It was a mix of everything, all kinds of genre as well as more mainstream and literary fiction. I started reading adult stuff very young. How were you introduced to genre fiction? And I seem to be inspired by specific periods and places in history. I’m starting to think about broader themes, too, such as seemingly insurmountable injustice. I’ve noticed that as a writer I’m drawn to the same themes over and over and they tend to be tragic: the glory and the tyranny of love, losing your heart’s desire because of a Faustian bargain you’ve made. Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire was a big inspiration for The Taker, but mostly for the structure: a character who has lived a long time and under unusual circumstances looks back on her tragic life. Great big, tragic love stories in general are the inspiration for the books: Tess of the D’Urbervilles (I’m a big Thomas Hardy fan) Anna Karenina Gothics such as Dracula. I wanted to write the story of a woman whose love is so strong that it would literally transcend time, but who ends up making a terrible mistake and paying for it for eternity. What inspired you to write the novel? And where do you draw your inspiration from in general? And that’s where we are in The Descent: will she give them both the chance to live happily ever after together?

Just when she’s resolved that she’s going to be unhappy for the rest of her life because she can’t have the man she loves, she finds out that this other man has fallen in love with her, a terrible evil man who is willing to try to change for her if she will give him the chance. The Immortal trilogy is the story of a young woman, Lanore McIlvrae, who goes to the very ends of the world-really sort of transcends the fabric of reality-for love, only to find out that she shouldn’t have done it, that she was wrong to do it. How would you introduce the series to new readers, and what can fans expect from this third book? I thought we’d start with your fiction: Your latest novel, The Descent, is the final part of The Immortal trilogy (to be published by Arrow). Lesson: you never know where life will take you.

Then, funnily enough, I ended up having a life that was the stuff of fantasy: working in intelligence, traveling, doing all this technical, math-y stuff that I never would’ve thought possible for a little storyteller. It is the third novel in the author’s The Immortal trilogy, but I didn’t (at the time) know too much about the series or the author, so I took the opportunity to send her some questions.Īs a girl, I wanted to have a magical, fantastical life but the outlook was kind of narrow and grim, and I think that’s why I turned to creating my own worlds in fiction. A few days ago, a copy of Alma Katsu’s third novel, The Descent dropped through the mailbox.

The Other Dead #5 by Joshua Ortega