind of thinking that.

Alma Katsu: Yeah, that’s what I wanted to convey. I mean, it’s sort of about two things. On one hand, what we’ve just discussed, like, how can these families who are so privileged and have so much, be so evil and care so little for the very people that they’re supposed to be serving in a way? But it’s also about families and what we do to each other. And when you see somebody who’s very, very damaged to make them think about where does that damage come from?

I grew up in a generation where parents were very not like they are with their children now, you know, very strict households, not a lot of love given to the children. We were more like little employment units, there to serve the family. And I think it’s very, very different today. So it’ll be interesting to see what the reactions are, but that’s was the purpose of all those flashbacks. We see the kids as adults, young adults, kept young adults because of their dependence on their parents but we see them and they’re not likable people, but of course, no one’s born not likable. They’re molded that way. So we have the flashbacks to see how these poor kids ended up the people they are today.

Steve Thomas: And you do a good job of fleshing them out as well because initially of course, I mean like all of them are just, you hate all of them at once ’cause like their initial reaction is, we’re just spoiled brats and we’re terrible people, but then you get into it a little bit more and a couple of the siblings at least are even trying to do the right thing and are not sure how to do it, or they’re all trying to do what they think is the right thing, but some of them are a little more narcissistic, I guess, about it, but they’re all trying to move this family in a different direction in their own way.

Alma Katsu: Yeah. I mean, and that’s the thing I learned from following war criminals and looking at other bad guys through intelligence, and that is no one thinks, they don’t wake up in the morning rubbing their hands and saying, “Ha ha ha, another day of evil!” What they believe in may be evil, but they think, like you said, they’re sort of moving towards this goal that they believe in.

And so, yeah, I was happy in the way the kids were depicted. They all flip in some way over the course of their lives and so once starts out bad and especially once he is told what the demon is, he really is trying to change the family. Then the same thing with the other two. The main character being Maris, the middle daughter, who I feel maybe ’cause I’m a middle daughter, I feel really bad for her and unfortunately she ends up in the worst place but it’s certainly something that I had actually seen with my own eyes happen to people who get inducted into these cults, really, there’s no other way to put it.

When I was talking to my agents about the book and I said they’re all unlikable characters, but I hope that you, just, like in Succession the TV show, you just can’t take your eyes off ’em. So I realize that there’s gonna be some readers who really don’t, they cannot deal with a book where there is not a sympathetic character. But I hope for the most part, readers will still find this book compelling. What do you think?

Steve Thomas: Oh, yeah. I mean, I bounced off the characters as in likability, but I definitely wanted to find out what was gonna happen to them, so the narrative definitely was dragging me along. And like you said, there’s a flip of almost all the kids of how they start to how they end up in the book. You see, even the ones that are trying to do good, I mean, they’re causing damage along the way too because they are damaged. There’s generational trauma in this that just as you might want to be a good person, but you’re gonna do these terrible… someone toward the end of the book, trying not to give away again, wants to do something really good with the company but is willing to do bad things to get there too. So it’s sort of even like what the reader might agree is the best thing for the future of that company. Well, people have to be hurt for that too.

Alma Katsu: I have to say it was a lot of fun to write.

Steve Thomas: It’s almost like you’re always in that uncomfortable state in horror. When I’ve talked to people about it, especially like Becky or whatever, like, I like mysteries a lot because at the end you wrap it all up, everything comes together, you know why everything happened, and that doesn’t, that’s not a trope of the horror genre. You don’t have to find out everything at the end, and it doesn’t have to wrap up neatly.

Alma Katsu: Because a lot of the things that the books ultimately are about are fears. They’re not things that can be wrapped up easily. So yeah, we’re just giving people sort of like a space to explore. It’s interesting, I was just at a horror reader’s weekend, and as I’m sitting on this panel and I’m listening to the other writers who were there, they’re all like, at least a generation younger than me, some of them were like two generations younger than me, and it was really eye-opening to listen to them talk about why they write horror and why they like horror. I mean, it’s the same thing. They all use it too to sort of navigate these things in their heads that they’re not quite sure what it means.

But a lot of them really also embrace aspects of the horror. I mean, not actual harm of course, but the silly things, like clowns being scary or what they get out of watching Friday the 13th, and they just all giggle at the same things. So I would urge librarians to think about the younger generations. Some of you are part of that generation, so you probably already know that there is an audience for this kind of thing, and it’s bigger than I thought.

I was just at the doctor’s yesterday, and this was the first time I’d seen this doctor and she was very young. She must have just been outta med school. And when she asked me what I did and I said, “I write horror novels,” she’s like, “I love horror!” I think there’s a lot more readers out there than you might think, librarians. So listen to Becky. She’s got great lists.

Steve Thomas: Yes, yes. And they’re starting to publish more stuff for kids and middle grade that is in the horror genre as well.

Alma Katsu: Yeah. And it’s natural to be curious about those things. It’s natural for kids to be curious about these weird, conflicting things that are just coming up to them for the first time. It’s natural for all of us to be intrigued by death. I mean, that’s the biggest question, right? What happens when we die? So, yeah, these are all ways, especially for kids, I think it’s such a benefit to give kids a way to think about these things and explore it without judgment and knowing that they’re gonna be safe.

Steve Thomas: Absolutely. You mentioned your intelligence career earlier. Does that help you in doing research for your books? Like do you know how to research topics better because you know how to do intelligence?

Alma Katsu: Oh, do I ever, yes. So I was basically a research analyst for my entire career, although I did split doing sort of traditional intelligence work with technology. My last third of my career I was a futurist, actually, technology futurist. And I did it as a consultant, and I am just wrapping it up now. Hallelujah. But as a research analyst, yeah, that’s what you do. And it’s different from being an historian, which I sometimes get questions about.

So I also write spy stories. Those are really easy for me to write. Horror is actually harder. And the first three, which were all historical horror, needed varying degrees of research, but the first two, the one on the Donner party, which is the Hunger, and the Deep, which is about the sinking of the Titanic. Oh my gosh. That needed so much research. I’m happy to say Fiend is a contemporary novel, so it really didn’t need anywhere near as much research.

Steve Thomas: And then The Fervor was about the Japanese internment camps during World War II.

Alma Katsu: Yes. and I did not have to do quite so much research for that, because I am half Japanese and my husband is half Japanese, and his entire family were interned at Topaz and some other camps, but they started at Topaz, and so we’ve been married 35 years now, and that whole, especially in the beginning, we had a lot of curiosity about what went on in the camps. The Japanese who were interned, much like the Jewish people who were put in camps, really don’t like to talk about the experience. It’s shameful in a way, even though of course the shame is not theirs. So we also read a lot and watched a lot of documentaries, and they did talk a little bit with us.

So I felt like when I was writing the book, I already knew a lot about it, particularly the inside view, how the people in the camps did it. I mean, it really is, I think, surprising for a lot of folks who don’t really know a lot about that period of American history, which is also an incredibly important civics lesson for America. I was just talking the other day about what I learned when we had a president who was trying to use an executive order to send people without due process to camps. Who would’ve thought all these years later, that particular topic would come back up?

That was an example of where I did research like an intelligence analyst and less like a historian, trying to think more about the why. Why did we go down this path? Why did we do these things? And the answers might surprise people.

Steve Thomas: And do you try to include, like in Fervor, Japanese folklore and then the new one, they’re from Eastern Europe. Are you looking into the cultures there to get like the right kind of demon or the right kind of, I forget the name of the creature in Fervor…

Alma Katsu: Jorogumo! Yeah, they ended up being sort of very different situations. The Fervor, Japanese folklore, you practically need a PhD to speak authoritatively on it. And a lot of people are really into it. So that’s one of those areas where I knew I had to tread lightly ’cause I did not have 20 years to invest. I grew up as a child reading a lot of the stories, but I knew enough to know that I could not speak very authoritatively on it. So I just sort of dip in and out. But I do think all of the spirits and demons that I bring up in the Fervor are absolutely true.

Fiend is a different kind of a different story because as you mentioned, the family that’s at the heart of it, they are from Albania. However, they’ve been a rich family for a thousand years, so they’re actually very cosmopolitan, but it goes back to that sort of, I don’t wanna say spirituality, but that superstitious factor goes back to their roots.

Now, in the nineties when the war was going on in Bosnia and Herzegovina, I was an analyst. I worked on that for two and a half years and was there when it spilled over into the Muslim areas of Serbia. And of course Albania is heavily Muslim and so I got to brush up against Albanian culture. We hired some Albanian linguists to work with us, people right off the boat practically, and it was fascinating. So Albania, I mean, that is a very fractious area. You don’t need me to tell you that the Balkans are fractious, but like in any society, they end up having this pecking order. Often the elites declare themselves the elites, and it kind of goes down the ladder, and the Albanians are at the bottom of the ladder in the Balkans, which makes them tough as hell. And I knew after being around some of these folks that eventually I would use this in a story because it’s just, it is the home of the blood feud. You do not want to cross an Albanian and that feeling is at the heart of the Berisha family. As urbane and sophisticated as they are, you do not wanna cross these people.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. Even if you’re within the family. They have the family meeting where everybody can come in and like ask for things ’cause the dad as the head of the family and he’s just as harsh on his own family, if not worse, than with other people.

Alma Katsu: Yeah. I really wanted to show like what a tough environment some people grow up in. I mean, I don’t wanna give anything away, but he makes some pretty tough demands of his family members in exchange for something as common as money.

Steve Thomas: Yep, but you also show that there’s a toll on him and his family, and so it’s not… that’s what I like is that again, it starts off as, “Oh look, here’s the stereotypical business family, they’re all terrible,” but all of them have some sympathetic element to them or like, you can see how this person’s burdened with this and how it’s affecting their life and their family.

Alma Katsu: In all my stories, I really try to make all the characters, unless they’re really minor, whole people, so you see the whole thing because, and I guess again, that probably comes from the intelligence background where you can’t have bias, you can’t decide, “Well, I don’t wanna look at that part. I only wanna look at this part” ’cause you’ll come to the wrong conclusion. So you really have to understand the whole picture and there’s a lot of human psychology that’s involved too in making assessments and that sort of thing, really trying to assess where the information’s coming from, if there’s bias, et cetera, et cetera. And it’s just a subconscious thing I do all the time. That has been sort of pointed out in some reviews and stuff. My characters are very rounded. It’s not typical sort of genre work where plot dominates characters, definitely are just as important as plot in in my work.

Steve Thomas: As you said earlier, there’s not people who are just Mr. Burns from The Simpsons who are just like, “Excellent!” plotting evil up there, Lex Luthor kind of people. Those super villains are not real.

Alma Katsu: Not real. I mean, there’s probably some, but yeah. In my experience, they’re not real. And I’ve had to follow people who’ve killed tens of thousands of people. How can you be that evil? Well, this is how!

Steve Thomas: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Right, and you see that a lot in, even just lawsuits a lot of times in discovery, things that they’re like, just putting things in emails and it’s like, why did you email that you’re gonna have this terrible business plan? Why did you put that in writing?

Alma Katsu: Yeah. Now you bring up a fascinating point. As I said, towards the end of my career I was more a tech futurist, and then after I retired, the government hired me back to write for them for another six years, but I did not have access to classified information anymore, so my job was to look at emerging technologies and help them figure out what the likely impacts of those technologies were. So we were looking for disruptive technologies, and that’s a really hard thing to do that kind of prediction, but all my sources had to be unclassified.

I learned so much from court papers. What you find out in discovery, all this information gets shared. The incredibly bad business decisions that CEOs, et cetera, et cetera, make. It is fascinating out there. And one of the big things, challenges for intelligence over the last 20 years, is this shift away from secrets to open source information that you can find out the same thing sometimes as secrets. ’cause secrets usually have a short shelf life anyway, but without all that risk about sources and that sort of thing. If we can just figure out how to find that information, it’s out there and you know how to pull it together and all that kind of stuff.

So there’s always that element in my stories too, where I show the thought process or the finding process. It’s probably a little bit more apparent in my spy stories, but I think even in this one and in the next one that hopefully will be published next year, is actually a technology horror story. We don’t have a title for it yet, because I can’t think of one. I’m really bad at titles.

Steve Thomas: Is it another contemporary again?

Alma Katsu: Yes, it is. Basically it’s sort of a critique of social media. Everyone’s doing it right, but I was one of the first analysts for the intelligence community tasked to look at whether or not there was intelligence value in social media. This was in the mid-2000s, so I guarantee you I have a different way of looking at this than most people. I helped develop a lot of the methodologies that are used today by companies that do social media analysis. So I just think of the whole thing. I’m waiting to hear back from my agents though ’cause I’m afraid they’re gonna tell me it’s a little too technical in a way, because I think when people read it, they’re gonna wanna know how is she able to do this? How is she able to avoid detection? So I do explain that a little bit, but maybe too much.

Steve Thomas: Right, but you have to explain it in a way that doesn’t go, “Oh, now I’m reading the terms of service!” And the futurism stuff that you were doing, I’ve heard before and that you’d be a better place to tell me if not, but that ramped up a lot more after 9/11 because they really wanted people thinking outside of the box of what could happen?

Alma Katsu: Yeah. Presented a lot of challenges. For one thing, the intelligence community had to pivot fast and majorly ’cause it may surprise people to know it, but counter-terrorism was not a big target for the intelligence community prior to that. And people will tell you a happy story ’cause they don’t wanna embarrass the intelligence community, but I’m here to tell you, it was the place where your less-than-great people ended up getting assigned, because people wanna go to where the action is! But they did a incredible job drawing down on some targets, putting resources on counter-terrorism, figuring out the lay of the land when they really didn’t know, and technology was part of that, especially a few years in where we were looking to things like social media to help us find leads and all that kind of stuff.

The research at that point was not nearly as robust as it is now. And we really are in this golden age of new technologies. It’s only gonna get crazier next 10 years, better buckle up. I do a lot of work still, I’m trying to stop, on artificial intelligence and generative AI. I actually give talks to organizations if they need someone to give a generalist perspective on what is generative AI, especially what are the roots? Because I was there from the beginning, so I actually remember all these steps that we went through. And I will say though, that it’s incredibly fast moving. This is the fastest moving technology I’ve ever seen. And managing the hype cycle, managing the hype is one of the biggest challenges. I kind of weaned off about a year ago and I’m jumping back in to just bring myself up to date for the talk I have to give, and I am amazed at how much faster it is moving.

So yeah, if anyone’s interested, I do give talks and, for libraries, I definitely wouldn’t charge if anybody feels like they really need a background presentation on what is generative AI and what are the implications for us common people? Government oversight, that’s the most important thing, and we’re not gonna get it.

Steve Thomas: No, not now. Does that fast moving element make it difficult for you as a writer to address issues like that in your writing? Because going through the traditional publishing cycle, you know you’re gonna write a book and it’s gonna come out the next year, so if you try to write a horror book about AI, you’re gonna do it next year when you know the landscape is different. So you always kinda have to be thinking ahead to address it appropriately.

Alma Katsu: Yeah, you’re definitely right. Fiction is easier than nonfiction. Like I would not write a nonfiction book about generative AI right now, unless I wanted it to be sort of a primer that they would use to capture this moment in time and teach it at a school or something like that. But in fiction, you can get around that because it’s not really about the technology, but it’s about those bigger questions.

So for this particular book, it’s about a young woman who wants to be an influencer, social media influencer, and she wants it so bad that it kind of takes her to incredible extremes with the technology, but what that does to her. I pitched it as a 21st century Picture of Dorian Gray. Because I do think, ’cause this is part of what I had to do too, is watch the effects of emerging technologies on society. How is it changing us as people? How is it changing our value system? How is it changing how we think, how we relate to information, what we consider truth? These are all endless topics, right? Because it is changing us a lot.

So anyway, I wanted to tackle some of that. Not to say that it’s making us worse as people, but it’s changing us. The other thing I find fascinating is the disruption between people my age and young adults now. How we think of it is so different, and that’s not to say we are right and they’re wrong, or they’re right and we’re wrong, but it’s an interesting area I think we all need to explore so that we hang onto our humanity.

Steve Thomas: Because you’re not really getting into the exact technologies of today. Like in your story, you wouldn’t go, “Well, remember when TikTok was going to be banned and then they delayed it and…” Like, you’re not gonna get on that. You’re just getting the overall, like the influencer concept is not gonna go away before the book is published.

Alma Katsu: Yeah. It’ll be interesting down the road if it ends up being historic concept. ” This is something people actually did in the 2020s. Can you believe it?” And the technologies itself, and this amazes me how some things move very quick, but some things move very slowly. So it partly looks at the deep fake technologies and how Hollywood is using them now and that sort of thing. I remember first writing about deep fake in, like, 2012 and the actual technology, the roots, haven’t changed that much. So I don’t feel too bad about the technological aspects themselves aging out. But you’re right, I think I’ve got at least another good 10 years on the influencer economy.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. Because that was a slow build kind of thing, and it’s become sort of set in the way of the world now, I think of influencers.

Alma Katsu: You know, we think of it as slow build, but when you look at the old days, pre-social media, it’s really, I can’t remember the numbers off the top of my head, but the Labor Department has gotten like, it’s amazing how many people actually make money in that economy. Like, they have categories for jobs on the IRS, who would’ve thought, right? I still can’t find ones that really pertain to novelists so…

Steve Thomas: well. It’s kinda like the stat you hear once in a while of how much money AOL still makes from dial up. And it’s like, what? There’s still millions of dollars to be made on dial up internet? But there is!

Alma Katsu: It is amazing. There was something else I found out… Oh, Napster! I did a piece on copyright. And so I had to bring up torrent sites, and Napster was a torrent site where people illegally uploaded music so people could share and download it without paying any fees. And I thought for sure Napster was brought under by litigation. It still exists as a subscription service!

Steve Thomas: Like Microsoft getting taken down by the Department of Justice is like, well, but they ultimately just settled and not that much changed. They were under investigation for a long time, and it was really serious, but then George W. Bush comes in and just decides to settle with them and that’s the end of it.

Alma Katsu: I think that’s where we’re gonna go with a lot of the copyright issues on generative AI, unfortunately.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, I guess we could do a whole episode about that too ’cause there’s the technology aspect of it, but then there’s the ethical content, stealing, parts of it too. I assume probably parts of your work are sucked up into ChatGPT and things like that and being used and not what you want probably.

Alma Katsu: Absolutely. The Atlantic ran an article about how Meta’s large language model, which is sort of the equivalent of ChatGPT, used  known torrent sites, so known pirated information, but they made the decision, which I think might have come out either in an email or in discovery, that we’re gonna just go ahead even though it’s ethically questionable. We can see that they broke the law. This is copyrighted material. They knew it was pirated, that it was gotten through illegal means. It’s like if you went to buy parts off of some black market car part dealer or something. You know you’re buying stolen items, but will there ever be compensation or some kind of ruling about this? Nope, it’s not gonna happen.

Steve Thomas: No. And for them, I think it gives them the shortcut that they need right now, and they’re like, we’re super rich. So even if there is compensation later, we’ll just pay it and that’s enough, and it gave us that shortcut to building our model faster. So who cares? Yeah.

Alma Katsu: I mean, I worked for years through the intelligence community with the big tech companies now, they were emerging then, and there’re definitely a couple things. One is this intense competition to succeed among the tech bros. They can’t fail against each other. What they’re going for for generative AI right now is the big prize, like whoever ends up on the top of the heap is gonna be like the next Google. They’re gonna dominate generative AI for the next 20 years or something. So they are pulling out all the stops.

The thing that most people aren’t familiar with is that they have actually run out of data. And one of the discussions going on now is whether or not synthetic data is as useful in the training of these models. They have run out of data, and when you’re a researcher, you get in this mindset that you’re allowed to use things for research, and it’s usually right there in the contract, so like Getty Images allows researchers access to their API for research purposes only. The trouble is with training the language models, you cannot disinter that once you jump from research to application, now you’re commercial, but you can’t untrain your system against the data that you used. So it’s a conundrum. They knew they were doing this, they just figured they’re gonna get away with it. And the payoff is so big.

Steve Thomas: Like you said, it’s a once in the generation kind of thing. It’s an internet. It’s an iPhone. There’s things that just change things forever, and Meta thought it was the metaverse, which is why they made that shift first. And then they decided, “Oh wait, people don’t wanna put big helmets on their heads!”

Alma Katsu: They haven’t quite cracked that nut. Will they ever? Who knows. That’s another thing I’ve been following, augmented reality and virtual reality, since the early 2000s. We’re still not there yet. It’s really hard predicting which technologies are gonna hit. One of the things you find as a futurist is that it’s usually a confluence of events. It’s not just the technology itself. So you can have great technology that ends up sputtering and going nowhere. It’s like these societal things happen in the same time that reinforce it, like Zoom. The only reason why we can do this today is thanks to Covid, it really just push that technology at the right minute.

Steve Thomas: Right, like, if Covid had happened 20 years earlier, who knows how it would’ve shut down things? Like we wouldn’t have had Zoom and things like that.

Alma Katsu: We would not have gotten vaccines as quickly as we had because they did use some artificial intelligence and flipping through all of the variations much more quickly than we had traditionally done. So, yeah, I mean, we’re in a great time for emerging technology. It’s gonna change our lives. Some people are not gonna be happy with the way their lives change, but the next 10 years or so are gonna be super messy.

Steve Thomas: Well, the last thing I wanted to ask you about was, are there other horror fiction writers writing today that you feel are in your area? Like, if people like your work, who would you recommend they go seek out?

Alma Katsu: Gosh, there’s so many great horror writers right now. One of my favorites is Paul Tremblay. You probably don’t need me to tell you because he is more famous than I am, but he writes really interesting almost existential novels, like novels that really make you question whether or not there is something more than we know that shapes our lives and maybe even controls our lives. He’s fascinating. His most recent book Horror Movie was really interesting sort of treatise on, you know, do we all have evil in us?

Another great one is Stephen Graham Jones and he is incredibly prolific. He’s been around a long time, but the last five or 10 years he’s really broken out and his most recent novel was the Buffalo Hunter Hunter, which is a vampire story, but it’s historic. It’s told from a Indigenous viewpoint and it is amazing, and I know it’s already hit the bestseller list. It is definitely worth your time to read. It actually might be one of those books that’s better in audio book because there’s actually three narrators, but two major narrators and the voice of the two narrators are so different and quite intense that some readers might find it heavy going, but I bet the audio book clears that up.

And of course, Tananarive Due, who’s also been around a long time. She started out decades ago, I think one of her most popular books was My Soul to Keep where she was exploring themes of Afro Americanism, tied to horror. She’s written some books that are not horror, but her most recent book was The Reformatory, which was also historical horror, which looked at what it was like in Jim Crow America and what folks went through in the Deep South. It’s an amazing book.

Steve Thomas: Yeah. Becky had me read a few of those too, and the Only Good Indians is the one that I read from Steven Graham Jones and I still, every once in a while, get that deer in my head.

Alma Katsu: Yeah. That was his breakout book and it was fantastic.

Steve Thomas: If you need book recommendations, ask Becky Spratford ’cause she’s always good.

Alma Katsu: Absolutely.

Steve Thomas: Alma, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I know we got off on a lot of other topics. I think obviously you have expertise in AI and stuff too, so that was a good little conversation at the end too.

Alma Katsu: Thank you so much, and thank you for having me on. This has been so much fun.

Steve Thomas: And as the one last note to the listeners, usually we have authors on the same time when their book is released. This is coming out a little bit earlier than the book. The book is coming out in September, but you can read it now if you can get an advance copy and you can vote for it on Library Reads. So get your NetGalley copy or talk to the publisher and get an advanced copy.

Alma Katsu: Absolutely. Thank you so much for bringing that up.

Steve Thomas: Thank you so much, Alma.

Alma Katsu: Thank you.

***

Rebecca Vnuk: Hello, and welcome back to the Circ Desk. I’m Rebecca Vnuk, the Executive Director of Library Reads.

Yaika Sabat: And I’m Yaika Sabat, a librarian who works for NoveList. Make sure to stay tuned after the Circ Desk for a special offer for listeners of this podcast.

Rebecca Vnuk: All right, so we just got done listening to Steve interview Alma Katsu. She’s a historical horror maven, right? And now…

Yaika Sabat: Queen!

Rebecca Vnuk: …she’s turning… Queen. Okay, Queen. We’ll go with that. We can bow down to that. She’s turning her talents to the modern world here in this one. So we’ve got this terrifying tale of an all-powerful family. So that was what I kind of went with trying to find read likes out of Library Reads.

One thing I’ll put a plug for is that we have our archive, it’s on our website, very easy to find, opens up in this giant spreadsheet. I just entered in July titles and I believe that we are close to 1900 titles at this point, and what’s nice about it is you can sort it by genre. We do our best to try and match up the genres and so you can sort by horror and find all your horror books. So I did that first, of course, and then I expanded it a little bit ’cause I wanted to see, I like this kind of this family, that’s the energy that came out to me in this book is we’ve got this basically ancient evil patriarch, magic, dark secrets, et cetera, so I tried to find some things that matched that.

The first one that I came up with is Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic. Now this of course is historical, not contemporary, but I thought it still would make a good read alike for Katsu. Our blurb on that was, “A perfect gothic mystery with an updated sensibility that will appeal to the modern reader.” Aha. See? “Noemí is a Mexico City socialite in the 1950s. When her father receives a disturbing letter from his niece, he sends Noemí to check on her cousin at the remote house where she is living, a grotesque and rotting English style mansion built on dirt imported from England by the colonialist eugenics family she had married into.” That’s quite a statement right there! “Lush descriptions and the creepy atmosphere make this a good choice for readers who liked the Witch Elm, the Little Stranger, or the Haunting of Hill House.” And that’s a blurb from user Laura Neal from the Evanston Public Library.

I thought that was a good match because you’ve got this patriarchy. We’ve got this family with dark secrets. I love how the person that wrote the blurb talked about, this is historical, but it is gonna appeal to modern sensibilities. So that was my first like, oh yeah, I like that one. So that’s that.

Then my second read alike choice is Weyward: a Novel by Emilia Hart. That one is from our March, 2023 list, and the blurb on that is, “Men are always trying to dominate the  Weyward women, but they always fail because the  Weyward women can call birds to their aid. This matriarchal clan of witches is almost broken until Kate, who stars in the most recent of the three timelines, appears. Practical Magic meets Margaret Atwood in an unflinching feminist fantasy that is boiling over with rage and loaded with empowerment.” And that comes from Jill Minor, another one of our Library Reads Ambassadors from Virginia.

And I think while this isn’t an exact match, because it definitely fantasy and not horror per se, I really liked that boiling over with rage and loaded with empowerment keywords that she used at the end there. I thought, sometimes isn’t horror a lot about rage, like I got that feeling from that and I thought this would be a good match for someone who enjoyed the Katsu for that sort of patriarchal, the family, the secrets. Well now we have matriarch and maybe this is a little softer, but we find out from the blurb, it’s not all that soft, like “rage” is definitely not a soft word!

So those were my read alikes. How about you, Yaika? I know you are a huge Alma Katsu fan, so I know you’re gonna come up with excellent choices for us.

Yaika Sabat: I do. I do love Alma Katsu. I’m so excited to see her move into a modern time setting and I think the topic of very powerful, elite, corrupt families is very timely. I mean, you even look at the remake of Fall of the House of Usher that came out and any news story and it’s a very timely book. And so I wanted to look at horror that focused on families, but specifically rich families. I wanted to look at these families who are in higher status in society.

One that came up when I was searching was Galilee by Clive Barker, which is actually from 1998. This is horror, and it is a family saga basically, that focuses on two very affluent American families and the battle that ignites around a young woman who is married to someone in one family and falls under the spell of someone in the other family, and the war that starts to rage between them that has the potential to raise the forces of evil. In this book, specifically, one of the families, the Barbarossas, are literally descended from divinities, so they are powerful in more than one way. The other family, the Gearys, are basically like the Kennedys. This is told from the perspective of one of the  Barbarossas, who is sort of chronicling the history of these families. And you sort of get to the more recent era and start to see what is happening when this young woman enters one family and the tensions increase from there.

And so this is less, you know, if you look at Alma Katsu’s book, there’s sort of larger themes like good and evil and this one isn’t quite as grand as that scale, although one of the families is a little divine. So it’s grand in that way, but it really is looking at the tensions from these two very powerful families and their unique existence, which I think mirrors the family that Alma Katsu is writing about. And it is intricately plotted, like Fiend. This one’s also very cinematic. And of course it’s Clive Barker, so there is gonna be some violence, some things that are gonna make you squirm, but I think if you’re interested in that idea of powerful families, Galilee could be a good one to check out.

Now the other one I wanted to go with does feature a rich family and is talking about good and evil, but this is almost more about what happens when a dangerous external force is introduced, and that is Victorian Psycho by Virginia Feito. It follows Winifred Notty, who takes on the role of governess at the Ensor House for a wealthy family. And she just happens to be a governess who is really trying to shove down her murderous psychotic tendencies. So yeah, you get her perspective as she is sort of dealing with her own dark desires and living in these sort of family dynamics within her new household. So this one does have a theme of real life monsters which I think you could say for any book about corrupt, powerful people. Yeah. It is about rich families. It has the same sort of menacing feeling that Fiend does. This one’s also gruesome and has some twisted characters. So yeah, I think this is interesting ’cause it’s almost less about the powerful family and more about what can happen to a powerful family. So I think that could be an interesting choice if you want something a little bit different than Fiend.

Rebecca Vnuk: It’s like a good companion piece, right? Like we’ve got the book that is about the family and all their doings, and then we have this book that’s like, ooh, here’s someone coming to destroy that sort of family. So yeah, I like that as a good companion read alike.

I wanted to point out also that depending on when you are listening to this podcast, I know that this is coming out in July, so Fiend is publishing on September 16th, which means that if you are a library staff person and you’re interested in voting for this for Library Reads, August 1st is the due date for that. So get yourself a copy of this on Edelweiss or Net Galley and get those votes in by August 1st, 2025 in order to see if we could get this on the Library Reads list. Just wanted to plug that in there for you.

Yaika Sabat: Yeah, good reminder about the deadline there.

Rebecca Vnuk: Yes. Well I think that is it for today’s Circ Desk, and we will check you out next time!