Interviewing Premee Mohamed

Hellooo!

I recently reviewed the excellent short story and novella collection One Message Remains by Premee Mohamed all set within a country and people known for their aggressive tactics towards their neighbours and brutal treatment of those within it. An apt set of tales for these times and offers a fascinating perspective of life within the ‘evil empire’. As always, a pleasure to invite Premee to the blog to discuss the book and more!

How do you booktempt One Message Remains?

I would probably say: If you enjoy seeing characters scraping a living in a baroque yet macabre world obsessed with death, privilege, and prestige, like Mervyn Peake’s ‘Gormenghast’ books, this collection might be for you! 

We first encountered the Treotans in ‘The General’s Turn’ what drew you to coming back and exploring them in more tales?

It was certainly a setting I wanted to write more in! Like, in a short story (it’s a novelette, but still) you always have to strike that balance of worldbuilding and dialogue and action and movement, so as much as I wanted to write lots about the world itself, there wasn’t room in that story to do more than I did. Then afterwards, I never felt certain I had the right idea or the right direction to explore—like, I had a tank full of gas, but a road hadn’t opened up that I felt good about driving on just yet. And then Psychopomp reached out to me about sending them a novella to consider for their first novella call, and something kind of crystallized, like: Oh! I had this idea about the kind of second-hand PTSD that researchers and historians get from reading first-hand accounts about war and disaster, but I didn’t know where or when I wanted to set it. But knowing that Psychopomp was interested in the novella almost gave me permission, it felt like, to set it in the world of ‘The General’s Turn’—like, connecting that war to the new one I wanted to write about. And it made sense. My idea, which turned into the novella ‘One Message Remains,’ called for a kind of eerie, bureaucratic, tradition-bound setting in which the invaders had a hard time thinking for themselves, and I knew they would run up against the people they’ve conquered with a huge amount of disrespect and overconfidence. Then after that, Sean and Elise (publisher and editor respectively) reached out again to see if I was interested in reprinting ‘The General’s Turn’ with the novella, as well as adding two more long-ish short stories set in the same world, and I was delighted. I really think each story spins off many more stories of its own; I feel like I could keep building this world for years. 

We usually see life from the resistance side fighting an empire, but these tales give us an insider view. Was this something you were keen to explore?

Very! I never really found myself questioning writing from the point of view of the villain or villains, because the whole point is that they lack insight into what they are doing at first. We, the reader, get to see how other people react to them—the people working for them, or their employers, families, enemies, allies, teachers, mentors. We get to form our own opinions about whether the insider view is moral or good, and I think (for me at least) that leads to a closer connection to the story when the characters realize that what they’re doing is wrong, but they couldn’t see it because they were too close. When you lack the ability to step out of your own head and perceive your behaviour the way outsiders do, you just keep doing the same thing forever. It helps to have something to shake you out of the rut of complacency, obedience, and fear that marks all empires. So each story ends with resistance of a kind.

The morality of the world is messy here – is that something you enjoy making readers ponder in your stories?

I do! I’m not trying to write neat black-and-white tales. There’s a lot of grey in the world, and there should be a lot of grey in fiction. We’re complicated and deep and the line dividing ‘villain’ from ‘hero’ isn’t a sharp one. It’s fuzzy, and it moves, and I think we need to acknowledge that people can cross it from either side several times in their lives. This is why I focus on what people do in these stories, not what they believe. We can only get so far into anyone’s heads, whether they’re fictional or real; we need to look at their actions to give us usable information as to who they really are inside. Which isn’t to say that I apply that in every case of moral judgement, but we have to simplify things in fiction or else stories would never end, and they’d be full of ethical litigation and endless nitpicking of language and thoughts.

Major Lyell Tzajos – how much fun did you have exploring him as a character?

A horribly, terribly good time. I think he joins a long history of narrative in which ‘finicky little twerp unexpectedly saves the day’ forms the major plot point. It’s not so much that we don’t expect him to be the hero—after all, it’s telegraphed from early in the movie or book or show that we’re following him for a reason—it’s more that when we’re faced with a non-traditional hero, our response is always “Ohhhhh okay!” with a little bit of surprise and admiration. I love news stories like that too—things like ‘School administrator refuses to let ICE enter building’ or ‘City councilor bars terrorists from entryway’ or whatever. People who have a little bit of power in their own sphere, but aren’t the kind of… physically imposing, or witty or intelligent, or charismatic and suave hero that we’re used to. But when the time comes, suddenly they’re the one who steps up, and it’s never who you think it’s going to be. So I love that Tzajos also does not expect himself to do it—to be a hero, to act heroically. He’s never done it in his life. But we’ve all got that kind of rock-hard core within us; we just might not know where it is yet.

Bone Gallows – have you been researching this one and should we be worried?

Ahahaha I get asked this a lot! I didn’t do much research for that story (I figure, it’s secondary-world, it’s okay if things work differently over there). I think the one thing I looked up was how to make bones stay white instead of turning yellow, so I was on some taxidermy websites for a little while but for some reason they didn’t have the exact answer I was looking for in terms of human bones being used as building materials. I eventually just decided to handwave it and say that they treat the bones in a pressure chamber (sort of like how you can make resin-infused wood) and the treatment removes all the organic material that would discolour the bones. (People should probably worry, yes.)

Do you think you may return to the Treotans?

I would really love to! Like I said, I probably have at least ten or twelve more stories spun off the ones already in this collection—maybe about Nana’s past as a partisan, or a story from the point of view of someone’s personal devil, or the mythology or folktales of those lands (are any of them based in truth?), or a story told by a village elder in Seudast during the war, or … there are a lot of options. But all those will have to wait till I hit my existing deadlines!

What else can we look forward to from you in the future? In this weird world of social media where can you find out more?

It’s a very weird world indeed! I am deeply remiss on updating my website, but it’s at premeemohamed.com and I’m on Bluesky with the same handle. In September 2025 I’ll have the third and final book in the ‘The Annual Migration of Clouds’ series, which is called ‘The First Thousand Trees’ and is coming out from ECW Press, so I’m very excited about that. And in August I will have a short story out in ‘The End of the World As We Know It: Tales of Stephen King’s ‘The Stand’’ (edited by Christopher Golden and Brian Keene) and I can’t wait for people to get their hands on that anthology!

What great books have you read recently?

I loved ‘Notes From A Regicide’ by Isaac Fellman—I think it’s out shortly but I managed to get my greedy paws on an early copy. Absolutely wrenching, beautiful prose and a story that hammers you flat on every page with grief and wonder. I also really got a belt out of ‘The Winter Knight,’ by Jes Battis—I’ve never read such intricately crafted Arthuriana and it was hugely absorbing. It’s not exactly a retelling of any particular Arthurian myth, more an exploration of how myths work and how people can get trapped in stories, expectations, and duty before they realize it. Also there’s a questing beast!