One of my new year’s resolutions was to read more foreign books and watch more foreign movies. (In translation of course, I’m your typical uni-lingual North American.) I have found some wonderful writers, such as Leonardo Padura from Cuba and Spain’s Arturo Perez Reverte. But lately I’ve been watching and reading more from South Korea. They are definitely having a moment.
Besides winning the Best Picture Oscar for Parasite, Bong Joon-Ho’s Snowpiercer has become a TV series on TNT–although the jury is still out on how good it is, and why it’s so Asian-free is something of a mystery. He’s one of those directors that, while I don’t love everything he’s done, is always worth a watch. (Seriously, The Host is an under-rated blast, Okja is too earnest for its own good.) And, although he didn’t direct it, Train to Busan is the best Zombie movie I’ve seen in a very long time, and I’m not a big fan of the brain-eating undead.
A month or so ago I shared with you my love of the historical fiction/zombie series, The Kingdom. Netflix has a bunch of Korean films and series (Black is creepy AF), and wherever (and whenever) they’re set, they have this air of being just different enough to be intriguing. Not Chinese, not Japanese, and definitely not what I’m used to.
There have also been two books recently that I really enjoyed. The first, is The Plotters, by Un-Su Kim. It’s an easy-reading oddball take on a political plot and the assassin hired to make it all work. Again, it feels like a standard political thriller but the world it portrays is just slightly… different.
The other book, and the one that’s getting all the international buzz, is Kyung-sook Shin’s, “Please Look After Mom.” It’s the tale of a family forced to deal with the changes in family dynamics, class and how little we know our parents and each other. It won the Man Asian Literary Prize, and is a staple of book clubs. While it’s not quite perfect (the changing POVs have no logic to them) it is an engaging, dramatic and heart-tugging story.
I know next to nothing about South Korea, and know very few people from that background, I suspect that will change as I go down the rabbit hole like I did with Hong Kong gangster films and all things Toshiro Mifune.
And I’m not alone. A colleague of mine in Northern California is hooked on the Korean version of Telenovelas. BTS is jump-starting puberty for a whole generation of tweens. Like, I said, the country is having a moment of pop culture relevance it’s never had.
What movies or books from other cultures and languages are you taking in? Maybe more importantly, why not?
Sarah, tell the nice people about yourself and what you do.
I wrote my first (what I would consider) “professional” piece when I was in the eleventh grade. It was a one-act comedy play for my community theatre group. When I saw people interacting with the story I’d written, both the actors putting their own spin on the words and the audience laughing and smiling as they watched, I knew that’s what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to tell stories that people wanted to engage with and experience. I did a fair amount of scriptwriting through college and shortly after, both for stage and film, but fiction is the one place I can make anything happen regardless of time or budget—both of which are pretty big roadblocks when you’re writing in fantastical genres, like I tend to do. Maybe I’ll return to scriptwriting at some point, but I think that would only be for the fun and collaboration. But novels, novellas, etc give me the freedom to tell the stories I really want to tell.
Your new book is “The Mourning Sun.” What’s the deal there?
The Mourning Sun, will be the fourth book in the Dead Mawl novella series (technically, it’s the fifth, but only if you count the prequel/origin story released in the omnibus and just recently as a standalone). The series is about a group of blue-collar workers—custodians and security guards—who strive to vanquish the evil entities lurking in the partially-abandoned Edensgate Shopping Center. The town they live in was once a prosperous mining city, but it was wrecked by these entities. Our heroes managed to trap the creatures (somewhat) in Edensgate, but they still try to escape again pretty much nightly.
It’s an ensemble cast—it jumps around into a few different heads depending on the installment—but it mostly focuses teenager Cari Hembert who stumbles onto the secret in the first novella and who we follow continue to follow in some capacity throughout the series. The Mourning Sun picks up right where the third book left off, and without giving too much away, on the morning after a very intense night that culminated in Cari arriving home to see her mother being attacked by a monster.
I love that your heroes are janitors and regular Joes. I mostly deal with the same kind of folks. What is it that inspired you to write this?
The heroes in Dead Mawl don’t really have magic powers in the traditional sense—they are more like D&D fighter class heroes, if that means anything to you. They each have a weapon proficiency that gives them extra skills in combat (accuracy, strength, etc), and the longer they work at the mall they gain higher endurance, faster healing, and even the ability to go for a long time without sleep. The villains, on the other hand, have a lot of magical abilities–summoning monsters and creating illusions are the big two we have seen so far—so there’s an element of research and experience that affects our heroes’ chances of being successful too. I think I like that part the most. I really don’t favor stories that have a superpowered badass just show up and fix things immediately (or they could fix things if his/her personality didn’t get in the way somehow). I like uneven matchups where the good guys must rely partially on knowledge and grit to get through it. And these heroes get hurt, even with the healing—I think every installment has seen at least one injury to a major character—so the stakes are personal as well as metaphysical.
As far as roots—the quick answer is that back in 2014 I wrote a couple pieces of Army of Darkness fan fiction. They were just for fun, but I liked the characters I created so much I cut out all the borrowed IP, reconfigured the plot, changed the setting from an S-Mart in Michigan to a semi-abandoned mall in Nevada, and here we are.
The longer answer is that I worked several blue-collar jobs when I was in high school and into college, including cashier and custodian, and I’ve had it in my head to do a hero story about characters in those fields ever since. These jobs are physically demanding, they are often boring and repetitive, they are looked down on as unskilled, and yet without people in these roles we would be lost. With everything that has happened over the past few months I think people are starting to get it, which is nice. Hopefully, it translates into higher wages, but we will see.
I’m going to smile, nod, and pretend I know what a D &D Fighter Class whatever is, but I get it. And Fan Fiction has started the careers of a lot of writers. Who do you read that people should know about?
This is always a tough question for me because I’m pretty all over the place. As far as writers in and adjacent to my genre, I’m a big fan of Grady Hendrix, Drew Magary, Jim Butcher and Stephen King (of course). I also enjoy some of the more delicate contemporary fantasies that have come out in recent years, like The Night Circus, An Unkindness of Magicians, and The Rook. Currently, however, I’m reading through James Ellroy’s L.A. Quarter series—I just finished The Big Nowhere and will move on to L.A. Confidential next–and I’m loving pretty much every minute despite having no magic at all. There’s very little genre-wise that I won’t try, except for maybe straight-up romance—and even then I might roll the dice if the premise sounds interesting enough.
Where can people learn more about you and your work?
ou can preorder The Mourning Sun on Amazon or buy my books on my website: www.sgtasz.com. That’s where I have my blog, which I try to keep up with once a week or so. I also have a Medium publication (https://medium.com/the-uglycat) where I exclusively feature pieces about Vegas/by Vegas writers.
Sign up for my newsletter using the form on the left hand side of the page and get secret free stuff plus the first look at my upcoming book Johnny Lycan & the Anubis Disk. Of course, you can find all my novels on my Amazon author page.
When I signed with my publisher, Black Rose Writing, I began reading some of my fellow BRW authors. One of my favorites is Anna Mocikat who has a backstory nearly as interesting as her books. I first read Shadow City (the sequel is out in the fall) and in going down THAT rabbit trail I realized her first five novels were written in German. Well, that sounds like someone I needed to talk to…
Give us the Anna Mocikat story.
I’m an author of Sci-fi, Dystopia, and Cyberpunk novels, with my latest book Behind Blue Eyes, just released this month. Before I started writing and publishing books, I used to work in the film industry for many years. I learned my craft as a writer at Film School Munich, where I studied screenwriting.
Behind Blue Eyes is my sixth published novel and my second in English. Before moving to the US in 2016, I published several books in Germany.
When not writing or reading, I love playing video games in my spare time. It’s a great source of inspiration for me. I’m a proud dog-mom of three rescues who keep me company when I’m writing.
I’ve read Shadow City, and look forward to the sequel, Dark City. Meanwhile, you’ve got a new book out. (Wayne’s note: dang, I thought I was cranking them out!) What’s Behind Blue Eyes about?
It’s a Cyberpunk Noir story. In a not so distant future, society has gotten rid of everything that made human life miserable in earlier times and has become a utopia. It is so perfect that it needs killer cyborgs to hunt down everyone who disagrees with it.
What is it about the story that compelled you to publish when you’re already in the middle of another series?
The roots of the story is the idea of three mega-corporations ruling the world, who are in constant war with each other. All factions have developed super-advanced cyborgs as the ultimate weapon, which they send out to fight each other.
One of my all-time favorite movies is Ghost in Shell and I took much inspiration from it for my story. But I’m also a big fan of Blade Runner and 1984.
So it’s ripped from the headlines, huh?Who did you read that corrupted you and got you writing?
I’m a big fan of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley, who are the fathers of the dystopian genre. I also enjoy books by Isaac Asimov, Phillip K. Dick, and Stanislaw Lem very much. Lately, I have been mostly reading Indie authors. There are so many hidden gems out there if one steps away from the mainstream bestsellers and is willing to explore.
Where can we learn more about your work and see what you’re up to?
Sign up for my newsletter using the form on the left hand side of the page and get secret free stuff plus the first look at my upcoming book Johnny Lycan & the Anubis Disk. Of course, you can find all my novels on my Amazon author page.
