I was in love with death too, when I was fifteen or sixteen and it was mysterious and fascinating. “The hardest thing in this world is to live in it.” Not to quote Joss Whedon, but I’m going to quote Joss Whedon.

I mean, it’s easy to tell ourselves how daring it is to kill a lot of fictional people as randomly as possible, but I feel like it can actually be a little safe, cynical, and adolescent. If I know better than to engage with any of the characters in a story, I’m going to have a hard time caring about the story itself. And I feel that there are books that are absolute bloodbaths that are also emotionally very effective-a certain Suzanne Collins series springs to mind.īut I feel that as a certain point it’s easy for noir and grittiness to slip around the corner to self-parody and become unintentionally funny, or-worse-just exasperating. I’ve never hesitated to kill a character when I felt there was a dramatic necessity for it, even if it was just the dramatic necessity to show that life is not fair and getting into fights is dangerous. I think if life is cheap than death is meaningless, and stories then to become boring.

Does that reflect a philosophy for you as a writer or was that something you were trying to explore with this book in particular? Life is not cheap in your setting, which is something that I found very real and refreshing. I have to say, I love how the book handles death (in that, there's not a lot of it).

Karen memory by elizabeth bear