My guest today is Nebula, World Fantasy, Ignyte, and Aurora award-winning author Premee Mohamed! As it happens, Premee has not one upcoming release, but between this month and the next one Premee has TWO completely different books coming out.

You can find Premee on Bluesky, Instagram, and in her Patreon.

Tell me more about From The Library of Jurger Leitner and what made you write it.

This was a fun one! For those not familiar, this book is an official tie-in novel based on an existing cosmic horror audio drama called The Magnus Archives, which is produced by Rusty Quill. The premise is basically "Here is a group of employees working at a place called the Magnus Archives and they record people who come to them with so-called weird stories." So it sounds like it would be completely episodic or 'monster of the week,' but it actually has a larger arc that develops over the five seasons. Last year the team approached me and my agent to see if we would be interested in writing a tie-in novel specifically exploring one event that happens in the show: the 'fall' of a library belonging to a man named Jurgen Leitner. I still think it's so funny that they picked this as the first one because as soon as I heard it I was like "A LIBRARY? I'M IN. I'M IN. I DON'T CARE WHAT IT PAYS. LET ME WRITE THIS. I LOVE LIBRARIES AND BOOKS." In the show, Leitner is a rich collector and the books that he picks up are often just called 'Leitners,' because he always puts a bookplate in them reading "From the library of Jurgen Leitner," which is how other characters recognize them when they find them later. These are super dangerous books — people who read them have been injured, killed, or committed horrific crimes, and in most cases they can't stop themselves from doing what the book's 'power' makes them do. So Leitner's big thing is "Oh I'm taking them off the streets, it's safer this way." But eventually it's revealed that his library, which contained nearly a thousand of these books, was destroyed and he barely escaped. Since there isn't a ton of detail in the episode where he talks about it, I was given a lot of leeway to come up with the how and the why, and my editor and I worked together with the main scriptwriter Jonny Sims to make sure that it was all canon. Without giving too many spoilers, let's just say that Leitner didn't always work alone, and knowing that he had research assistants (without any mention of background checks or qualifications) was the key to writing this story. So my hope is that fans — even though they already know how the story ends —will still like the book because they can delve deeper into the world, and that people who aren't familiar with the Magnus Archives will like it because it's a fun cosmic horror-thriller.

(NOTE by Renan: when I first sent the questions to Premee, I had not realized the book is credited by Premee Mohamed and Jonathan Sims. I’m glad that she explained their roles in this book!)

Now, let's go to Wickhills. Tell me more about it!

Wickhills is a standalone fantasy novel coming out from Tor, so I'm pretty excited about that — it's my second time working with Tor and with my editor Jonathan Strahan in longform (Jonathan has also edited some short stories of mine for anthologies). I loved working at this length because any item of worldbuilding that struck me as cool was able to just... find a way in, without all the sad snipping and pruning I have to usually do for novellas. Wickhills is basically a book about urban planning and poor information management — this is a world in which every single inhabitant has to live in one of six remaining coastal cities, after a still-mysterious event about 250 years ago made overland travel impossible and all the cities and towns in the middle of the continent disappeared. For both practical and political reasons there isn't much traffic between cities — they're isolated as well as isolationist and have developed pretty different cultures. So our main character Ferec, who works for the internal secret police (I mean, that's the only kind of secret police they have), is extremely surprised when he's assigned to protect a defector from another city. When the defector's employers come looking for him with maximum violence, Ferec's mission changes to finding out why the man is there, what he stole (spoiler alert?), and why any city's government would be willing to rack up a vast bodycount to acquire it and prevent anyone else from getting it.

A magical library and an underground world. What similarities can we expect to find between both stories and what is completely different about them?

Ooooooh man good question... I was working on both books at the same time, as you can imagine, and I think by the time they were in final edits there were a lot of similarities whether I meant it or not (also I was working on like ten short stories). First and foremost though I think the central theme is exactly the same and I almost don't really know how that happened, but it's the same one as in my favourite book so maybe it was inevitable (The Name of the Rose, by Umberto Eco): What would you do in order to obtain forbidden knowledge? And again for a lot of people it would be like "Well I guess I'd look it up" "Inter-library loan maybe" "Pirate it" or whatever, but in these two books the answer is "Absolutely one hundred percent kill people for it" and that's before we know what the knowledge actually is. And in both cases people make the logical jump that if somebody else wants something very very badly, whatever it is must therefore be amazing and you should get it first. Like "Well if it's not worth killing for then it's not worth getting." I think both books are also fundamentally about power and colonization, because there's no real way to talk about the control of knowledge in these books without talking about justice, cities, surveillance, inequality, opportunity, and oppression. If history is always written by the 'winners,' what did they take from the losers and can that ever be rediscovered? That's the power of the written word — when the author is gone, the words and the truth may still remain. Both stories are about people in ethically questionable employment realizing that they're playing a role in something terrible, and striving desperately to set things right — or as right as they can without making things worse. Of course, in practically every other aspect they're completely different — Wickhills is a secondary-world fantasy where every piece of history and culture is made up, and Leitner is set in London in the early 90s, with real places and events scattered amongst the fantastical shenanigans.

What is a piece of fiction that you think didn’t get enough attention?

I know it's received some attention but I never felt it was enough — Notes from a Regicide by Isaac Fellman. What I wanted was for the book to blow up and sell millions of copies and be made into a prestige mini-series, three feature films, and have maybe an entire spin-off universe of books that I could then buy in special editions and read and re-read till the day after the end of time. It's so sharply and beautifully written, it's so emotionally wrenching, the speculative elements are both subtle and inextricable, the setting is eyeball-vibratingly real and grounded. It's one of those rare books so full of precise, concrete detail that half the time I thought I was reading about my own memories — it really gave me the illusion that I had been there, seen these characters doing what they were doing, talked to them, ate with them. I loved it and I really want more people to love it too.

How do you feel having TWO books coming out almost at the same time?

This isn't my first two-book-same-time rodeo so I guess the same as last time -- a weird combination of excited and resigned, I guess? Like "Yay, two books!" but also it's kind of tiring trying to promote two books at once, and especially in this case when they're really sort of being aimed at two different sets of readers and I can't really talk about both in most cases (so also, thank you for letting me talk about both here!). Like, do I hope that people pick up both? Of course! Do I think it's realistic for people to spend such a large chunk of their book-buying budget on a single author in such a short time frame? Not really. So I feel a little bad for both books because people's attention will be split between them, but at the same time this is one of those publishing things that is completely out of my hands, so all I can say is — godspeed to both!