For her second collection of stories, One Message Remains (paperback, Kindle), author Premee Mohamed presents four novellas and novelettes that are all set in the same secondary world.
In the following email interview, Mohamed explains how this collection of dark fantasy tales came together, as well as her thoughts on visiting this fictional realm again.
To start, what are the four stories in One Message Remains about, and when and where do they take place?
The first story is the eponymous novella, “One Message Remains,” which is about a post-war “charity” mission carried out by an army major, back in the former battlefields of a new land that his empire has just colonized. But while leading his team to recover the remains (including the souls) and the effects of the dead enemy soldiers, he starts getting clued in to the fact that someone probably should have asked the people whether they wanted this mission or not.
“The Weight Of What Is Hollow” is a novelette, and is about a young girl who is an apprentice in a family of bone-gallows makers, used for hanging prisoners of war or other recipients of military justice. When she catches the eye of a high-ranking officer during a botched execution, he decides to commission her to build the gallows for his next execution.
The third story is “Forsaking All Others,” another novelette, about a deserter on the run from his own side; he pairs up with a fellow soldier doing the same thing, and they run for refuge to his grandmother’s house. (Grandma, we should mention, is a former insurgent.) He also, though he doesn’t know it, runs right into an ancient myth of the region and discovers whether it might be true.
The final story is a reprint of the novelette “The General’s Turn,” which came out in the online literary magazine The Deadlands in 2021. In this story, a general torments a prisoner of war in a traditional “game” held in a theatre, in which the player has to determine which of the actors on stage is Death.
As for where these stories are set, it’s a secondary world somewhat like our own, with elements of Eastern Europe and the Balkans, but also the Roman empire, the Ottoman empire, and a lot of fantasy components.
I don’t know that I intended a “when,” except that there’s certainly steam-powered tech and electricity in some of the stories, and I didn’t write them to be contemporaneous with each other. The stories can be read in any order, without knowing anything about the other stories.
Where did you get the idea for each of these stories?
Oh man, where do ideas come from, right?
Definitely for “One Message Remains,” I had been chatting with a friend (the actual exchange is up on the Psychopomp website on the announcement page, I think) about the archivists and librarians who read lots of the kind of things in the novella in order to decode and categorize them — I mean things like personal letters, military orders, journals, diaries, poems, that kind of things, written by (almost entirely) very young soldiers who (almost entirely) died. And I got to thinking, obviously in modern times we’d be concerned about the psychological effects of second-hand trauma for the people consuming these personal writings. But what if there was some other effect? Like, what if there was not a magic exactly but a kind of resurrection of these dead soldiers, if you read enough of their stuff — not that they’re zombies or ghosts or spirits either, but that they are brought in a way back to a certain type of life, and that’s why this culture believes you should leave them alone, leave them buried, and not touch them or read them ever again.
For “Forsaking All Others,” I think I had been reading stories either about the history of the Devil, or The Penguin Book Of Hell (I can’t remember when I started it, but it was one of those things where I kept getting distracted and reading like five pages a month for years) a couple years ago, and I got hung up on the idea of a personal devil rather than a general capital-D Devil, sort of like how at a certain point the church stopped discouraging the ideas of personal saints or guardian angels. And so the idea felt very intuitive to roll into or recycle into this collection, because it’s all about different types of pursuit, different types of being hunted and persecuted, while feeling that you haven’t done anything to warrant such drastic punishment… I think it worked well with the kind of surrealist, no-place no-time elements too. Like, they don’t mention God much, or other types of religion, but if they believe in personal devils, what else does that suggest?
“The Weight Of What Is Hollow” came right out of “The General’s Turn,” that throwaway line where Vessough, the narrator, mentions that he can hear the noise of the gallows being built outside and how tricky it was to build with bone. I started to wonder (as one does) about the behind-the-scenes people or traditions behind these weird cultures that I had written…like, I think I was speculating on social media a while back about “Does anyone ever think about the guy who breeds the flesh-eating beetles in The Mummy, so that they have a big bucketful ready to pour on Imhotep when it’s time to do the hom-dai at the start of the movie?” and everyone was like “Are you all right.” But like, what about the people who make the bone-gallows? How did that start? Who does it and why? Are they quite right in the head? I wanted to answer some of those questions, but I also wanted to look at, similarly to the rest of the stories, what we feel we owe to these constructed, agreed-upon structures and institutions around us: the military, countries/borders, cultures, families. Can you just break yourself out of a pattern like that? Or are you knitted into it on every side?
Finally, “The General’s Turn” itself came from (if I recall correctly, because this was a while back) the image of the stage itself, and the giant turning gears, that opens the story. I forget where I saw it or how I came to picture it, but I was like, “Okay, well this is certainly very dramatic, what else happens besides the gears slowly turning?” So it was almost one of those word-association games, like… stage… play… players… disguises… audience… a game, some type of game, but really dark. (That is, I was like “You can turn things with gears, but you can also squish things between them, I am just saying.”)
As you mentioned, these stories are connected, some stronger than others…
There’s a shared world, obviously. It’s not always named, but all four stories are meant to be set in this same secondary world and roughly (I suppose give or take 50-80 years) around the same time.
I think they’re also connected thematically, which is unavoidable when you’re writing new material based on an existing story, but I think it worked out here. I was about to say “Without being too heavy-handed about it” but actually I got a review for this collection a little while ago saying it was too on-the-nose, so uh, people’s mileage may vary? I don’t think I needed to say “War is bad” or “Murder is bad” but maybe people do say that, I don’t know.
Anyway, the themes are sort of peripheral to war, I think — like I mentioned above, themes around duty and obligation, the idea of the social contract, about the irrationality of war too (like, why would you send your own side to hunt down deserters, thereby wasting even more valuable manpower and time, etc.), the positive and negative power of traditions, the way we connect the past to the future and maybe why we should be challenging or questioning that connection a little bit more. It’s not automatic, this idea that “Well we’ve always done it this way,” but we often act as if it is; I wanted to show people pushing back against it, doing things a different way, even if it feels like putting your hands against a mountain and trying to move it. There’s a cost to changing and there’s a cost to not changing too; the question becomes whether you feel like you have either the right or the duty to pay it (I’m thinking of Tzajos here in “One Message Remains” specifically).
And are there any connections between any of the stories in One Message Remains and your other books?
Oh good question…
I was working on “One Message Remains” while I was working on other stuff, so I bet there are quite a few connections sprinkled into various short stories and upcoming books, and I think I incorporated at least one thing consciously from These Lifeless Things (which Paul pointed out on my Skiffy & Fanty episode!) and one thing unconsciously from The Siege Of Burning Grass.
But I think for the most part, the connections are just general, thematic, more ideas than premises. There’s no repeating characters or anything like that.
You also said that “The General’s Turn” was a reprint. Are the others new?
The only one that already existed was “The General’s Turn.” I wrote the other three stories specifically for the collection.
The four stories in One Message Remains sound like they’re dark fantasy tales, with maybe some horror seasoning. But with you, you never know. How do you describe them, genre-wise?
Oh man, tough question. I never know what to do with these things. I keep saying “fantasy,” and I think that’s where they most firmly sit? There’s magic and demons (??) alongside everything else, and Death is someone you can just casually see when you’re out with your family at a public execution, so I’m happy to call it fantasy.
I’m not sure it fits neatly into the horror space, I mean particularly in terms of (now that I’ve spent like half of 2024 reading academic stuff about horror [laughs]) the beats, the tropes, the endings, the antagonists. There aren’t really any villains in these stories; there are protagonists and antagonists, but there are no heroes and there are no monsters. It’s a hazier genre space, I think, it’s not straightforward.
I like “dark fantasy” though.
One Message Remains is your second short story collection after No One Will Come Back For Us And Other Stories. How is Remains different from No One, aside from being four stories as opposed to 17, and the four stories being longer than any of the 17?
I think the biggest obvious difference is the shared world. I’ve actually seen it referred to as “a novel in stories,” which was not my intention (though I think the final word count was like 53K or something, so it actually is the length of a short-ish novel).
I think it’s more cohesive too, again because of the shared themes and the shared world. Less a case of “Oh hang on, let me grab like 17 stories in several genres written and published in a huge variety of venues over the past 6 years to send you.”
So, are any of the stories in One Message Remains influenced by any writers or stories that haven’t influenced anything else you’ve written?
I really need to start tracking what I’m reading while I write stuff…
I do think some elements must have been influenced by my first reading of W.B. Yeats’ The Celtic Twilight (possibly that was the source of the personal devil myth) and Colin Wilson’s The Occult, which earned a note in my book tracking spreadsheet that just reads “???? ??? ?????????”
Going back to the stories in One Message Remains having a shared world, are you thinking you’ll write more stories set in that realm?
I absolutely plan to, whether they find a home or not. It was one of those cases where I just threw in any old thing in the world-building if I thought it sounded interesting or fun, and now that I’m looking back I’m like “Wait, but that could be a new story” “That could be a new story” “These characters need their own story” “What About That Guy” (This will all have to be on my own time, of course, because this is not contracted.)
So, is there anything else you think potential readers need to know about One Message Remains?
If you are looking for gruesome war stories, action on the front(s), or battle formations, this is not the collection for you! It’s a collection of stories told peripherally to the wars — so that ideally you’re looking over your shoulder, or even behind yourself, to see the actual fighting. I hope readers can see that I did that on purpose, because there’s enough focus on killing in war stories that you can still see it even when the camera, as it were, pans away to something else.
Finally, I always think that short story collections are a good way to get to know a writer. If someone enjoys the stories in One Message Remains, which of your novels or novellas would you suggest they read next?
I think if people enjoyed the overall collection, they might enjoy my spec-fic spec-ops novel The Siege Of Burning Grass.
I also think, with its odd overlay of myth and pursuit, that if you liked “Forsaking All Others” you get a not-too-dissimilar (though much better hydrated) fairytale in The Butcher Of The Forest.
And certainly if you like the theatricality, train wreck prose, all vibes no plot, weird traditions thing happening in “The General’s Turn” you might enjoy And What Can We Offer You Tonight.
