Whatever

The Big Idea: Chris Gerrib

Posted on October 30, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi      4 Comments

Bank robbers have always made for exciting characters, and author Chris Gerrib got inspired by a real life robbery while working at a bank. Hop in your getaway car for a drive through the Big Idea for The Third Person in the Room.

CHRIS GERRIB:

“They were alive when I left them.”

That’s the first line of my new book The Third Person in the Room, and figuring out what happened after the speaker left is the through-line of this book.

Like many authors, and unlike Our Host, I have a day job. For many years, that job was as the head of IT for a community bank. Fairly early in my tenure at that job, one of our branches got robbed. It was a small building, about the size of a standalone fast-food joint, and on a wintry Friday night a masked man with a gun walked in. He marched the two employees into the back room and walked out five minutes later with around a quarter of a million dollars in cash.  

As I was pulling (useless) video from our new digital camera system that night, I thought that if you only committed one such robbery a year and not in the same area as where you lived, you could make a nice living. So thus life handed me a Big Idea.

Unfortunately, unless I was going to write a very short story, something needed to happen to cause complications. Then, during the banking crisis of 2009, my employer started to buy other banks. These were all smaller than us and failing. I saw a lot of shenanigans going on at those banks. At one of them, we had the police put out a BOLO on a former employee who we thought was skipping town after defrauding his institution for mid-six figures.

(The real story wasn’t as exciting- no fraud – just a lot of sloppy bookkeeping and questionable banking practices.)

My previous mystery novel, Strawberry Gold, was set in a fictional small Central Illinois town. This town was conveniently a few hours’ drive from Saint Louis, Indianapolis and Chicago, thus making a nice base for my fictional robber. Small towns with quirky characters are interesting to write about, and I didn’t have to reinvent one.

My second Big Idea came much later in the drafting process. I am a pantser, AKA “discovery writer” which means I don’t start with an outline. I was having a real problem with my main character, Mr. Bank Robber. Then one day it hit me – I had a character already made. Vincent Bisceglie III, who had been a main character in Strawberry Gold. And since this novel was set 23 years after the first book, reading the first book was not a requirement to enjoy this one.  

The nice thing for me about writing mysteries is that I can tell fictionalized versions of real stories. For example, I did not voluntarily leave that bank I was working at. I could write a character who felt some of the same disappointments I did and dial it up to eleven. I actually had a lot of fun writing her. 

Frankly, I had a lot of fun writing this book, and I hope you will have fun reading it.

The Third Person in the Room: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop

Author socials: Website|Bluesky|Instagram

The Big Idea: Sharon Shinn

Posted on October 29, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi

Bursts of inspiration are all a writer can ever hope for, but how do you flesh that inspiration out into a coherent story? Not just coherent, but a good story. Author Sharon Shinn shares some of her personal experience with this topic in the Big Idea for her newest collections of short stories and poems, Tropes: Stories and Poems of the Fantastical.

SHARON SHINN:

In my 9th-grade creative writing class, my teacher walked in one day holding a small potted plant. “I want you to write a story about this,” she said—and then deliberately dropped it to the floor. Dirt and terra cotta shards went everywhere. My fellow students and I stared for a few moments, and then grabbed our pens and paper. Sadly, I can’t remember what story I turned in, but I do remember that it was rather more lurid than my classmates’ tales of cats pushing pots off of windowsills. 

Since I’ve became a published author, dramatic writing prompts have seldom come my way. But they’ve been replaced, at least now and then, by the flashes of inspiration that catch me at unexpected moments. Sometimes they’ll arrive as images, inexplicable but insistent; sometimes as phrases or sentences that seem melodic and hypnotic. Sometimes they will just manifest as ideas. What if…

Often these tantalizing flashes just camp out in my mind for months or years before I decide what to do with them. In idle moments between other projects, I’ll examine them again, trying to figure out how they might fit into a story, what would come beforehand or what would follow after. As most writers would tell you, the idea is the easy part. Fleshing it out is the challenge. 

That’s the case with three of the pieces in my new collection, Tropes. I’d had the prompts for years. I just wasn’t sure of the rest of the stories. 

In the case of “Blessing in Disguise,” a novella set in my Elemental Blessings series, the flash was an image. Of a broken derelict of a man sprawled before a temple door, waiting out a rainstorm. In this world, whenever a newborn is five hours old, a family member goes out to find three random strangers at a temple to draw blessings that will guide the child for life. So I knew that someone was going to show up to demand that this man participate in the ritual—and that he would try to decline because didn’t feel worthy. Why? Was he a criminal? An assassin? An addict? What had brought him to this point? How could the simple act of choosing a blessing alter the trajectory of his life? Who had come to the temple asking for this favor? How would that person’s life be changed by this meeting? And how could this story fit into the overarching narrative I’d built over five novels? It was a long time before all the pieces came together.

Another novella in the collection, “Rescue,” was inspired by an opening scene that I thought was compelling but had no idea how to develop. A woman is bound to a stool in the middle of an arena. A unicorn is brought in to determine whether she’s a virgin. The woman realizes the two of them have three things in common: We had both been brought here in the hopes that we would please the prince. We were both in fear for our lives. We were both pregnant.

But—but—then what? Does the unicorn certify her as a virgin, even though she’s not? Why would the unicorn care? Who’s the father of the baby? Is he a good guy or a bad guy? And why introduce a unicorn into a story if you’re not going to make some kind of magical use out of it? But what? That one took a lot of thinking, too.

But the line from this collection that I’ve had in my head the longest is this one: Uncle Joe’s house used to eat people. Loved the line. Had no idea where to go with it. Obviously, if you’ve got a carnivorous house, someone’s going to get devoured along the way. But who? Why? Who’s telling the story? I don’t write a lot of short fiction in general—most often when I’m invited into an anthology—and no anthologies had come along with a theme that seemed to fit this sentence. So it floated around in my mind for years before I decided to sit down and figure out the rest of it. It turned into the short story “The Secret of the Spiral Stair.”

Even when it takes me a long time to write the attendant stories, I love these lightning strikes of inspiration. And I love that other writers have experienced similar moments. In a fascinating 2009 TED talk, writer Elizabeth Gilbert discusses the creative process, which at times can feel “downright paranormal.” She says, “I have had work or ideas come through me from a source that I honestly cannot identify.” She talks about poet Ruth Stone, who, while working out in the fields, would feel a poem coming at her over the landscape like “a thunderous train of air.” Stone would race back to the house to grab pencil and paper so she could collect the poem before it abandoned her in favor of another poet who was paying more attention.

I’m not sure where those mysterious flashes come from, whether the sources are internal or external. But when they stick around, I know it’s my job to fashion them into something more corporeal, and then maybe they’ll start haunting other people as well. 

Tropes: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop

Author socials: Website|Facebook|Bluesky

The Big Idea: Wole Talabi

Posted on October 28, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi      2 Comments

Big ideas don’t always have to start out as grand bursts of inspiration. Sometimes a big idea is made up of smaller ideas over a long period of time that all snowball together in perfect harmony. Author Wole Talabi explores this idea as he talks about his newest novel, The Fist of Memory, and cites some other great authors that lent some of those small ideas to him.

WOLE TALABI:

When I look back at the process of writing The Fist of Memory, I don’t see a single big idea that anchored me through it. I see many small ideas orbiting a glowing spark of motivation like a protoplanetary disk that eventually coalesced into a novel.

So yes, I could tell you that its inspired largely by a lot of the action media I had consumed growing up, woven together with my deep and endless fascination with first contact SF narratives like some weird Nigerian lovechild of John Woo’s The Killer and Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem. I could tell you it features assassins with direct neural interfaces and is set in a grounded but ultimately hopeful near-future world where the impact of climate change is impossible to ignore. I could tell you that it tries to unify uniquely African traditional beliefs and philosophies like Sankofa (which emphasizes the importance of remembering and learning from the past to shape the future) and Ubuntu (that interconnectedness is what makes us who we are) with modern scientific understanding of the nature of reality anchored in quantum mechanics. I could tell you that the world of the novel is shaped by the uniquely Nigerian brand of political violence and turmoil extrapolated from the country’s real-life complex political history of coups and behind-the-scenes power struggles. I could tell you all this, but these are all fragmentary ideas and inspirations and influences and intentions, and they don’t tell you much about why it took me so long to finally put them all together and what they all add up to.

Besides, I can’t tell you the one really big idea behind The Fist of Memory without spoiling at least some of the plot. So instead, I’ll tell you about the place stories come from, where small ideas can connect to become more than the sum of their parts because the big idea behind this novel is about connection anyway.

SF’s big mama Ursula K LeGuin described the production of great art as a journey into the self to pull from the “collective unconscious” – a Jungian idea that beneath the individual unconscious there lies something collective: patterns, myths and archetypes shared by humanity. I’ve always been fascinated by this concept but never applied it to my own writing. It seemed like an abstract way of explaining why so many stories across cultures seemed to share some DNA or seem to draw upon something ancient and fundamentally human to speak about the present day.

And that’s all it was at the time – an interesting theory. But when I first started to write this novel, it quickly became clear to me that I was reaching for something larger than I could consciously articulate. I kept trying to consciously impose some kind of superstructural order on the constellation of influences I had brought with me in trying to achieve my intention. But the story and the characters refused to conform. I was trying to construct a planet when what I needed was to journey into myself to find the gravity that would naturally connect all the fragments that had accumulated inside me over decades. Something I needed to go inward to find by excavating my memories.

Memories of a TV program where a professor of sociology argued that Africa and Africans in general were somehow inferior and cited the usual nonsense – present day economic underdevelopment, biased IQ statistics, etc. which triggered in my young mind, a kind of rage and anger and desire to prove him wrong and show that Africans were indeed capable and that our cultures, histories and philosophies contained ideas and concepts are rigorous and fascinating as any other.

Memories of growing up in Nigeria during the brutal military dictatorship of General Sani Abacha – the political chaos, the riots and protests, the lawlessness. Memories of my father and his book of judo techniques that sparked my love of martial arts and Hong Kong action cinema. Memories of my boarding school days in Benin City, studying mathematics and physics, staring at the night sky and wondering – what was out there? Memories of reading my mother’s books on African literature, of discovering the richness and depth of Yoruba mythology and history and philosophy. I let all these personal memories flow together, as I navigated the collective unconscious, seeking connections between them and the larger human desire for connection, for survival, for care and understanding. It was then that I understood that connection itself was the story. It began to flow out of me – less like construction and more like archeology.

After that, it was just a matter of editing to get the structure and tone and rhythm and flow of the story right. It’s funny now to see that the novel I had been trying to assemble from apparently disconnected fragments of myself was about the possibility that disconnectedness itself might be an illusion. One that can only be broken in the subconscious. That realization wasn’t just my method of writing the novel. It became what the novel was about.

The big idea of The Fist of Memory is the possibility that, just as there are connections inside us that we aren’t always consciously aware of, what we perceive in the physical world might, at another level of reality, be connected. That things which appear separate can be part of the same continuum. Science and spirituality. Life and death. Violence and redemption. Past and future. Heroism and villainy. Memory and reality. One human consciousness and another. To quote big mama LeGuin again the idea is that, “The unconscious mind is coextensive with the universe.”

Writing this book has taught me that stories are technologies by which we connect to ourselves and to each other. I hope that when you read it and are done with all the excitement, technology, politics, action and physics I’ve baked into it, that you are left with a warm glowing feeling of possibility and connection.

The Fist of Memory: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop

Author socials: Website

The Big Idea: Kevin J. Anderson

Posted on October 27, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi      2 Comments

You can’t have a duology without an enticing cliffhanger at the end of the first book, and thankfully New York Times Bestselling author Kevin J. Anderson managed to write the second installment in his Nether series, despite a broken ankle setting him back some. Journey through his writing (and speaking) process to see how Nether Vortex follows up on that suspenseful cliffhanger. 

KEVIN J. ANDERSON:

I grew up as a wide-eyed kid, looking up at the stars with a Star Trekian wish to boldly go where no one has gone before. The universe was filled with a sense of wonder.

But you know what? Space is also scary as hell! It’s infinitely cold, dark, empty, alone … filled with radiation, solar flares, and gravity wells (and that’s not even counting monsters, deadly aliens, or killer robots). In space, everything wants to kill you. It’s even worse than Australia.

Science fiction horror should be a bigger thing. Just imagine being in a distant space station or an interstellar ship incredibly far from even a hint of rescue, where only a thin metal hull or reinforced windowport separates you from deadly vacuum, where the transmission of your terrified scream would take hours to reach the nearest listener.

So where are all the scary science fiction stories? Yes, everyone can immediately cite Alien and Event Horizon, then after a pause add Pitch Black. Heck, even Apollo 13 is a terrifying space story, in its own way. How about Jason X, the first film to bring a hockey-masked serial killer into space? And who can forget Leprechaun in Space (no matter how much we try)? But I think the genre needs more. If you search for “space horror” on Amazon, you’ll find a few titles but not a lot.

When Weird Tales Presents and Blackstone Publishing asked me to write novels for them, they let me choose the genre and topic. I jumped at the chance to write a cosmic horror epic: Nether Station and Nether Vortex.

Now I could really buckle up and take advantage of the scenario—a haunted house in space, an isolated station on the far edge of the solar system near a wormhole that offers a shortcut to Alpha Centauri … or maybe it’s a place where the horrific elder gods have been exiled, and boy do they want to come out. I reread all of H.P. Lovecraft’s work (man, that guy had some creepy and mind-blowing ideas), and added a lot of Easter eggs in the prose.

The first half of the story, Nether Station, has a controlled cast of oddball characters, mostly misanthropes (who else would want a job like that?), each facing their own problems even before the really weird shit starts happening. This novel is claustrophobic, intense, scary, and ends on a cliffhanger. The second half, Nether Vortex, is much bigger in scope, a sprawling cosmic war where countless species are being consumed by a great darkness. The two books are like Alien followed by Aliens.

I’m a prolific and reliable writer, and I like to think I’m always on time. With the giant cliffhanger at end of Nether Station, I didn’t want to keep the readers dangling in the wind. You want them to feel delicious suspense and anticipation, not an annoyed sense of “Is this guy ever going to deliver the next book?” (Not that we know of anybody who’s done that to his readers…)

Then the real horror happened. I outlined Vortex and was all ready to write. The deadline was looming, but not in a scary way. I couldn’t wait to get to my version of “At the Mountains of Madness” in the Martian polar ice caps, Lovecraftian SF on a grand scale.

Now, I’ve long-established that I write by dictation. I live in beautiful Colorado, and I take my notes with me out on the trail. I’ll head into the mountains or forests and trudge along for miles, dictating my chapters. I get inspired, I’m surrounded by scenery, and I sink into the zone, lost in the story I’m creating as I walk along. I’ve been doing this for so many years that the words come out as nearly finished prose, like I’m narrating an audiobook. When I return home, I have my dictation files transcribed, then I edit them online. In fact, it’s the only way I can write my novels.

Except, just when I was starting to write Nether Vortex, I hiked a beautiful trail up Beckwith Pass near Crested Butte, Colorado. On the way down, it started to rain, and the trail got muddy … and I slipped and fell off a ledge, twisted my leg, and broke my ankle. (Yes, I hike alone; I can’t dictate if somebody is walking along beside me.) So, I had to limp a mile back to my car and then drive an excruciating three hours back home.

That’s the sort of experience I inflict on my characters, not something I wanted to try at home. I spent the next two months in an armored Darth Vader boot.

Worse, although I could hobble around the house, I certainly couldn’t go out hiking, not even on the wimpy bike path near my home. I had a 130,000-word novel to write, and suddenly I wasn’t sure how to do it. My creative process strictly relies on walking and talking.

So, I sat on the porch, staring off into space, and I tried dictating chapters, but it was ten times as hard to sink into the zone without moving. I tried pounding out chapters on the keyboard, stuck in a chair in a stuffy office while staring at a screen. (How do you guys do that for hours and hours?)

But deadlines can be very inspirational, and the thought of angry readers imagining Lovecraftian punishments for me if I didn’t deliver on time after that Nether Station cliffhanger was enough for me to complete the manuscript on time. I powered through, typing some, dictating some, and the plot and characters took over. Maybe that helpless, claustrophobic, trapped situation actually helped convey the right sense for the story. (The ankle’s fully healed now, and I’m back to writing novels the “right” way for me.)

I love how the Nether books turned out. I created big scary story and an immensely cool setup. Oh, there’s room for other bad stuff to happen if I want to revisit that universe, but these two novels form a complete story with a real and satisfying conclusion. I hope you enjoy the read.

—-

Nether Vortex: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop

Author socials: Website|Facebook|Twitter|Instagram

The Big Idea: A. T. Sayre

Posted on October 21, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi      1 Comment

Everyone remembers Scrooge as a mean, cold-hearted man, even though his entire arc is that he becomes a better, kinder man and develops empathy. Author A. T. Sayre’s main character in The Asterist is quite the Scrooge, too, but maybe we’ll end up remembering him in the better light he deserves by the end.

A. T. SAYRE:

Asterist, noun /ass ter ist/  – someone who lives on an asteroid. Often used as a pejorative for people posted on solitary observation or research stations in remote areas of space. 

The Asterist is my second novel. Which, just like my first one, was only supposed to be a novella, but just kinda kept going. Seems to be the way it works for me—aim for a novella and miss. Not the most orderly ways to operate, I know, and I suppose one of these days I have to guestimate how long something I plan to write is going to be correctly. Small goals…

It has been a wild turnaround on it, too. I finished the rough draft of this one less than a year and a half ago, in March ‘25. Then came the beta readers, rewrites, reworkings, more rewrites, etc., the whole process, which was concluded sometime late last summer. And here it is already out in the world. It’s actually been less than a year since The Asterist was even sent out to publishers. For those of you reading this who don’t take part in the sausage making part of literature, that is amazingly fast, especially for a nobody doofus like me.

I have many talented friends with marvelous books they have put their everything into that have been out on submission for years with no luck yet. Which is how it’s supposed to work normally. Big name authors can turn things around quickly, of course, because they have names built on track records of proven quality and success, but I have nothing like that. Yet The Asterist took just barely over a year and a half from the first typing of THE END to in your local bookstore. I like to think that reflects something about the book, about just how good it actually is. Because I think it’s fantastic, far better than something a doofus should be able to write.

The big idea of The Asterist is about empathy. Specifically, about the expansion of empathy out to embrace the other. It’s easy to feel for someone who you see as in your ‘tribe’ already, people do that all the time. For your family, for your friends, for your neighbors. They’re like you, they look like you, they share a lot of your same values, so you can easily grasp where they are coming from and can feel their pain and want to help. There’s nothing whatsoever wrong with that; in fact it is glorious. After all, in the grand scheme of things, why are we here if not for each other?

But the farther we get from these commonalities, the easier it can be to feel nothing real for someone and what they might go through. Even to be somewhat hostile. I don’t think I need to give any examples of this kind of thing today for all of you to know exactly what I am talking about. Suffice to say, the fear of the other is alive and well in our world. It was an important instinct to have a hundred thousand plus years ago, when a stranger showing up in your valley might stretch the limited resources you could utilize too far and put you and your loved ones at risk of starvation.

But apart from some extremely isolated patches of this planet, no human has lived in that kind of world for eons. The instinct remains, though. And it’s continued existence in our psyche might be one of the biggest obstacles left to our advancement as a society. One I firmly believe we must, if not extinguish from our minds, at least learn to go beyond.

This is what William Jeffries, the hero of this book, the titular asterist himself, is doing. At first blush he is not the type of person you would expect to get life lessons about empathy from. He’s a bitter, foul-mouthed, even somewhat mean-spirited man, beaten down by a life that did not turn out as well as he had hoped, which he responds metaphorically to with a perpetual middle finger. It’s a life of grievances, excuses, and petty snark. If there is any type of person who would embrace his fear of the other, it would be him.

Then he is confronted quite suddenly with the existence of something that is most definitely an other, a whole new and very different alien species, one that he has nothing remotely in common with. And despite his cantankerous, misanthropic character, he learns to get past that sense of otherness, and to grow and evolve his feelings toward them, to see them as a being worth love and care. And he doesn’t do it because the fate of the universe depends on it, or humanity’s, or even just his own life; he’ll be just fine no matter what, so will humankind, and the universe like always barely notices anything any of us ever do.

There is nothing bigger at stake here. He could very easily wash his hands of the whole situation at any time and he knows it. But he doesn’t—he stays involved, he fights, he struggles for this other thrust into his presence, puts himself at great risk in various different ways for them. And no matter what rationale he may give at any given moment as to why, in truth he does it all for no other reason than because deep down he knows that is what he should do.

It is a level of character that I wish I felt certain I had myself. I have the same antiquated fear of other instinct in me as everyone else does. I try to move beyond it, to ignore it, sometimes more successfully than others. 

Would that we all would do the same, and try to be more like the bitter, foul mouthed, and mean-spirited William Jeffries.

The Asterist: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Powell’s

Author socials: Website|Bluesky

The Big Idea: Stephanie Feldman

Posted on October 20, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi

With fall in full swing and that crisp chill in the air, it’s the perfect opportunity to cuddle up with author Stephanie Feldman’s newest collection of short fiction, The Night Parade and Other Stories. Light a fall candle and follow along in her Big Idea for these spooky tales.

STEPHANIE FELDMAN:

As a collection, The Night Parade and Other Stories asked me to approach the question of the Big Idea backwards. Not “What Big Idea do I want to tackle?” but “What Big Idea ties these stories together?”

It wasn’t hard to find threads running through my work. I’m always thinking about Big Ideas—what makes a story matter—while I brainstorm, draft, and revise. My short fiction often explores women’s perspectives and all that makes my Mid-Atlantic home weird, creepy, and enchanting.

When I collected my spooky stories set in this region, I made another discovery. While these stories all feature different characters in different worlds, I could assemble them in a rough chronology of a woman’s life. Over the course of the book, we go from childhood friendships, to teenage fear and ambition, to young adult insecurity, and through romance, marriage, divorce, motherhood, and death. 

The stories selected themselves; the order fell into place. I felt quite proud of myself. A thematically cohesive collection of dark speculative stories about “The Danger of Loving another Person.” My writing process focused on relentless questioning of Big Ideas had paid off!

But then, I found another thread, silent until the manuscript pulled it taut: music.

In “The Staircase,” the girl who briefly vanishes is a flutist, and she returns from the void with a strange melody. In “The Barrens,” the kids venturing into New Jersey’s haunted Pine Barrens are seduced by an anonymous DJ broadcasting from the wilderness. In “The Boyfriend Trap,” the narrator knows something has changed when her moody, controlling boyfriend plays her favorite song, which he once derided. In “The Albatwitch Chorus,” the middle-aged witch and her teenage intern—daughter of the ex-husband still hanging around—both long to hear the singing of the mysterious, dangerous cryptid society on the outskirts of town. And in the final novella, “The Night Parade,” the young widow searching for her kidnapped husband will do anything, everything to hear the music of an annual, ghostly procession.

And how does that melody go? And what song does the DJ, the suddenly solicitous boyfriend play? And what does the tiny hominid’s voice sound like? And can you decipher the strange words in the Night Parade’s chant?

Maybe you know that old claim: “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” (Fittingly, while the quote has been attributed to many, its author remains unknown.) Some things you just can’t articulate.

Counterintuitive though it may seem, a story’s meaning can’t be entirely articulated either—or, rather, it can’t be summarized or encapsulated in a thesis. “A story,” Flannery O’Connor wrote, “is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.”

So I could tell you that “The Getaway” is about the compounding loneliness of isolation, and whether it’s possible for the young woman, her social life derailed by the COVID lockdown, to repair her oldest friendship. But it also is the broken clock on the porch, the vision of her friend standing in the trees holding a steering wheel, the hole in the ground, the open window, the feeling of being watched. “The Witch of Osborne Park” is about a young mother in the suburbs who doesn’t fit in, and can’t bear her child growing up. But it also is the flock of birds pummeling the window, the little girls costumed in purple robes and wooden masks, the plastic cup of warm white wine, the vanished “Watch Children” traffic sign and the car collision where it stood.

For a long time, I thought I had to master structure and technique; I had to pin that Big Idea down. But I’ve learned—especially as I’ve leaned into horror, the uncanny, the weird—to trust my unconscious impulse. If it feels striking, unnerving, moving, important, then it deserves attention, and probably a place in the final story. If I can’t tell you my story’s Big Idea, then I know it’s not finished. But if I haven’t let in the jolting, haunting images, phrases, and moments that appear along the way, then it’s not going to be any good.

The Night Parade: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Books-A-Million

Author socials: Website|Instagram|Bluesky|Facebook

The Big Idea: Jonathan Maberry

Posted on October 15, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi      2 Comments

Where does the soul go when the body perishes? In Jonathan Maberry’s new novel, they get implanted into robot mechs to fight in an alien war. Is this the best option? Or is heading into the light the better option? Soldiers in Ghosts of the Void have to decide whether or not to make the ultimate sacrifice, the one beyond even death.

JONATHON MABERRY:

I grew up weird. 

I was poor, lived in a terrible neighborhood, and had monsters as parents. My escape was to use books as doorways to worlds where people fought monsters…and sometimes won. The stories that enchanted and encouraged me were those where ordinary people found themselves pitted against extraordinary threats –monsters, plagues, aliens, all of that. I read those tales to see how they were able to level up to confront those threats and maybe even triumph. It was through those adventures that I first cultivated optimism for my own survival with the monsters at home.

When people ask me why I write about monsters, I say that I don’t. I write about people who fight monsters. My first literary heroes were Abraham Van Helsing and Bernard Quatermass. 

Along the way I had some real moments of luck. My middle school librarian introduced me to science fiction and horror, which became my favorite genres, especially when combined. And she literally introduced me to Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, and L. Sprague de Camp, who each became friends and mentors. All three encouraged me to read deeply into those genres and think beyond them. They also pretty much force-fed me old copies of Weird Tales. That’s where I first encountered the cosmic horror stories by H.P. Lovecraft and his followers. And from then on I was lost in the best possible way.

Most of Lovecraft’s stories were published in Weird Tales Magazine, which I now edit. The off-kilter and unexpected direction of the stories published there suited me. Given my childhood circumstances of  poverty and abuse, I found a wonderful escape filled with every kind of creative possibility. I gobbled up not only Lovecraft, but Robert W. Chambers, August Derleth, Edgar Allan Poe, Clark Ashton Smith, and others. They became my family, my role models –not for civilized behavior (I mean, let’s face it –Lovecraft was a horror story of a person)—but as storytellers who did not respect or even acknowledge the guardrails of conventional storytelling. 

All of those writers, and a couple of dozen others, are the godfathers of Ghosts of the Void. 

So, Ghosts of the Void, along with the first two volumes, NecroTek and Cold War, are me driving at high speed on the wrong side of the road. Writing these books has torn down the guardrails and allowed me to go fully weird in terms of plotting and writing. The complex themes include many areas of lifelong fascination for me: space travel, hard science, alien life, cosmic horror, existential philosophy, and the many ways in which humans react to the unknown. So many of my interests as a reader and writer were brought together for these books, and Ghosts of the Void was joyful to write, even with its dark themes.

The NecroTek trilogy begins with a teleporter experiment that goes wildly wrong and transports an entire space station to the far side of the Milky Way, where the survivors are thrust into an ancient war against godlike alien beings and their limitless armies of shoggoths, night-gaunts, and other cosmic horrors. As human fighter pilots die in battle, their souls are resurrected through necromancy and are implanted in shape-shifting alien mech bodies. Death is no longer an end to war. In death those heroic young pilots become vastly more powerful. It’s a corollary to me studying martial arts on the sly because I knew that one day I’d have to square off against the towering monster who was my father. A confrontation I won, though I went to the hospital in the same ambulance as him. In NecroTek –particularly in Ghosts of the Void, there is a heavy toll to pay for survival, but it’s worth every penny.

The series focuses more on characters who are trying to understand the nature of this new and larger universe, while also dealing with love and loss, with death and life, and with the deep challenges of obligation. The ones who die along the way are given a choice of going into the light, so to speak, or being brought back as ghosts to continue the war. This is a deep sacrifice because the alien shapeshifting ships are powered by an energy source that gradually erodes their souls. This is true ultimate sacrifice. Some opt out and move on; while others accept the cost of war if it means protecting everyone else.

And there is a philosopher trapped aboard Asphodel Station who makes first contact with the ghost of an alien who died in that war. Their connection and conversations are at the very heart of the story because they discover commonalities even while being living and dead, human and alien. 

I’ve always been deeply fascinated by the possibility of encountering alien life, and whether that first contact would play out. Rather than picking the low-hanging fruit of “they’re always bad” or “they’re always good”, I prefer a nuanced speculation that allows for aliens to have a variety of agendas and perceptions, some of which we may never decode. And, having studied the history of first contact here on Earth, I’m not at all convinced that it will go well. After all, basic communication depends on commonalities, but what common ground would –or even could—there be with beings who might not share anything with us. That’s what triggers my speculation –we know that whales and crows and other animals have languages, but we have no idea how to translate what they say into what we can understand. As a kid this used to hurt my brain; but as a writer I get to play with that and explore it. Everything will be different, and that is both fascinating and terrifying.

Ghosts of the Void is the book my younger self has always wanted to write. My father would have hated it. My mentors –Bradbury, Matheson, and de Camp—would, I truly believe, be happy as hell.

Ghosts of the Void: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop

Author socials: Website|Facebook|Instagram