Steven Barnes, Tananarive Due, Alma Katsu & Silvia Moreno-Garcia: A Conversation

Alma Katsu is the author of six novels, including Red Widow, The Deep, and The Hunger. Before publishing her first novel, Katsu had a long career as a senior intelligence analyst for several U.S. agencies. It’s 1944 in The Fervor: A Novel (G.P. Putnam’s Sons), and as World War II rages on, the threat has come to the homefront. In a remote corner of Idaho, Meiko Briggs and her daughter, Aiko, are desperate to return home. Following Meiko’s husband’s enlistment as an Air Force pilot in the Pacific months prior, she and Aiko were taken from their home in Seattle and sent to one of the internment camps in the Midwest. It didn’t matter that Aiko was American born: They were Japanese and therefore considered a threat by the American government. Mother and daughter attempt to hold on to elements of their old life in the camp as a mysterious disease begins to spread among those interned. Meiko and Aiko team up with a newspaper reporter and widowed missionary to investigate – something sinister is afoot. Inspired by the Japanese “yokai” and the “jorogumo” spider demon, Fervor explores the horrors of the supernatural beyond just the threat of the occult.

Silvia Moreno-Garcia is the author of Velvet Was the Night, Mexican Gothic, Gods of Jade, Shadow, and many other books. She has won the Locus and British Fantasy awards for her work as a novelist and the World Fantasy Award as an editor. In her historical science fiction novel The Daughter of Doctor Moreau (Del Rey), we meet Carlota Moreau, a young woman growing up on a distant and luxuriant estate, safe from the conflict of the Yucatán peninsula. She is the only daughter of a researcher who is either a genius or a madman. Montgomery Laughton is an overseer with a tragic past and a propensity for alcohol. He’s an outcast who assists Dr. Moreau with his experiments, financed by the Lizaldes, owners of magnificent haciendas and plentiful coffers. And then there are The Hybrids: The fruits of the doctor’s labor, destined to obey their creator blindly and remain in the shadows. It’s a motley group of part human, part animal monstrosities. All of them live in a perfectly balanced and static world. But the arrival of Eduardo Lizalde, the charming and careless son of Dr. Moreau’s patron, will unwittingly begin a dangerous chain reaction between passion and secrets.

Steven Barnes is a The New York Times bestselling author of more than 30 novels. He is a pioneering Afrofuturist, nominated for Nebula and Hugo awards, and writer of the Emmy Award-winning “A Stitch In Time” episode of the 1990’s reboot of The Outer Limits. His collaborator and wife, Tananarive Due, is an academic and author whose books include Ghost Summer: Stories, My Soul to Keep, and The Good House. In their collaboration The Keeper (Harry N. Abrams), illustrated by Marco Finnegan, Aisha has lost her parents in a car crash, and now she must move to decrepit and derelict Detroit to live with her ailing grandmother. But shortly after Aisha’s move, her grandmother’s health rapidly deteriorates. With her dying breath, she summons the dark spirit that has protected their family for generations to watch over her granddaughter. At first, it seems that this spirit, the Keeper, is doing what it was asked. But Aisha finds that this being can only sustain itself by stealing life from others, and she and her friends must come together to destroy it or die trying. Barnes’ graphic novel The Eightfold Path (Abrams ComicArts – Megascope), co-authored by Charles Johnson and illustrated by Bryan Christopher Moss, is an anthology of interconnected Afrofuturistic parables inspired by the teachings of Buddha. Eight strangers looking for enlightenment from an ancient spiritual teacher are trapped in a cave high in the mountains on their way to his temple. One of his acolytes directs them to each tell a story that the group can learn from as they wait out the snowstorm raging outside. One by one, the travelers share their stories, each a morality tale representing one of the aspects of final enlightenment taught in Buddhism. Their stories of horror, dystopia, high adventure, cyberpunk, and urban fantasy are spokes on the symbolic Dharma wheel, and each interlocking tale gets them closer to their true destiny – unveiling the future of the human race.  

Tananarive Due is an academic and author whose books include Ghost Summer: Stories, My Soul to Keep, and The Good House. She and her late mother, civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due, co-authored Freedom in the Family: A Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights. Her collaborator and husband, Steven Barnes, is a New York Times bestselling author of more than 30 novels. In their collaboration The Keeper (Harry N. Abrams), illustrated by Marco Finnegan, Aisha has lost her parents in a car crash, and now she must move to decrepit and derelict Detroit to live with her ailing grandmother. But shortly after Aisha’s move, her grandmother’s health rapidly deteriorates. With her dying breath, she summons the dark spirit that has protected their family for generations to watch over her granddaughter. At first, it seems that this spirit, the Keeper, is doing what it was asked. But Aisha finds that this being can only sustain itself by stealing life from others, and she and her friends must come together to destroy it or die trying.