Michael Koryta is the NYT bestselling author of 15 novels. His work has been nominated for or won for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Edgar Award, Shamus Award, Barry Award, Quill Award, International Thriller Writers Award, and the Golden Dagger. His novel Those Who Wish Me Dead will be released as a film this fall, starring Angelina Jolie, Nicholas Hoult, and Aidan Gillen. In his latest thriller, The Chill (written under the pen name Scott Carson), supernatural forces threaten to devastate New York City.
Alma Katsu is the author of five novels of horror and suspense. Her latest, The Deep, a reimagining of one of the most famous disasters in history, the sinking of the Titanic, will be released on March 10th. Her previous novel, The Hunger, was nominated for both the Stoker and Locus awards for Best Horror Novel, and the New York Times called it “supernatural suspense at its finest.”
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Alma Katsu: After establishing yourself in mystery and crime, I have to ask, what drew you to horror for The Chill? What was the appeal? Does everyone secretly—or openly—love horror?
Michael Koryta: Love of the storytelling world where the past is encroaching on the present. A ghost story invites the past right in and treats it as if it never left. In my experience, that’s really how we live our lives—every move made in the present is shaped by memory, right? On individual and societal levels. The idea of kicking open a door that allows the past to wander in and be active is always appealing to me. For some reason, I’m particularly drawn to this when the natural world is involved in the story. The idea of turning on a faucet in Queens and receiving water that comes from a reservoir in the Catskills where once a town existed is both intriguing to me and fundamentally eerie. Drink up!
I don’t think everyone loves horror, which is a shame, because they should. A little paranoia is good for the soul. It seems so unimaginative to not be afraid of the dark.
What about you? Why are you writing for the warped minds like mine?
Katsu: I lived in a strangely Gothic world as a child. I grew up in a very spooky house in a spooky town in Massachusetts. The house was an old Victorian, long neglected, which meant it had all these period details that, being a Service brat, I’d never seen before. Pocket doors that disappeared into the walls, twisty stairs leading up to an attic filled with old trunks left by previous occupants. Overrun by mice, so the walls talked to you every night. Growing up in a house like that definitely cements the notion that the past is a frightening place.
I’m struck by what you said about the appeal of kicking open a door to the past and wandering in. That definitely comes through in The Chill. The connection between the past and present is seamless and the ease with which the past reasserts itself is so, um, chilling.
Let’s talk about horror, and what some people are calling a resurgence of the genre. For a long time, horror has been persona non grata in the book world. After King and Straub and Koontz popularized horror in the seventies and eighties, it seems to have fallen out of favor. Major houses published less horror, except for pulpy paperbacks. Bookstores dropped their horror sections.
But lately, we’ve been seeing a comeback, probably partially due to interest in horror films and television. We’re seeing more “horror adjacent” books, thrillers with a supernatural element to them (like The Chill). Any thoughts on this? Why it’s happening now, if there’s something in the water (haha!) or air or political zeitgeist that’s making readers more receptive to horror?
Koryta: I think it’s a great time for horror, yes. The box office suggests it. But I’d argue the genre fans never went anywhere. Publishers believed they did, maybe. The three names you single out share something crucial: they write well. They work hard. It’s not a question of content so much as quality. I think horror readers are very discerning. They’ve seen all the tricks, so you’ve got to deliver it very well. I see the supernatural simply as another mechanism to create suspense. Now, some readers view it as a full-stop moment. You know the type, the “too-grown-up for ghost stories” reader who is happy to read about murder or terrorism but draws a line in the sand with the supernatural. Do you run into that? The reader who loves the Donner Party but was disappointed to learn there’s a supernatural element? That always amuses me. The reader who says “I don’t do horror” but is seeking out the Donner Party…that’s an interesting cat.
Katsu: When The Hunger first came out, I ran into a fair number of adult readers who gave me the “I don’t read horror” line, perhaps because they thought that horror equated to slasher or splatterpunk, but those are definitely subgenres within the form. I tried to persuade them to give it a try because it was character-driven and the horror element was fairly light.
I’m seeing more books now that could be considered crime or mystery but there is a definite horror vibe to it. So, what makes a book horror: I find that interesting. Horror writers say that horror is a feeling, not a genre, and so it’s a big tent.
We’re writing this right around the Oscars, so let me bring the movie Parasite into the discussion because I think it’s a good example of the broadening of horror. When that came out, it was widely embraced by the horror community. Some people don’t consider it horror, but social commentary can be horror, too.
Koryta: The political zeitgeist is real, I think. The genre spikes when there’s a little whiff of apocalypse in the air. I think some of that has to be anchored in news fatigue. “Give me an imaginary monster, please.”
Parasite is a wonderful reference, a film that is without question horrific but wouldn’t be considered horror. Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. The Watchmen. The list goes on.
Do you feel the political or cultural moment had to shift before there was the appetite for books like The Hunger and The Deep?
Katsu: The “aha” moment for me came when, after I’d turned in The Hunger to my editor, she mentioned that it seemed very timely, politically. It seemed to echo what we’d gone through with the 2016 presidential election. I’d written it during the election and got worried that I’d let too much of that seep into the story. But then, I thought about what was going on in 1846, the reality that the settlers faced, and I saw the parallels between then and now. With The Deep, the connection to the present day practically jumps off the page. The Edwardian era was a lot like our current time, with wealthy dynastic families sitting on piles of money while the masses fell deeper and deeper into poverty. Women fighting for their rights. The realization that we don’t seem to learn from our mistakes and are doomed to relive them might be the scariest thought of all.
Koryta: I love that observation. It echoes what I wanted to write about with The Chill: what are we forgetting about the past that might doom us, what lessons are we ignoring. The leaking faucet in Deshawn’s apartment was a fun symbol for me. We ignore those things. We certainly don’t worry about the water itself. We just trust that it will be there, and we do that at our own peril. Was there a thematic question that guided you to writing The Deep, or are you a history buff in general, a student of human folly, or all of the above?
Katsu: With The Hunger, the connection between now and the historical event didn’t come to me until afterwards but I’ve learned to look for that up front to use in plotting. I’m so proud of being able to learn from experience at my advanced age!
I’m intrigued at the thought of you, this guy who’s been a PI and done all this adventurous stuff, diving into horror. In other words, you’re a pretty solid guy, a tough customer, so what in the world could possibly scare you? Tell us the scariest thing you ever have had to deal with, or something that really creeped you out.
Koryta: Sorry for the delay, I just told my wife that you said I seem like a tough customer and I had to wait for her laughter to die down. In my experience an active threat proves not to be that scary. I can think of a moment from my PI days, from a caving trip, a car accident, and a few memorable moments with big cats (one leopard in particular) and they’re all far less frightening to me than things I’ve imagined that didn’t come to pass. My anticipatory fear runs on a different frequency. When something bad is actually happening, my brain cools off. When I can believe something *might* happen, though? That’s a hot wire. Which is, surely, why I’m so drawn to suspense novels.
Hitchcock said “there’s no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.” I love that quote. It’s a guiding light for me. True terror is from the promise that something’s coming, not from a jump-scare or a twist. Take a look at The Shining and you’ll see that King opens the book by promising everything that will come to pass: the snow will fall; the phones will go down; the family will be trapped; there’s something bad in room 217; Jack had better not forget about the boiler; and in case anything bad does happen, Danny will need to shine really hard for Dick Hallorann. King tells you everything that will happen. He just doesn’t tell you when these things will happen, how, and at what cost to which characters. The suspense is intense because of what has been offered as much as what has been withheld.
What about you? You’re a horror writer and a spy, for crying out loud—what on earth scares you? And there’s a difference here between phobias and an incident of terror. I have many phobias, including a fear of phobia, but snakes are definitely high on the list. Spiders don’t thrill me but they don’t bother me, either. Heights don’t faze me in the least but ladders do. I would rather rappel off a cliff any day of the week than climb a ladder to the second story of a house. I trust ropes and mountains. I don’t trust ladders. Put a snake on a ladder and you will see me leave the scene pretty fast.
Katsu: So snake + ladder is your kryptonite, got it. Good to know.
This is where I’m going to be a bit of a killjoy. I can honestly say I do not have any fears. It’s because in the 1990s, as an intelligence analyst, I worked genocides and mass atrocities. And there were a lot of them: Rwanda, the Balkans, Sierra Leone, Zaire. The list goes on and on. Watching all that up close and personal—neighbors killing neighbors, burying people alive, hacking off body parts—you get exposed to the worst in mankind and it makes the stuff that used to be fun to me (ghosts, haunted houses) not so scary anymore. Now, when it comes to things like rappelling down mountains or jumping out of planes… If my plane was going down and I had to jump out of it, I would do it, but I wouldn’t be happy about it. I don’t go seeking thrills. I am eminently practical.
Okay, let’s get back to writing. Another thing both books have in common is history. Would you like to talk about the research that went into The Chill, and you leavened it into the book? History is sometimes like trying to give medicine to a reader: how did you end up getting them to enjoy it with The Chill?
Koryta: I’m a down-in-the-weeds guy. I’m fascinated by process. I’m fascinated by how complex seemingly simple things can be. But trying to coax a reader into sharing that fascination is undeniably challenging. I’m the writer who in first draft will worry that I’ve included only 100 pages of detail on how a water tunnel works. “Is it enough? Oh, cut it to two pages? Interesting request.” And you know that you’re going to screw something up, so in my experience there are only two ways to handle it: be brave and bold and own the mistake, or avoid the internet. I choose the latter.
Katsu: I actually enjoyed learning about the water supply system to NYC in The Chill. But it is a challenge, learning to use a sparing hand with exposition and backstory.
Koryta: I like obscure stuff, too. It’s safer! You’re writing about well-known history, which seems far braver to me. Writing about The Titanic is akin to writing about the JFK assassination; you’re staring down the barrel of experts who will gleefully pounce on your mistakes. How does one become brave enough to do that? Is there a pill?
Katsu: I definitely had to think long and hard before deciding to go ahead. Writing about well-known historical events has definitely been a challenge and a learning experience. The actual research itself doesn’t bother me, because my day job of 35 years was basically being a researcher, so I felt pretty confident that I could handle it. I found out, while on tour for The Hunger, that while most Americans had heard of the Donner Party, many didn’t know the specifics—and that’s what made it fun, we were all learning together.
The Titanic, I knew, would be exponentially tougher. There was so much more research material to consider, and legions of rabid fans to challenge any misstep. I’m girding my loins for that. But I’ll be able to walk them through my rationale for the choices I made (ingrained in me from the days of writing Presidential Daily Briefs!) and, if that’s not good enough, well… Thank goodness there are no Fiction Police to haul me off and lock me up.
What about you? Did “the experts” ever take issue with something in one of your books?
Koryta: Oh, sure. The gun nuts are the worst. They’ll forget a story even exists if you make a mistake between a grip and a stock, for example. I was absolutely determined to get everything right about the Dodge Challenger in If She Wakes. The car nuts promptly noted a mistake about a Camaro that gets one reference in the book. But I benefit from that. I won’t repeat the error.
Katsu: Let’s talk a little about personas. Why did you decide to use a pen name for this book? Is The Chill the first in a line of supernatural/horror thrillers? Are you flirting with the idea of having a split personality?
Koryta: Yes, it is the first, but not the last! It provides a little brand clarity for the booksellers, and it allows me to have some fun. But I’m merely writing with a pseudonym that will not be a secret to anyone who cares to come looking for me. Your different selves seem much more fascinating. Tell us a little about Alma the Spy vs. Alma the Writer. Where do they converge, and where do they diverge?
Katsu: Yeah, the whole thing is pretty crazy. I didn’t sell my first novel until I was 50, toward the end of a long career in intelligence. I didn’t think it would be a problem since nobody outside of the three-letter agencies knew about it (though my coworkers did think it was kind of funny I was writing books about magic and the supernatural; come to think of it, they probably thought I had lost my mind.) And I didn’t think the two worlds overlapped at all until a very astute person at my previous publishing house mentioned that the characters in my books were all so twisty and manipulative and asked if it had anything to do with my time in intelligence. And I thought no, of course not (crazy woman) and after a beat, realized I was wrong and she was right because YES, OF COURSE, THAT’S EXACTLY IT.
And now it’s kind of my signature. Manipulative characters who are so good at it that you never see what they’re doing. Because that’s the whole nature of clandestine work, and it seeps into your consciousness, your whole being, over time. It’s not a particularly pleasant thing to go through, being manipulated by your peers, day in, day out, but dang it makes for good story villains. Just another example, I guess, of finding horror in the everyday.
