Poured Over: T. Kingfisher on What Moves the Dead
“When you’re writing a children’s book, it shares much relation with horror, because it has to be usually very immediate and very visceral and gripping. Because otherwise the kids are gonna get bored. And your window of opportunity to grab the reader is … longer with horror, you can do the slow creeping dread better, but you have to grab the reader, metaphorically, by the throat.”
Whether you know her as Ursula Vernon or T. Kingfisher, one thing is for sure—this Hugo, Nebula, and Locus award-winning author always pulls us in with her captivating fantasies and chilling thrillers—which remains true of her two new books, Nettle & Bone and What Moves the Dead, both releasing this year. Ursula joins us on the show to talk about the fine line between writing children’s books and writing horror and her love for gothic stories, the artwork that inspired this stunning cover, mycology, the lesser-known life of Beatrix Potter, what she’s working on next and what games she’s playing, and much more with guest host, Kat Sarfas. And we end this episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Marc and Becky.
Featured Books (Episode):
What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher
Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher
The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings by Edgar Allen Poe
The White People and Other Weird Stories by Arthur Machen
The Willows by Algernon Blackwood
The Angel of the Crows by Katherine Addison
The Haunted Mesa by Louis L’Amour
Featured Books (TBR Topoff):
The Initial Insult by Mindy McGinnis
The Pale Blue Eye by Louis Bayard
This episode of Poured Over is produced and hosted by Kat Sarfas and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.
Full transcript for this episode of Poured Over:
B&N: Hello, I’m Kat Sarfas, forever bookseller at Barnes and Noble. Today we are joined by the lovely Ursula Vernon also known as T. Kingfisher. Ursula writes fantasy, horror and occasional oddities and has won numerous awards for her work in various mediums, including the Hugo and Nebula. So welcome, thank you so much for being here with us.
T. Kingfisher: Oh, delighted to be here. Any day that I get to talk books with booksellers it’s a great day.
B&N: So for me personally, I first came to your writing as a children’s author only to discover that you also write and illustrate a variety of other genres and mediums. And so I read, you often say that, inside every children’s book author is a horror author waiting to come out. So I’m gonna need you to elaborate on that one a little bit?
TK: Well, the thing is that in when you’re writing a children’s book, first of all, it shares much relation with horror, because it has to be usually very immediate and very visceral and gripping. Because otherwise the kids are gonna get bored. And your window of opportunity to grab the reader is something I mean, you have longer with horror, you can do the slow creeping dread better, but you have to grab the reader, you know, metaphorically by the throat. I do not condone grabbing children by the throat. Don’t do that. Or, let’s just not go around grabbing anyone. But also, when you’re a children’s book author, or okay, maybe this isn’t true for everyone, but certainly for me, there are points here, like kids would love this. And the editor is like, they might but their parents won’t and they buy the book. Or no, that is too scary or no, that is too creepy, or no, we are not allowed to teach the children that arson is a solution to their problems, which may be why several of my horror novels have ended with burning down the haunted house. And the problem is that every time you are, or at least every time I am told that you cannot do this thing in a book, it goes into this place in your chest and becomes compressed down tighter and tighter until it is like diamond. And finally you’re like, oh, no, I’m gonna write something and I’m gonna put everything in that they would not allow me to put in and just, you know, go completely hog wild. Many children’s book authors I know have a sort of mental file of the things they could not get away with. And someday, they are going to put that in the book.
B&N: I think it’s just that curiosity. I mean, kids are creepy, and I say this lovingly. But I can’t tell you how many times my son has come to me, and he’ll be five, and just the things he says. And you don’t want to curb that curiosity and that imagination. You try your best to answer their questions, explore that McCobb side of them. And again, just curious. But it’s just so funny, because I feel like you know, Maurice Sendak has said similar things about his writing and just, you know, you put me in children’s boxes, but I write what I write and, you know, and children, I don’t think we need to be so precious that it was…
TK: How many kids do you know, certainly among writers, all have like a formative experience where they were 12 and picked up a Stephen King book? What kids actually want to read and what adults tell ourselves they want to read are often at odds, but I could do like 45 minutes on that.
B&N: So we sort of have this retellings and reimaginings around fairy tales and mythology and folklore and now classics, so very much on trend, I would say, across all ages, so you’ve explored fairy tales before in Bryony and Roses, you’ve got The Raven & The Reindeer and most recently, Nettle & Bone, which I know is not truly a retelling, but it very much captures sort of the fairy tale vibe.
TK: Oh, I’m so glad it does, because since it isn’t, quite strictly a retelling of anything, it was just adjacent, getting that field down was very important to us.
B&N: So, we should say, you know, retellings, reimaginings, and like theory and adjacent pieces. So for many of us, you know, those are sort of our first brush. That’s my first question, you know, fiction and fantasy and what is it about these sort of stories that kind of never leave us and we’re instantly attracted to them whether we’re 12 years old or whether we’re 112?
TK: It’s hard to say. I think that part of it is obviously early exposure and sort of the cultural Gestalt. But there’s also so many fairy tales that are very similar and consistent across cultures that you know, a blue beard is blue beard in France, and then is a woman who marries a tiger in India, but they’re the same basic story and folklorists have done extraordinary amounts, cataloging them all. And there’s the Art and Thompson folklore index that categorizes them all neatly. And if you ever have, you know, a couple of hours to kill, or weeks or days or happen to be working late at the streetlight outage hotline in order to pay the bills, and no one else is there in the building. So you pull up the website not that that’s taken from life or anything. Yeah, there’s a commonality. I don’t know. There’s some kind of residents in some of them with some sort of human story that it’s as if we fall into a number of story patterns and the archetypes keep reappearing. A couple of years ago, Penguin Random House published a set of sort of lost fairy tales essentially, The Turnip Princess was the title. And it was hundreds of of last fairy tales that had been collected and I want to say Germany, and never widely published by The Brothers Grimm. Frankly, a lot of them were not well written. There was a reason a lot of them did not come out.
B&N: Yeah, that’s the reason why they were never resurfaced.
TK: Yeah. But over and over again, they were variations on these themes. And the same, you know, some of them had like, Okay, this is a fairly so-so retelling. But then would have some element that is just like so badass. There was one that was a version of Beauty and the Beast. Which incidentally if you read the original French version or translation of that that is wow. It’s really long and mostly about French ferry politics and it is a thing. Beauty has trained monkey butlers. There is a version of that in the Turner Princess book where it’s all basically Cupid and Psyche reskinned. But the beast is a crow. And he pulls out one of his quills or one of his feathers and gives it to Beauty and says anything you write down with this quill will be given to you. And I’m like, Damn, that’s good. Like, that’s a good bit. Oh, man.
B&N: That’s gonna move me into my most recent favorite. Not necessarily a fairy tale. But, What Moves the Dead, which is sort of this gripping atmospheric retelling of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher. So then, going from fairy tales. Now we’ve got Gothic classics, what brought you to this, like what brought you to the Gothics?
TK: I’ve always loved Gothics. I’ve always wanted to write a gothic I still kind of want to write a gothic that is not one of the classic Gothics where it’s the hero and who is trapped in the house and cannot leave because she’s penniless and working as a librarian or something or organizing the collection. And ya know, I’m gonna write that book. And then of course, there’s a dark secret in the brooding house. And if I write it probably lots of taxidermy. With Poe, I actually got there sort of sideways. My previous two horror novels were pulp retellings, essentially, they were Arthur Machen’s The White People and Algernon Blackwood’s The Willows, and so in my head, House of Usher was just another I retelling a pulp horror story kind of thing. And I was out, you know, I was one day, what story should I poke at? And I was just reading some classics in the genre. I don’t know why some of them speak to me and some don’t. It’s just occasionally if one like sticks with me, then usually it’s one that I find I need to write something about. And I’ve read a lot of pulp and much of it is forgettable. But then like, you get to the willows. It’s just there’s something there. And Poe, actually, it wasn’t so much. There was something there as I was exasperated, I was like, I haven’t read The Fall of the House of Usher since I was a weird nine year old, whose grandmother got her those leather bound collections of classics to try to encourage my love of reading and I only ever read, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Poe and Jack London probably far too young age and read all of the poem collection because it was the complete poem, including stuff that, you know, at nine I was there, I had no idea what that guy was reading. So I thought I’d read The Fall of the House of Usher. And then I came back as an adult, and I’m like, this is really short. Yes, this is much shorter than I ever realized. And then I remember it. And also, the narrator is frankly useless. Just yeah, like his response to terrible goings on in the house is, I’m going to read your poetry. And then when your dead sister turns out not to be dead, and claws her way out of the tomb and comes in and you scream and fall down, I’m not going to check anyone for a pulse. I’m just going to scream and run out of the house. Yep. Yeah. Like a lousy friend. And, or if nothing else, like, Okay, you clearly cannot keep your head in a crisis, which, all right, there are good people who scream and run away. But you should have gotten back in the house and like, tried to pull people out of the rubble, if it’s collapsing into the dark. And also, it was clearly about fungus, like the entire opening is just fungus, fungus, they’re horrible vegetable humors around the place, there’s more fungus. It’s a lot of fungus in this novel, that whoever. And also they never explained what is wrong with Madeleine and why she’s buried alive and what her ailment is, and I’m going, I feel there’s a connection. And I’m also the person who wants explanations for things like I always want to know how the magic trick is done. When it came down to what is going on in The Fall of the House of Usher, I’m like, I want to know what’s going on. And yes, there’s a lot to be said for ambiguity and horror. And I certainly will not argue the point. But I prefer to know exactly why things have gotten, you know, terrible. And so I’m like, I want to get in there with that fungus and figure out Madeleine Usher’s ailment and maybe have a narrator who is not completely useless. And what was one thing and another I wrote What Moves the Dead, extremely grateful.
B&N: I read Poe. And then I read What Moves the Dead first. And that’s when I was like, did I read this? Like, I kind of remembered it. But then it was you know was it just told to me? Or it’s part of you know, it’s part of the culture? Yeah, do I just know it from that? So, you know, I went back and I, you know, looked it up and what? And I was just like, Oh, I think I have some Yeah, same thing like some leather bound Poe. I was I was shocked. I had short it was that that’s it. And I know, you’ve talked about sort of like this economy of storytelling. And you know, there’s something to be said, for short stories and horror and whatnot. But I laughed because I love author notes. So I read your author note. And a lot of the things you said also very much encouraged me to go back and read it because I was kind of laughing particularly when you you were talking about Poe and how he was really, really into fungi and how he devotes more words to fungal emanations that he does to Madeleine, and again, it’s a short story. So that’s that says a lot. Um, I think and I didn’t remember I didn’t remember any of this and so you kind of set it and then along with reading it again sort of sent me down this very bizarre Gothic medicine rabbit hole once you start getting into like the fungi and anyway so thank you for that I’ll never be able to look at mushrooms in the same way.
TK: If you ever want to go down a rabbit hole, medieval cosmetics will take you terrifying places.
B&N: Late at night when I can’t sleep that’ll be the next on my to Google list.
TK: Apparently one of the the sources of income for hangman was selling fat from the corpses to cosmetic makers because they would use it as a base to fill in because people had pock marks because they had been ravaged by the plague and occasionally syphilis and it was a filler.
B&N: Yeah filler. So the original fillers. Thinking about injections and Botox, you know it’s all full circle. Back to fungi. What kind of mycology research did you do while either like before or while you were writing it?
TK: Oh it was a lot of it was while I was writing it. Most of the time I am writing pure fantasy or I am writing contemporary horror. Ah, writing historical is hard because I was constantly stopping and What Moves the Dead is set in 1890 something deliberately somewhat ambiguous something. And so I was like digging through things going, when was it discovered that there was fungus that hunted nematodes? Can my mushroom Hunter actually say this? Or would anyone actually know that? And so even though I basically cooked up how the fungus worked, and how it was intelligent, with the help of some lovely people on Twitter, it’s all done with like biofilms and macro algae and electrical conductivity and crenellations, and I’m like, none of that can go in here, because they don’t have the vocabulary. It’s tough. Whenever I’ve written a couple other things that aren’t published yet, they’re historical. And I spent half of it with Google Open going, Okay, well, when was this? Okay, and then you’re down a rabbit hole for, you know, 30 minutes so that you can write one sentence. It’s fun, because I love that sort of thing. But yeah, it takes a lot.
B&N: I love when people talk about opening lines, like what kind of grabs you so basically, your opening sentence in this book is “the mushrooms gills, with a deep red color of severed muscle, the almost violet shade that contrasts so dreadfully with the pale pink of viscera. Like it just so instantly kind of brings you in and brings that something the mushroom and the gore. And then this cover, which I need to
TK: The cover. I know Jesus, I bought the original painting, like they showed me. This is a Christina Mrozik, and I was like, is the original available, like I’ll put you in touch and I’m like, Just Just tell me how much it is royalties for me What Moves the Dead had not come in yet. But I will buy let me give you my credit card.
B&N: This is just stunning. And then again, that opening line just immediately draws you in and the mushrooms and going back to, as a vegetarian, I’m deeply now concerned. I eat a lot of mushrooms. It made me think of like, mushrooms are kind of weird. You know, you don’t think about it. And then obviously reading this, and then
TK: They’re not with us.
B&N: Right. And so I had a few years ago, read another book amazing Gothic, because Gothic says some of my favorite is one of my favorite genres to read, which was Mexican Gothic. So, I’m reading your book. And it’s just so crazy, because I felt like I had read Mexican Gothic. And then every time it was almost like maybe because I was searching it. But I was getting all these articles on like mushrooms and how they talk to each other and all these crazy stories of how it’d be like no, my friends would be sending them to me and I’d be selling them to my friends who I also knew had read the book. And it was just, it was just, you know, one of those books that you couldn’t, you couldn’t stop talking about and I kept on you know, more more layers, things would come about and it would make me think of this book. And so now this book is now going to be added into that.
TK: As you got from the afterward I’m sure I was happy. I was like halfway through it and then read Mexican Gothic and very nearly just abandoned What Moves the Dead. Do I have anything to say that Sylvia Moreno Garcia did not say better. And if I have not sort of kind of sold the book, which made it kind of imperative finish. And also, there is at least in retellings, particularly authors who will be like, when we are having a dark night of the soul. I don’t want to retell Beauty and the Beast because my friend over here did it better. And then usually that friend will chime in and say yes, but you haven’t done it yet. And if you give you know 10 authors an idea, you will get 12 different books. So, I picked it up again. And partly the narrator, I just wanted to spend more time with because I’ve really enjoyed being the narrator of the book. And so yeah, I was fine. Like, no, my mushrooms are different.
B&N: You were talking about how one of the other reasons you wanted to sort of explore the House of Usher was this character so and I’m very excited to talk about character so you know, we’ve got in House of Usher you have the narrator but we’ve kind of gone over you’ve got Roderick, Madeleine, and that’s pretty much it.
TK: And Madeleine is barely a character in the original Usher. She’s a name and a monster more or less. Yeah.
B&N: Exactly. But with you and your version. So you’ve gifted us with quite a few or personalities and I’m gonna say, I just gotta say, well, Eugenia Potter is my personal favorite. Right now I want to chat about Alex Easton who is our sort of our non binary narrator and what what I thought was just so fascinating uses their home country of Gallacia?
TK: Gallacia. Yeah, I want to Ruritanian route and just made up a couple of small European countries that don’t exist yeah.
B&N: But of course, I was like it could have like, it’s just, it could be Galicia with another L like, but I was like, or it could be made up. Either way, I love it. Because so in that country, you use the pronouns of that country instead of English ones. And as a soldier, Alex’s pronoun is CA, and you explored the sort of use of pronouns based on response.
TK: You can use they because we’re speaking English. And that is how Alex would translate it. So don’t worry about trying to get it.
B&N: But just this, this idea of using pronouns based on responsibility rather than gender, which was just fascinating to me. So what drove you to to explore the narrator in this way? And I mean, Easton by far is fabulous. I thought when you were like I wanted to stay with with Easton, I totally get it. But yeah, how was that formation?
TK: Well, I came up with that, in actually some fantasy novels I wrote, The World of the White Rat is a series of fantasy novels that I self published. And there is a there was a species in there who had these sort of little badger people, and their pronouns were based on what caste they were, and not gender, because I was thinking for some reason why would pronouns relate to gender, they give you a marker of the person, and many languages don’t have gender pronouns, or a fair number of them. So I was like, I think I’d probably been reading the Ancillary Justice books as well, which are a fabulous science fiction series where, among other things, instead of he used the generic, they just make she the generic pronoun, and it’s very effective. And you go through it, basically, not knowing what gender 90% of the people are. And, also a friend who’s finished and I think finished does not have an automatically gender. I could be wrong with that. And so I was just thinking about that. And so I sort of had that idea in my back pocket. And I was also thinking of, writers have brains like magpies and, you know, what it’s like you’re going down the rabbit of research, you know, and having fun with that. And ages ago, I had read about a group of people in the Balkans in I believe in Albania is where they mostly live now, where they develop this, what I thought was the most fabulous work around to, women could not inherit property. And that was not a law that they can change. But because they, like many people in many cultures, tended to have fairly high attrition among the young men because of a lot of inter group violence. They were like, Okay, but what if we just make more men, so you could take an oath, and if you were born female, you were now a man, and that was it, you could just swear it out. And for all intents and purposes, you are now male, you can hold property, you can engage in blood feuds, and whatever, it was never treated as a gender identity issue among them, possibly because you know, this practice was largely started centuries ago, and that was not nearly as much thing. It was a logistical one. And so you would have mothers who were widowed and didn’t have any sons and are like, Okay, I can’t have a household. I can’t own property. I have to go live with my in-laws, and that’s going to suck. But I have a daughter. And so there are these reports of mothers begging their daughters to become sons so that they don’t have to go live with their in-laws. And they would be like, yes. Okay, and to honor the oath, and at that point, you’re a dude. That is, you have all the rights and responsibilities, you are not treated any differently. Here’s your sword and have fun. And the thing is, while this is certainly not, Alex’s military is not version of that in Gallatia soldiers amount to a third sex more or less they get they get a second set of primaries as an honorific. But it was the practical workaround of it that I loved the and so it was like, well, we need soldiers, and traditionally only men have become soldiers and we knew that but we’re really running low and somebody just showed up and all the paperwork says their pronouns would be called con, because that’s what soldiers are. So yeah, just give him a rifle and put them on the frontlines, and we’ll worry about it after the war is over. Yeah. And that was how I got there. And Easton was just so much fun to be because in many ways, they’re a turn of the century European veteran, and they are prejudiced against Americans in sort of a hilarious fashion. Which I get to say because I’m American, dammit. So I have a lot of fun making jokes at our expense. And there’s a lot of you know, that sort of puts on a helmet and stomps off to meet Dr. Livingstone attitude, but they’re also you know, they have shell shock. They’re tired but they’re just fun.
B&N: Yeah, I kind of loved the horror was there. It had a little bit of levity, like it brought this sort of humor to these relationships that they have which was which was just fantastic.
TK: I can’t sustain a serious for longer than a short story. Like all my books, inevitably people are like, this is horror, but it’s so funny. And I’m like, Yeah, I don’t really have a choice.
B&N: No, and that’s I feel like a little bit of your trademark like I was sort of expecting that cute humor and you know, you start reading it and you’re like, Oh, this is a lot of that creep factor and then, sure enough, there was you know, that sort of wit I’m gonna go back, because I needed to explore the story and needed more. I need to know more about Miss Potter. So this sort of fictional aunt to Beatrix Potter, which so there was like, in its own way. I need to know is she ever accepted to the mycology society? Do her and Angus get together. If things are coming back to you. We’re coming back full circle to your sort of children’s authors are horrors authors comment right.
TK: Beatrix Potter, one of those great loves was mycology. And I actually looked to see if I couldn’t use Beatrix Potter in her youth, but I was off by like, I would have had to set it in the early 1900s. And there would have been a World War on so I was like, yeah, that won’t work. So I’m gonna have to make a great aunt who is just talking, you know about how her niece is is so enthralled with mushrooms. Realistically, probably not. Because Beatrix Potter couldn’t make a go of it as mycologist. Which is part of the reason she went to children’s books, and I admire her greatly. She was an amazing woman. She is the reason that a lot of farmland was saved from developers because she basically was writing one children’s book a year to fund her land conservation and keep things as working farms. She saved a breed of sheep pretty much from extinction, she probably won’t be accepted into the mycology society. Her and Angus, I suspect however, have a bit of an item before them. I have toyed around I’m working on the second Easton novella, if there’s ever a third, I suspect Miss Potter will return in it and we may spend some time in Gallatia and I only written the beginning which is basically Angus saying we’re going back to Gallatia it used to be like I don’t want to go back to Gallatia it’s cold and there are wolves and just be like nope, Miss Potter wants to look at the mushrooms there so we’re going and I have volunteered your house and so yeah.
B&N: And then go. Yeah, if you wanted to write any sub short Angus/Miss Potter romance, I’m just saying that I am in, personally. This year has been busy. You gifted us Nettle & Bone, and now we have this amazing Gothic horror retelling, What Moves the Dead. So, what’s next? Other than my Angus/Miss Potter romance novella.
TK: Well, I’m hoping to self publish them. they’re booked between now and the end of the year because you know, I haven’t there. So I probably should. But in March, we have a horror novel called A House With Good Bones that will be coming out. And then next summer, we will have another novella, and this one’s a fantasy novel. So I’m sort of reversing the order. But yes, there is there’s a lot more coming out. And I am currently working on the next Easton novella, which is actually in America, and everyone is shaking hands with them. There’s just like, Oh, God. So I’m having a lot of fun with that. It’s kind of hard occasionally to knuckle down and do the horror, but because I’m just having so much fun having him get to the site of the horror.
B&N: But, I feel like that’s something I very much enjoy in your writing is that it almost makes the horror more. So, you know, you get that laugh, or almost like eases you up a little bit. And then it’s like,
TK: It’s a horror movie thing, you know, the music ratchets up. And then there’s the music sting, and then it’s the cat. You’re like, oh, okay, thank God. And then the serial killer’s right behind you.
B&N: Very well done. Yes. I’ve just been just thinking of all the imagery, which I think is so well done here with the fungi and the white hairs and the white coming out of the fishes. And I don’t want to give away too much for those who haven’t read it. But it’s just like, you sit there and you’re like, well, as you’re reading it. My last question for you. I am a firm believer that we are what we read. So I love instead of, you know, almost asking someone to describe themselves or talk about themselves. I love to just ask people what they’re currently reading because I feel like that’s a little bit of a window into who we are.
TK: I just finished up The Angel of the Crows by Katherine Addison, which I loved. Who wrote the Goblin Emperor. And so it is this marvelous sort of Sherlock Holmes adjacent kind of thing except instead of Holmes you have an angel named Crowe, who solves murders. And it is a lot of fun. It is London with a lot of supernatural things. There are you know, werewolves and whatnot. And Jack the Ripper is on the loose. I’m not gonna say it’s nice, because obviously people are getting dismembered all over the book.
B&N: But lovely story. It’s a lovely story.
TK: It’s sweet, like so many of the people are just trying very hard and doing their best. And it’s nice. You can tell a lot of it is motivated in sort of the fixed fix desires that I think many of us have, which are okay, the sign of the floor has a lot going on, but also it is horribly, horribly dated and racist. How can I fix this and or, this was just a terrible idea. And but I can fix it. And I enjoyed that enormously, partly because I had just played the Phoenix right Attorney at Law games on the Switch. And they’ve just put out one that is set where you’re a Japanese lawyer in Holmes’s England. You’re an exchange student. And it’s hilarious and bizarre and a lot of fun. I play a lot of video games. So that and then for the thing that you would probably not expect I just recently reread Louis L’Amour’s The Haunted Mesa. And Louis L’Amour is not an author I generally read, but The Haunted Mesa was his attempt to write a science fiction novel, sort of horror science fiction, and a lot of it is frankly is terrible. But I had picked it up when I was like 12. And we were on a long car ride I’d read all of my books. It was like you can buy a book at the supermarket and it was all Westerns except this one cover had like a cucina on it and I read the back and it’s like, okay, there’s a portal to another world. Alright, I’ll read that one. And so I went back to reread it because it loomed very large in my brain as a kid and wow, there’s just so much wrong, even words cannot express. But at the same time, it’s fascinating to see. And I say this as someone who you know, if I could sell as many copies of a book is Louis L’Amour, my editors tour would just be backing up a truck of money to the door. But you can see someone who does not write in the genre grappling with all of the problems of just starting to write new genre. Yeah, and so it is rambling and awful, but a lot of it like, okay, I see where you’re trying to bring in your regular readership along with you, everything is sort of overexplained about five times. At the end of the day, it’s the Anasazi vanished because they went through a portal to another world, which is also where the Aztecs lived. And they set up this bizarre society that is full of like labyrinths and mazes and traps and they have a weird God King who has gotten senile. And also for some reason there are Sasquatch and Komodo dragons. There’s so much going on. And it’s so bizarre and it doesn’t hang together and in the afterward which this is part of the the rerelease of the like Louis L’Amour vault or something where they have somebody writing about, you know, his notes on it and whatnot, or outtake scenes didn’t get in at the entire end. The first note, he was basically saying, yeah, he had no idea what he was doing here. And yet he had big ideas, and they weren’t coming through and he very nearly scrapped the book, but the cover art had already been done, and he loved it. And he was on a deadline. So finally, he just gave up and did this. And which I appreciated the honesty if nothing else, ironically, having quite recently, my last horror novel was before What Was Dead was The Hallow Places which is about portals to another world. And so I spent a while reading about, you know, mysterious disappearances, supposedly to other universes, and I realized that I had heard of the steamship, the Iron Mountain, which supposedly vanished in the middle of Mississippi, from reading the book, the haunted maze out where the Iron Mountain shows up, and I saw it as almost as an unconscious homage to the Iron Mountain steamship. The ruin of it actually shows up in The Hollow Places. The heroine is hiding in it being stalked by monsters who can hear thoughts and so she’s thinking very fixedly about fanfic, try to distract them.
B&N: That’s amazing. It all comes back. And even those books where you’re like, this is terrible. They just lodged themselves in your brain.
TK: I have been inspired by bad stories so often because a good story makes you think, Wow, that is amazing. I couldn’t ever do that a bad one. It’s like, oh, I can fix that.
B&N: That’s amazing. Ursula, thank you. This has been wonderful. Nettle & Bone, our fantasy, and What Moves the Dead, our horror, are out now. Thank you.
TK: Delighted to be here.