Interviewing Premee Mohamed

Helloooo!

I reviewed No One Will Come Back For Us by Premee Mohamed a stunning collection of short fiction that blends and crosses genre with ease and you totally need! Gentle Reader, I loved it! I was therefore very happy to get to welcome Premee back to the blog to talk about this collection and more.

How do you like to booktempt No One Will Come Back For Us and Other Stories?

I’ve mostly been telling people “Look, look, this is the same editor that put together Cass Khaw’s ‘Breakable Things,’ he knows what he’s doing!” I’m definitely counting on Michael Kelly’s and Undertow’s reputation to precede my collection. The fact that he’s edited Weird Fiction for years and has this very distinct editorial voice and vision for everything that comes out of the press.

What do you enjoy about writing short stories? How does it compare with longer works like novellas and novels?

I guess what I like is the necessary constraint of the form—a short story is a creation where you can explore one idea in depth, instead of a novel or a novella where you can introduce several ideas in parallel or sequence that all play off and interact with one another. Short stories have a focus, and we know that no matter how long they took to write, the reader will most likely be reading them in a single sitting. So focus has to be the priority. I find it very difficult to write short stories because I like to be able to rove around, meander, go off on tangents, introduce subplots, explore the world, the values, the characters, the ideas. In a short story all I can do is put a laser-focus on one premise and trust that the reader will figure out everything I wanted to put in but couldn’t.

How important is the narrator voice to a tale?

For me, extremely important… even more so in a short story than a longer work, because the reader has to figure out and connect with the voice right away, there isn’t the opportunity to spend dozens of pages gently leading someone into it. I also tend to think of the narrator voice (I mean, as distinct from the author’s voice) as kind of the equivalent of the director’s camera in a movie. The tone, atmosphere, general vibes, that’s what makes movies distinct, specific, and memorable, and same with the voice in a story. A character saying the equivalent of “I don’t understand what you’re asking me” should sound very different, and land differently, in (say) a Gothic story than in a tech noir story. The language choices but also the complexity of the sentences, the emotions being expressed, the responses to dialogue, everything should be an emergent property that clearly indicates that this is the type of story you’re reading, and not another type.

Which story was the hardest to write?

I find all short stories difficult but I think the hardest was ‘The Redoubtables’! I’ve talked about this elsewhere I think, but I had the premise and the setting, I knew what I wanted the story to say, but I couldn’t figure out the format and structure to put it in. I usually don’t have this much trouble choosing a narrator or characters to focus on; it’s usually ‘easy’ when I figure out what I want the story to be about. But here, with no survivors of the incident, I couldn’t figure out who I wanted to tell the story inside the story, if that makes sense. It took several false starts to land on writing it like a creative nonfiction essay, narrated by a journalist character. And even then, the earlier versions of the story had the narrator far too close to the event; I had to build in a lot more distance as I edited. The distance is the thing I like best about that story, I think. She’s peering through a keyhole at the edge of a tragic disaster, but also realizing it’s set inside a bigger world than she can see. She can’t get any closer than she is, and she also realizes she’s afraid to try, which I think is the appropriate response.

Pulling this collection together did you find common themes?

I did! Michael’s brief was to grab dark fantasy, horror, and sci-fi with horror elements, so when I did that, I found a lot of common themes appearing that I hadn’t expected to see. I guess it’s natural to not spot a pattern while you’re looking at a single story, but see it when you look at them in aggregate. A lot of uneasy relationships with divinity and faith—what does ‘belief’ look like when you can see and interact with the gods, and there’s no doubt that they exist? And then, the idea of these transactional relationships that we have with particular deities, spirits, monsters, creatures… what do we owe them and why? Are we paying up out of fear? Duty? Love? Respect? How does that bleed over into how we treat each other? I spotted the same shapes repeating themselves in some of the parent/child relationships in a few stories; I didn’t think I had written so many horror stories featuring kids, but I did. Same questions again: what do children owe parents, what do parents owe children? How does individuation occur and when? Am I capturing the moments in people’s lives when they join or leave communities? Am I capturing their motivations? How are families like cults? Why do we fear what we fear?

What are some of your favourite short story writers?

I love Sofia Samatar. I think I’ve never read a short story of hers that didn’t wreck me into tiny pieces. Adam Troy-Castro, same thing, same effect. Isabel Yap’s short story collection ‘Never Have I Ever’ is one of my favourite things I’ve read in ages, as well as recently (though I think it’s an older collection) Nadia Bulkin’s ‘She Said Destroy.’ It’s such a good collection! There’s so many different types of horror.

What else can we look forward from you in the future and where can we find out more?

I have a pair of sequels coming out from ECW Press for my 2021 novella ‘The Annual Migration of Clouds,’ so I’m very excited about that! I also have a secondary-world military fantasy novel coming out from Solaris, ‘The Siege of Burning Grass.’ Last thing I think is a fantasy novella from Tordotcom, we should be doing the cover reveal soon, ‘The Butcher of the Forest.’ Plus a ton of short stories in various anthologies, including the dark academia anthology ‘Wilted Pages’ (edited by Ai Jiang and Christi Nogle; and the music-themed horror anthology ‘Playlist of the Damned,’ edited by Jessica Landry and Willow Dawn Becker.

What great books have you read recently?

I just finished ‘The Spear Cuts Through Water,’ by Simon Jimenez. Just loved it. Left me absolutely speechless. It’s a masterclass in writing fantasy at an epic scale while never, ever losing sight of the tiny human stories that compose epics. I’ll read anything he writes now. I also recently finished and loved ‘An Immense World,’ by Ed Yong; it’s about how animals sense the world, but it also asks some wonderful (and occasionally unanswerable) questions about the implications of the relatively limited human sensorium, and how that’s shaped not only our languages, cultures, values, communities, but also the way we construct our identities, or how we have them constructed for us.