How was your family affected by the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII? This is obviously a very personal story for you. It’s not all pre-determined surprises and unexpected bits come up while putting the words on page. By the third book of this type, I have a routine down: research, outline, writing. How did it feel to return to historical horror after writing your (Thriller Award-nominated) spy novel Red Widow?Īs much fun as I had writing Red Widow, going back to historical horror was like slipping into something comfortable. In her latest interview with The Big Thrill, Katsu talks about telling her story from a diverse range of perspectives, giving herself permission to take some liberties with the historical timeline, and writing a historical horror tale that became disturbingly relevant as she wrote it.
It’s the first time Katsu has written a book with an Asian main character. As she writes in the book’s afterword, her mother was the target of anti-Asian racism when she immigrated to America decades ago, and Katsu’s father-in-law was interned during World War II. Unlike her previous historical horror tales, THE FERVOR is intensely personal for Katsu, who is of Japanese descent. Meanwhile, an Oregon minister who was widowed by a mysterious explosion is haunted by a kimono-clad apparition and sightings of tiny, translucent spiders, and a Nebraska reporter ditches her married boyfriend to chase a story about fiery objects spotted in the skies across the western US. When a mysterious illness known as “the fervor” sweeps through the camp, and Aiko claims to receive ominous warnings from spirits and creatures from Japanese folklore, Meiko takes it upon herself to investigate camp officials’ increasingly strange and secretive behavior.
The novel centers on Meiko Briggs, a Japanese American woman who, along with her young daughter, Aiko, has been confined to an Idaho prison camp while her Air Force-pilot husband fights in the Pacific theater. After veering into the spy genre with last year’s Red Widow, Katsu is back in familiar territory with THE FERVOR, a horror novel set against the backdrop of World War II, when 120,000 Japanese Americans-tens of thousands of whom were American citizens, many born on US soil-were forced out of their homes and placed in concentration camps. It only took two novels-2018’s Donner Party-inspired The Hunger and 2020’s Titanic-themed The Deep-to establish Alma Katsu as the reigning queen of historical horror.
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