What is Alma Katsu reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Alma Katsu, author of The Fervor.

Her entry begins:

I had the opportunity to do an early read of a number of horror novels coming out in a few months. For those who are unaware, horror has been having a moment for the past couple years: bookstores are bringing back horror sections and filling it with more than Stephen King and Dean Koontz. Publishers are launching new horror imprints. It’s become a big tent, with more psychological suspense and speculative fiction being shelved alongside traditional horror.

The Pallbearers Club by Paul Tremblay. Paul Tremblay is a case in point. His work tends to ask big existential questions in unexpected ways, and The Pallbearers Club is no exception. While appearing simple on the surface (and eminently readable), it’s so complex that it ends up being hard to explain. On one level, it’s about a strange friendship that develops between two people, an awkward teenager growing up in a small Massachusetts town and a cool stranger who happens to take pictures of corpses. But as the story develops, you begin to ask yourself what’s really going on here? Is it a memoir disguised as a novel or is it something else? Is it a new kind of vampire story? Is it supernatural at all? It’s a damned amazing piece of storytelling and...[read on]

About The Fervor, from the publisher:

From the acclaimed and award-winning author of The Hunger and The Deep comes a new psychological and supernatural twist on the horrors of the Japanese American internment camps in World War II.

1944: As World War II rages on, the threat has come to the home front. 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, Meiko 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 when a mysterious disease begins to spread among those interned. What starts as a minor cold quickly becomes spontaneous fits of violence and aggression, even death. And when a disconcerting team of doctors arrive, nearly more threatening than the illness itself, Meiko and her daughter team up with a newspaper reporter and widowed missionary to investigate, and it becomes clear to them that something more sinister is afoot, a demon from the stories of Meiko’s childhood, hell-bent on infiltrating their already strange world.

Inspired by the Japanese yokai and the jorogumo spider demon, The Fervor explores a supernatural threat beyond what anyone saw coming; the danger of demonization, a mysterious contagion, and the search to stop its spread before it’s too late.

Visit Alma Katsu's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Taker.

My Book, The Movie: The Hunger.

The Page 69 Test: The Hunger.

Writers Read: Alma Katsu (March 2020).

The Page 69 Test: The Deep.

The Page 69 Test: Red Widow.

Q&A with Alma Katsu.

The Page 69 Test: The Fervor.

Writers Read: Alma Katsu.

--Marshal Zeringue