TOLEDO – Daniel Kraus has written horror novels, a war novel that won the Pulitzer Prize and a nonfiction book about Night of the Living Dead. Earlier this summer, he brought his newest book to downtown Toledo. The Sixth Nik is his first work of science fiction.
Kraus recently appeared at the Toledo Main Branch Library as part of the Authors! Series, a ticketed event that included a copy of his new novel and a signing afterward. The visit came less than a year after Kraus won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Angel Down. The new genre wasn’t really the point going in for him.
“I think, kind of in the background of everything, is a desire to try everything,” Kraus said. “I’ve done most other genres. There’s still a few I have yet to get to.”
The Sixth Nik started much smaller, Kraus said, closer to a two-character play than a novel, built around a scene where the book’s young protagonist is held hostage by a robot. That scene survives in the finished book, but only as a minor plot.
“I wanted to do something that was sort of in the vein of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, kind of this battle of wills between two characters,” Kraus said. Working forward and backward from that scene, he kept running into a bigger story.
“It just sort of, as I came up with this idea and that idea and began to put the pieces together, it just sort of grew into that,” he said. The world grew piecemeal, only as the story needed it.
The novel follows Sisilla, a 9-year-old girl implanted with technology called “niks” as an infant and raised by a cult, the Nunavik, based in Greenland. She’s the 55th girl in a line bred for a short, “highest utility” life, usually ending between ages 9 and 11. After that, her head is removed and the technology is reused in the next girl.
“She’s someone who comes of age with her destiny sort of already locked, and is trained to look forward to a very short, eventful life in sacrifice to a better world,” Kraus said.
The character grew out of ideas about control: who gets to decide what happens to another person’s body and how young that control can take root.
“There’s really not anyone who would go into that willingly,” he said, “but there are various reasons that one would fall into it. The most basic one being that it happens too young for them to have a say in the matter, and that’s probably the greatest form of mind control of all.”
Reviewers have called the book horrifying on multiple levels: physically, emotionally, ethically. That was intentional, Kraus said, even though he thinks of it as science fiction first, not horror.
“I wanted it to be very visceral,” he said. “…There’s nothing that hits home more than things of the body, your own body. There’s nothing more visceral, so I thought it deserved a very visceral book.”
Sisilla is altered before she’s old enough to understand what’s happening to her and bodily autonomy runs through her story from there.
“In a sense, she’s been impregnated with other people’s desires and wants and goals,” Kraus said.
Kraus has built a career on refusing to repeat himself, moving between horror, war fiction and now science fiction.
“Any time I start a book, the main thing that guides it is that it’s as different as possible from the last book,“ he said. “That’s a horrendous way to run a career, because that’s the opposite of what most people want and most editors want and publishing in general wants.”
Early on he recognized the feeling of writing something too familiar.
“It made me feel like I was in danger of heading down a road where I would be producing content instead of art,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to stay hungry, as silly as that sounds, and stay on the edge.”
Despite that, he’s already working on the next one.
A sequel to The Sixth Nik is due out next June, the second of two planned books.
“I’ve never really written a real sequel before… But I just had so many ideas when I was working on this that I just started amassing this giant log of ideas for a second book, if I should ever do it. I did it.”
The Authors! series continues through the fall, with suspense writer Karin Slaughter appearing Aug. 13 and horror author Clay McLeod Chapman on Aug. 27.
