Mathilda Zeller Talks It Looks Like You in the Dark
On this episode, Dan sits down with author Matilda Zeller to talk about her debut adult horror novel, It Looks Like You in the Dark, from Tor Nightfire. Zeller sums it up best herself: Stranger Things meets Reservation Dogs in the Arctic. The book is set in an Iñupiaq village in the 1990s. A group of Alaska Native kids are trying to mind their own business, but miners and an ancient shapeshifting monster called the Kushtaka won’t let them.
Zeller’s maternal family has roots in the Kotzebue region going back at least ten thousand years. She talks about the stories she grew up hearing, the real-world shadow of the Red Dog Mine, and how the Cold War cut off thousands of years of trade and connection between Alaska Native and Siberian communities. She also shares the unsettling origin of the book: a published account of a man pressuring a local girl into telling him the Kushtaka story at midnight. Zeller wanted to reclaim that story from the girl’s point of view.
They also get into the sunlit dread of Midsommar, a raven who grants wishes you’ll regret, and the music that fueled her drafting. And she explains why a horror novel needs a love story: “Nothing is actually horrific unless you care and unless you have something to lose.”
About It Looks Like You In the Dark
Tapeesa is newly out of high school and working in a fish processing plant in the Inupiat village, Chukchi, where she’s lived her whole life. Maybe that’s why people tend to assume she isn’t that bright—or maybe her mama is right and she does have bad blood. Either way, she knows the legend, and she knows the history. Her Ahna told her that the hungry creature—the kushtuka—appears to us in the form of someone we love. It will try to get us to follow it. Follow it where? Those who have gone no longer have throats to tell us.
The Kobuk River Valley of remote Alaska draws greedy white men time and time again. But whenever they come, death comes too. This time the white men are here for the long term, to create an open pit, a rare earths mine just north of the village. When her sister Esther goes missing, Tapeesa will do anything to get her back. Seeking justice, Tapeesa must track down the kidnapper in the darkening Arctic. What awaits beyond the warmth of her village is more horrible than she could imagine and closer to her than she knows.
IT LOOKS LIKE YOU IN THE DARK is a fast-paced, grab-you-by-the-throat story about love, loyalty, and all the fearsome monsters that emerge when we turn our backs on the land and each other.
About Mathilda Zeller
Mathilda Zeller writes horror and fantasy. She is of Inuit descent and her family and roots extend deep into the Kobuk River Valley, which inspires and informs her writing. Mathilda Zeller is a pen name, honoring two of her resilient great-grandmothers.
