Episode 72: T. Frohock Interview

Travis interviews author T. Frohock about her latest book from Harper Voyager, A Song With Teeth. It’s the third novel in the Los Nefilim series, which follows the half-angel Nefilim through the political strife of the Spanish Civil War and World War 2.

Teresa and Travis discuss the women spies of World War 2, the Nazi attempt to create super soldiers with methamphetamine, and the struggle to research historical fascism in a world that uncomfortably mirrors the past.

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About T. Frohock

A Song With Teeth

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Transcript:

[intro music fades in]

Travis: George Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” And these days, stories about fascism and learning from past mistakes are more important than ever.

Welcome to the Fantasy Inn, where we share our love for all things fantasy and discuss the broader speculative fiction industry. I’m your host, Travis Tippens.

This week’s interview is with author T. Frohock. Her latest book is A Song With Teeth, the third novel and the Los Nefilim series from Harper Voyager.

Teresa and I discussed the women spies of World War Two, the Nazi attempt to create super soldiers with methamphetamine, and the struggle to research historical fascism in a world that uncomfortably mirrors the past.

And with that, let’s jump into the interview.

[intro music fades out]

Travis: Welcome to the Fantasy Inn, Teresa! I’ve been looking forward to this chat for a while.

T. Frohock: Oh, thank you. I’m so happy to be here. I’m so happy anywhere now.

Travis: Yeah. Yeah. That’s a very fair statement during the year 2020 and unfortunately, 2021 is kind of, you know, bigger and badder 2.0, so…

T. Frohock: Well I was so excited. I put on makeup and everything. [laughs]

Travis: [laughs] Yeah. This, this is about the extent of my social gatherings as well for, for a while now.

T. Frohock: Yeah.

Travis: Well I guess to start off by just taking you way back, can you remember what first made you fall in love with science fiction and fantasy?

T. Frohock: Oh, definitely. I usually tell the story any time anybody asks. But I’ll never forget, my father was very big on taking us to the library when I was a child. That was our… Every Saturday morning we went to the library and we would stay there until they closed at noon. And I’ll never forget I was walking… I was in the fiction looking for something to read and I came across a book called The Forgotten Beasts of the Eld by Patricia McKillip.

And that was my first real introduction into fantasy.

And I will just never forget how lyrical and beautiful the story was. And I remember feeling so attached to the protagonists and couldn’t understand why she would want to leave all of her magical creatures to go out with a guy, you know, and that part of it just always disturbed me. But I think the rest of it. I love the story.

And from there I really just fell in love with fantasy, moved on to Peter S Beagle. And from there I read The Hobbit and a lot of it was starting to come out in animation at that time. But I was about 12 when that happened. And then after that it was just like falling into a hole. I went from fantasy to horror and spent a lot of my youth reading horror.

Started in Stephen King, read a lot of his novels as they first came out. And from him to Peter Straub and it was just, I really loved horror more than anything else. So when Dark Fantasy came in vogue, I was just in Seventh Heaven. And some of my more recent favorites was Christopher Buehlman’s Between Two Fires, which just was all my favorite things in one book. It was historical fiction, it had to do with a knight and the Cathars, and angels coming down from heaven. I mean, it was just really a very, very cool book. And the scenes that he wrote, the horror of it was just so well done. I mean, when you can scare me, you’ve done something.

So that’s pretty much what the trajectory has been. I mean, it’s just I’ve always loved fantasy and horror, some science fiction. Science fiction usually needs to have some horror for me to really enjoy it. Aliens. I remember seeing all of those when they first came out in the movies. Yeah.

And it was just doing great movies. I mean, and they weren’t slasher flicks because that was the one thing I never really could stand. I didn’t like the Friday the 13th movies or anything like that. I really was raised more or less on the old Bram Stoker Dracula movies, Christopher Lee, Vincent Price, all of them.

I’m telling you how old I am. [laughs]

They were just really great movies and very Gothic and very much about the mood of the piece. Poe, that type of thing, and those were the kinds of things that I really, really liked.

And so you will see some of those things show up in my own fiction from time to time just because I just like that creepy, ghostly feel of the Gothic horror more than anything else. So that was how it began and where it wound up. I don’t know where it’s going from this point forward [laughs].

Travis: I personally have not read all that much horror. That’s definitely a weak spot for me, I’d like to get into it more. I think most of my encounters with horror has been kind of like what you’re saying with the Dark Fantasy.

So as someone who came from the fantasy genre, now a lot of those genre walls are breaking down. And so there’s been some horror elements in some of my favorites over the last few years.

T. Frohock: I think sometimes people confuse grimdark with horror. I’ve seen that a lot. Because people assume that grimdark is the same thing as horror and I think there are enough differences between the two that they overlap in places. And even though they’re different, they overlap in several places. And I think that’s what kind of scratches that Dark Fantasy itch for a lot of people. They get a dose of horror without reading actual horror novels, because I don’t think grimdark goes quite as far as some horror novels.

And then again, you can break that into two different types where you have more mainstream horror that you see in the book stores and stuff, and then you see some more intense forms of horror that don’t always make it into the mainstream. But they’re still they’re really, really good.

I like horror because it really delves into a person’s psyche more than anything else. And what scares us is usually what’s in us. So that’s one reason why I really like horror. It’s just very intense in terms of looking into who we are and what we are and what scares us. I know that’s weird, but that’s me. [laughs]

Travis: No, it’s it’s not weird. It’s fascinating. And I mean, I don’t think anyone who is a fan of any kind of genre fiction is going to think you’re weird for liking horror for those reasons.

T. Frohock: Yeah. You even look at something like Lord of the Rings had several elements of horror in it. I mean, when you really stop and look at some of the events that happened in the novel, they could be translated in a lot deeper fashion than sometimes I think some films have made them out to be. I think they’ve made them out a lot lighter in terms of how they’ve interpreted the text. So. But that’s me. I’d make it really dark and scary.

Travis: [laughs]

T. Frohock: But that’s not where my talent lies. That’s not, you know. [laughs]

Travis: Exactly! Exactly, right? So I am curious, then, how you went from being this big reader and a fan of horror and fantasy sometimes as well. How did you go from that to becoming a writer? So what was kind of your “writerly origin story?”

T. Frohock: What happened was when I was younger, I was taking some courses at the community college and one of them was a creative writing course. And in that course, I met Lisa Cantrell, who went on to publish several books with tours back in the 80s, and she really mentored me in my writing. She’s a wonderful, wonderful person.

As a matter of fact, we lost touch with one another and reconnected when I was writing the Los Nefilim novels. And she had a lot of input, especially on on the first novel Where Oblivion Lives. She really helped me narrow down and stay on task in a lot of areas in the book.

So she mentored me and I tried writing for a while. I had an agent. I wasn’t able to get anything published and I more or less just quit for several years. I had a young daughter and I devoted myself to raising her. I went back to school and got a degree as a paralegal and went to work first for a law office and then for a library, community college library.

And when I was in my forties, I thought, I really want to try writing again. And what I wanted to do was, I knew I did well with characters, I knew I did well with writing them. But what I wanted to do was to take a course and help me with plotting, because that was where my weak spot was.

And so I took an online course for creative writing and that was where Miserere came into existence. I workshopped that novel through the workshop, or through the creative writing course I was taking, and spent a year writing it when my husband had knee surgery.

So I worked on the book then and I just thought it was the greatest thing. And I put it up into a workshop and everyone told me how terrible it was. And so then I cried. A lot. Because I thought, oh my God, I’m terrible at the thing I really want to do.

And then I started looking at it and I realized they were right. A lot of the things they had said about the story and the characterization and where I’d started the novel was quite correct. So I re-evaluated the whole thing, rewrote portions of it and sent it off for agents to look at.

And my first agent managed to sell it to Night Shade books right before Night Shade books went [farting noise], and [laughs] so there died the Katharoi series [laughs]. But it was a great experience for me because I was able to learn how to advise other writers as to what happens when your publisher goes into bankruptcy and tell them, you know, there is life after a series. If it doesn’t make it, there’s always something else.

While all that was going on, I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do next, and that was when I wrote The Garden, and that was never published. And it was just too much. It was too many things, all in one book. So I ended up rewriting it and it still never sold, so I just put it aside.

But that was where the characters of Guillermo and Diago and Miquel first appeared was in that novel. And I wrote another novel that wound up in the trunk and I was just getting very, very discouraged. So I decided novellas are the thing. I’ll try writing a novella, that’s going to be my last shot. I’m going to write the novella and I’m going to write it the way I want to write it. It’s going to be the best that I can do, but it’s also going to be my style and I’m going to own it.

So I wrote it and was shocked and amazed that Harper Voyager wanted to buy it [laughs] okay? And David Pomerico aked me, he said, “Do you have any more novellas that you would write in the series?”

And so I quickly came up with two more very short synopses for him, and they bought all three. And so that was what was in the first book. That was In Midnight’s Silence, Without Light or Guide, and The Second Death. And because I knew that they were going to publish all three of those novellas in an omnibus, once the third one was released, I went ahead and made them so that they could read like a novel, because I figure if I’m buying three novellas, I’m going to see them go all the way through.

So even though each one is a short contained story that you can read and enjoy by itself, they are connected enough that if you sit down and read them back to back, it’s like reading a novel.

So that was how that came about. So that was a long story.

So anyway, that was how I wound up being a writer. And what’s crazy is every time I say this is it, if it doesn’t work, I quit, mainly because I was ready just not to quit entirely, but to quit submitting and just relax and study the craft a little deeper. I wanted to step back and every time I’ve said that, I’ve sold something.

So I don’t know why that happens [laughs] completely beyond me, but that’s how it’s worked for me. So it’s really strange. Everything about me is strange.

Travis: Well, I absolutely hope that you’re not feeling like you need to quit any time soon. But I do hope that you continue selling more stories.

T. Frohock: [laughs] I’ve got some more ideas and some things I’m working on. I’ve really enjoyed the Los Nefilim series, I think. In some ways, I’ve loved doing it, in other ways, it’s made me very lazy. Because I’m so familiar with the world, it’s so easy [laughs] it’s so easy to slip into it and come up with stories from it. It also makes me extremely lazy when I’m approaching something new, because I’m always thinking, why is this so hard?

And it’s not that it’s hard, it’s that it’s new. And getting to know new characters is like getting to know new friends and new people. And there’s for me, I don’t know how other writers approach it, but for me it’s a lot of work and the biography for the characters in the background, because I like to feel like I know them one hundred percent before I put them on the page. Primarily because by doing that, I’m able to anticipate how they will act and react in certain situations.

Because I had a friend of mine once tell me there’s a biography and there’s a way to do a biography where you do height, eye color, stuff like that. There’s another biography that’s more of a personality biography that you want to do for them. What is their favorite movie or their favorite music? And what is the worst thing that’s ever happened to this character? Or what’s the best thing that’s ever happened to this character? And it’s a great way to kind of peel back the layers and create a whole person rather than just, you know, stick figure sticking up who’s going to just do A, B and C.

So it’s for me, that’s where I like to get into the nitty gritty of the story and the characters. That’s what fascinates me, is people and how we interact with one another, how we act under stress, how we internalize the things that happen to us from childhood up until we’re adults.

And most adults are still internalizing a lot of the things that happened to us as children, you know. So it’s just kind of, to me it just fascinates me. And I really enjoy looking at it through fiction.

Travis: So I think… I forget the name, exactly. I think you said it was The Garden, which was that original novel that you were writing and you had a lot of the seeds for these characters that came out in Los Nefilim. It’s interesting that you had it, I think, in 1348 in Spain. So why choose that as the original setting?

T. Frohock: I wanted to do something with the Black Death. I really did. What happened was I thought, everybody else is writing all this fantasy set in Teutonic knights: German knights, English Knights, French knights. Why don’t anybody ever do Spanish knights? Now, I know.

It was a whole ‘nother world [laughs] Spain, because of the way the whole Iberian Peninsula was fragmented during that time period, it wasn’t Spain. It was different areas: Castil, Catalonia, and Andalusia, and all these areas, they were like small countries into themselves. Each of them have their own king and they all hated each other. And it was [laughs] and it was just really incredible how different the political atmosphere was to the rest of Europe in that time period.

So the reason I had started in 1348 is because I thought it would be fairly easy. And nothing writing historical fiction is easy at all. I did learn a lot about how the Spanish knights learned from the Arabs who they were fighting, because what they would do is, is the Spanish knights go out in this really, really heavy, heavy armor. And because the Arabs were not fighting in heavy armor, they were able to run circles around the Christian Knights.

So what they did was, is they developed a lighter cavalry unit who basically fought in chainmail. And it was just really interesting how the two cultures adapted techniques from one another.

Travis: Hmm.

T. Frohock: Yeah, and it was just really interesting to read about. But none of that had anything to do with the book. I ended up, what I wanted to do with the book was to almost do a Beauty and the Beast kind of thing where they disappeared into this fairy land.

And it really didn’t work out because I had way too much, way too much involved with it. And the farther back you go in history, the harder it is in some ways because of the documentation or the lack of documentation. So I spent probably a lot more time in research than I did writing during that period.

So when I decided to bring them back, I just figured, let’s move them up. The original plan was for them to be Nefilim and to bring them up to the Spanish Civil War. But I had not plotted the series much farther than that.

So that was kind of why I started in nineteen thirty– I mean, not 19, 1348. And I had intended to bring it up to 1938 and kind of have lots of little adventures in between.

Travis: So what about the Spanish Civil War fascinates you so much. Why was that the end goal and why is that kind of the general time frame of the current series?

T. Frohock: Well, because they were already Spanish and I was being lazy and I didn’t want to have to move them to the country.

Travis: [laughs]

T. Frohock: And I know that sounds terrible, doesn’t it? [laughs] But it’s true. I figured they were already Spanish. All their names were Spanish, all of my my biographies for them were Spanish. And I just absolutely refused to deviate from that.

And the more I read about the Spanish Civil War, the more interested I became in it. What bothered me was, is that American audiences don’t understand the Spanish Civil War as much as they do World War Two.

A lot of that has to do with the fact that Franco didn’t die until the 1970s. And so until then, a lot of the archives were completely closed. Nobody could really get in and study what happened. That’s why you’re just now starting to see a lot of information about the Spanish Civil War start to come out historically and even in Spain too. Only now a lot of people are feeling kind of comfortable enough to talk about it. It was a very repressive period.

So I thought if I’m going to bring an American audience into Spain, then I need to bring them in in the early 30s, when a lot of the political instability was just beginning to take hold. And so that’s what I did. And so that’s why Los Nefilim was set I think in 1931. I just wanted to kind of get the audience involved in the characters more than anything else.

But I also wanted to set that stage of the way the right and the left were starting to become opposed to one another. And all of these little intrigues were going on in the background, political intrigues between the different groups. And I wanted to reflect that through the Nefilim. And also, Germany was getting involved in Spain before the war actually started, as well. They were starting to send feelers out to see what was going on.

And that’s one reason why when I see people say, oh, well, all these people are white or all these people are the same race, the same nationality, and it’s never like that, especially in a country like Spain. You’ve got all sorts of people coming in and out from different nationalities. They don’t just happen to pop in for a day or two. A lot of them are there to make serious contacts.

So to me, if you want to talk about something that’s unrealistic is when you talk about an area that has no real outside contact with the world as a whole, especially when you’re in a place like Barcelona, which is the seaport, where you’ve got people coming and going all the time. So it was just a fascinating time period to me.

Everything from the early 30s on through the 40s, was just incredible. The rest of the world was reeling from World War One. It hadn’t really hit in Spain at that time because the Spanish really made a lot of money off of World War One. They wound up selling weapons. They were neutral. So they sold weapons. They made money off of that. So I don’t know, it was just to me, it was just really interesting, all the history behind it.

So when I started pulling it in for the Nefilim, I wanted to make them a part of that history and put them in Spain and sort of bring it up through the wars.

Travis: So we’ve sort of talked about the Nefilim and everything for a while now. We haven’t really given our audience kind of a good idea of just what the heck is this series about, right? So can you kind of just give, like, a brief overview of what the whole Los Nefilim books are about?

T. Frohock: Well, they’re like gangsters. Kind of. [laughs] What happens is that I have I have a little bit of a background in religion. And some of the Old Testament psuedepigrapha talks about Nephilim. They call them the Sons of Angels. But at the same time, I was thinking, wow, that would be the sons and the daughters of angels. I mean, why wouldn’t they be girls, too?

And the legend goes that the watchers came down and had sex with women and then they made giants. That’s the legend. But I thought, what if there is a whole ‘nother race of beings called Nephilim? And what if they controlled the dialogue, so to speak? What if the demons were actually the Old Earth gods that were here first? What if the angels were a warrior race that came from another dimension and tried to take over this realm? So that’s where the basis of all the what ifs came into play.

And then I thought, what if Solomon, who had so much material written about him from Jewish, Arabic and Christian, have all written about Solomon. And he was supposed to be like a priestly king and had all sorts of magical things, he had a magic ring, and a magic carpet. He had all these magical things, he could control the demons. And what if he was really a Nephil? Part angel? What if there was a breeding program? OK.

And the more I thought about it, the more I realized, wouldn’t it be cool if Solomon was like the king of this section of Nephilim, and he was betrayed by a close friend? And as I was reading the Psalms, I found the name Assaf. And it’s really a nebulous individual.

There are some that say he composed some of the Psalms with David or with Solomon, but there’s not a real clear indication of who he is. However, it is unusual that you’ve got David, who is a King, Solomon, who was the king, and then Assaf as an author of some psalms.

So I thought, what if they were really close and then what if Assaf betrayed Solomon somehow? And Solomon got really mad and pretty much wrote him out of the text? And that was how the back story came across for Guillermo and Diago. And Miquel was part of the equation in The Garden as well. So I brought him forward into this.

And he’s kind of caught between both Solomon and.. or rather Guillermo and Diago. He’s in love with Diago, but at the same time his allegiance goes to Guillermo. And I was always thinking, what kind of push and pull would that take on a person? To love two people for two completely different reasons and to be loyal to both of them? What kind of situation would that put him in? So that’s where the backstory and the magic comes in.

And what happens when we meet them in the 1930s is that Guillermo is like a warlord and he’s claimed Spain. And the Nefilim have something called the Inner Guard and they are in allegiance to the angels. And they work kind of like CIA, military intelligence, and they keep an eye on the demons. That’s their job.

But what’s happened is, is they’re getting pulled into all these little mortal conflicts which aren’t very small [laughs].

Travis: No.

T. Frohock: Right. So it’s almost like it was the idea of “as above, so below.” So there’s a war in heaven, there’s a war on earth. And that’s kind of where the whole series was going.

But what I wanted to do was to take the big picture and bring it down just on these three characters and their relationship to one another and how they’ve gone from hating one another to being friends again to supporting one another, and we see that through the adventures that they have and that’s what the series is about.

I know a lot of people like the flash and the magic–and that’s in there! I try to put that in there.

Travis: [laughs]

T. Frohock: Because that’s for me. That’s my favorite part.

Travis: Yeah.

T. Frohock: Yeah. And the rest of it, though, is the personalities and how different they are yet how hard they have to work together.

Travis: Yeah, I know for me, I really loved those three core characters of Miquel, Diago, and Guillermo just because I really don’t see that many fundamental foundational male friendships at the center of most fantasy novels, really, any novels. So that was a really nice change, I think.

T. Frohock: Well, I wanted to take some of the toxic masculinity out of it because I think that’s something that’s kind of entered into the literature over the last several years. When I go back through and I read how men treated each other, especially in the 30s and 40s, there wasn’t all this toxic masculinity okay. They weren’t afraid to show each other how they felt about one another.

And I’ll never forget reading. There’s a novel. I think it’s K.L. Reich, I’d have to look it up. And it’s about two Spaniards who wound up in a concentration camp at Mauthausen.

And one of the first nights they are together, they’re very, very close friends. And one of the first night together, they are separated by another person who’s sleeping between them and they reach over this man to hold hands, you know, and these are the kind of relationships that men have and had.

And what they also remind me of is the men I know. I’m very lucky. I don’t know many men who are that toxic “manly manly men.” Most of the men I know are very gracious to one another [laughs]. And they they treat one another completely differently than what you see in some of the films and things that are popular now.

So it was something I really wanted to look at and to reflect on in the story, because I think it’s something that we need to see more of. We need to see men nurturing men…

Travis: Yep.

T. Frohock: …through friendship or, you know, as as Miquel and Diago nurture one another as husbands, as lovers. I have several gay friends and all of them are just very tender with one another in ways that you don’t see portrayed a lot of times in film or in literature.

A lot of times the gay man is either comic relief or the tragic guy dying of AIDS. And there’s a whole breadth of human beings out there. And I think it’s important that we recognize through literature and a whole different scope of the way people are.

And I think we need to take that into consideration just as much as we do the other stories. Because I don’t want to put those down. I think it’s important that we see stories about people with AIDS. And I think it’s important that we see stories about people who have toxic masculinity. But at the same time, I don’t think we should celebrate that toxicity.

And I want to see that men nurture one another.

Travis: And they are like, all three of them do seem to almost share the role of main character, even though Diago is arguably the main character. But I think it’s interesting because I’ve heard that Guillermo was actually originally the focus of the story. And then you switched it more towards Diago.

T. Frohock: I did. After I read The Garden, I realized that I was telling Diago’s story through Guillermo, which is… I guess to me that’s kind of, it was cheating Diago of his moment. Because to tell his story through the straight guy’s point of view is shifting the focus from Diago to Guillermo. And I wanted to shift that focus back to Diago.

This is his story, and it should be seen through his eyes all the way through from beginning to end. So I did shift that and when I did that, I just found it took on a whole new dimension.

And I love Diago because he’s this little short guy. He’s not really strong, butch, nasty, but he can be really mean when you push him in a corner. But he’s out of all of them, he’s got such a conscience, you know. Because to me, the angels are very warlike. And so the angelic Nephilim are very warlike.

The demonic Nephilim are very devious and conniving. And here’s Diago and he’s just kind of caught between them. And throughout all this, he learns to be his own person. And it only took like five hundred or so years and a lot of nurturing from Miquel, but he made it [laughs].

Travis: Yeah [laughs] Well, so we have talked a lot about the historical research you’ve done and the different aspects of history that have worked their way into the story.

I know for me, one thing that really stood out to me was the introduction of the drug Pervitin in Carved from Stone and Dream. So apparently this was actually used in an attempt to create like these Nazi super soldiers and played kind of a major role in World War Two.

T. Frohock: Right. Right around, I think it was the early 30s. Well, it really started before that, in the late 20s. Germany was doing a lot of drug experimentation.

Part of that goes back to Germany wanting to be self-sustaining in a lot of ways. That’s why rather than getting imports they were working on synthetic gasoline, things like that. And so that brought up the labs and the predominance of studying chemical interactions.

And as that happened, they, of course, were working with medication. And it wasn’t unusual. I mean, everybody I don’t know if you’ve heard it or not, but Coca-Cola originally had cocaine and that’s where you got that.

Travis: [laughs]

T. Frohock: And yeah. And I mean, that was in America. And there was a time when cocaine was actually legal. Some of those things kind of went away as they saw some of the aspects of the disadvantages of it.

Freud, for one, I think he used cocaine quite a bit and he was addicted to it. So in the early thirties, they were moving away from that. But at the same time, the Germans were doing a lot of tests on how to enhance intelligence for their soldiers.

So what they did is they started experimenting with the drug Pervitin. That was eventually the brand name of it, what they were experimenting with with meth, OK, in American terms. There’s a very long medical term for it. And don’t even ask me to pronounce it, OK? [laughs] It’s just not going to happen.

But what they were doing was, is they were experimenting with meth. And they were trying to see if they could enhance the soldier’s ability to stay awake and to function better. And what they found out was that the meth didn’t really give them any more intelligence. They didn’t do better on tests with meth. As a matter of fact, they did slightly worse. But at the same time, they were able to stay awake for huge amounts of time.

And productivity went up in some ways just from the sheer endurance level they had. And it also turned them into berserkers, which is just wonderful from the military aspect of it, because that’s what you want. There is a whole army full of lean, mean fighting machines, except these were kind of crazy.

So what they did was they started manufacturing it and giving it to the army. But that didn’t happen until the invasion of France, when they were producing massive loads of it. And it kind of became the linchpin in Carved from Stone and Dream by accident.

What I do is, when I’m starting to write a book, I start researching about that historical period. And when you’re dealing with a war of the magnitude of the Spanish Civil War merging into World War Two, and you can even go back to World War One, you’ve just got such a huge amount of information. What you want to do, or what I try to do as an author, is pull out interesting nuggets. And there were certain aspects of it I wanted to cover.

I wanted to cover the Spanish retreat from the Spanish Civil War. All those people fleeing Franco weren’t really running away, they considered themselves going back to France to regroup and then go back into Spain and retake Spain. That was the original plan.

What happened was that they wound up emigrating, a lot of them. Some went back after the war. But that was one thing I wanted to cover. And Pervitin kind of came out of left field for me.

I read Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich. I believe it’s Norman Ohler who wrote it. And it is just a fascinating history of how the Germans first learned about meth and began experimenting with it in labs and redesigning the drug to get the effect that they wanted. And when they started mass producing it, I can’t remember, he gave just like an obscene number of pills that went to the German army during the French invasion by Germany in 1944.

When you go back and look at that, you realize, and I never want to put down strategic planning because there was quite a bit of that. But when you have these guys hopped up on Pervitin, they move the entire French and British… They cornered the British on Dunkirk in record time.

I mean, it was just amazing the speed that they went. And they went that speed because they didn’t sleep, for two and three days. And they were horribly vicious.

There was one account, that Ohler gives of one general who is leading his battalion and just completely decimates a section of the French army. I mean, they were literally running over the soldiers in tanks, just by God and get those pineapples to Hawaii kind of [laughs] kind of mentality going on there. I mean, they were just gonna go.

It was just amazing the brutality that came out of it too, you know. You can make jokes, but it was just a horrific invasion. So as I was doing all that research and looking into it, I wanted to try and figure out what would happen if you would give a supernatural creature who has essentially been bred for war because that’s what the angels in Los Nefilim do there.

They have this massive breeding program to have their mortal army in place, or their Nephilim army in place, in case there’s ever an uprising of demons. So they are trying to genetically create the most perfect vocal combinations they can so that their soldiers can conquer the demons, which is fine.

You take that up on Pervitin and what happens then? So I had to look into the side effects and heart attacks. The Germans had generals just dropping dead in the field from heart attacks because they’d taken so much. Soldiers as well. And the addiction itself was a problem.

So I started looking at all these things and thought, oh, what happens if we give it to a character? And that character is usually very kind of even keel… What happens then? And it was really interesting to write it from that perspective.

And I don’t want to say too much because it gives away spoilers, but I feel kind of bad because part Carved from Stone and Dream kind of gotten eaten by the pandemic. [laughs] About the time it came out, everything started shutting down and everybody’s talking about A Song with Teeth and I’m going, yeah but this one. This one.

And this one, my editor loved. He thought, oh, that’s even better than Where Oblivion Lives, he liked that. I think because it moves so fast. It moved… My agent read it and she calls it John Wick meets A Band of Brothers. And that’s exactly, exactly how it felt. But boy, it was intense to write it too [laughs].

Travis: Yeah, I know by the time I finished–I listened to the audiobook for it–and by the time I finished I was like, OK, like now we’re probably getting into the main story, right? Because we just had the beginning part, like, oh, it’s over. Like it went that fast. Like that’s how fast paced it was.

T. Frohock: [laughs] Well, I didn’t mean for it to happen quite that fast, but I was also on the deadline too. Deadlines are good for writers. Because what happens with a deadline is that means we start it and we write consistently and constantly and then we actually turn something in on time. If that book had been left with me alone without a deadline, I would probably still be tweaking it before I would send it in.

Travis: Yeah, I mean, doubly so with someone who works so much history into their writing, too, right? Because there’s always a little bit more you could squeeze out.

T. Frohock: [laughs]

Travis: Yeah. So another one of the history moments that I think is so cool is in A Song with Teeth, you have Ysabel, this young nefilim in her first incarnation who we’ve seen kind of grow up from a child throughout the course of the books. And she’s originally eager to learn spycraft.

And now she’s like this competent teenage spy. So I understand you based Ysabel off some of what you learned about the actual women spies of World War Two. So I guess can you share any of those daring stories of real life spycraft that inspired you?

T. Frohock: Yeah, I had some. As a matter of fact, it was really fascinating. First of all, the variety of women who were involved. Some of them were French citizens. There was an American involved. And there was another lady who was actually French and she married an Englishman and emigrated to England. Let me see the best one.

First of all, they were part of something called the SOE. And the SOE is the Special Operations Executive. It was also nicknamed as Churchill’s Secret Army or the Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. And what they actually were were terrorists.

And if you’re on Netflix, they actually had a really cool documentary about the SOE where people from the 21st century, just regular people, went through a mock up of what actual SOE agents were required to go through before they were certified to be put in the field.

An example of one of the tests they give to see who’s able to do it and who isn’t is they were all sitting there doing a lecture and they’re all sitting there taking notes. And then suddenly out of the blue, a man with a gun runs through the room. And of course, they all leap to their feet trying to figure out what kind of test this is. And the instructor tells them, he says, sit down, describe the man, OK?

And I mean, when you see it, I mean, he’s there like, you know, for, like, point two seconds, he’s gone. So then they have to describe the man. And they had to do extremely difficult calisthenics. It was really more than boot camp level.

They had to understand codes, coding, Morse code. Usually there was an agent in the field with a radio operator with them. Now, some women were actually involved with it from the beginning.

And please forgive me, I have a hearing impairment, so I mispronounce everything. But Marie-Madeleine Fourcade was probably one of the first spies. She was a French woman. She had a set of spies. I think she commanded right around three thousand agents. About 20 percent of them were women. And her group’s name was Alliance. But the Nazis called them Noah’s Ark because all of the agents took names of animals. That was their code names.

And she was known as Hedgehog. That was her code name. And she chose that code name because the hedgehog is really a very resilient animal and it knows how to burrowed deep [laughs] okay. And she did.

And she actually survived. She actually escaped from a Nazi jail. She was in her apartment and had just met one of her chief lieutenants in the resistance and he had just left and the Nazi agents came in. The Gestapo comes in and they’re looking for the man and she tries to tell them, well, the man that’s left, you know, there’s no man here, there’s no man here.

Why would you even think, because you know this is 1940. Why would you even think I’m with a man? Well, they eventually somehow found the papers that she had in there. They arrested her. They took her to a holding cell. She was going take a cyanide pill.

But soon she realized that if she took the cyanide, her lieutenant and his family would be wiped out and they would lose the whole spy line. So she looked at the bars on the window of her cell. She found out she could get two of them loose.

She was really frightened, of course. And so she was sweating and she had heard a story from a father about how thieves would smear oil on the bodies to slip through narrow spaces, so she was helping the sweat would do it for her.

And long story short, she managed to squeeze herself through the cell. She ended up having… She took a dress off, dropped her dress down, got through naked, tied the dress around her neck, ran across the street and was hiding in a crypt, trying to figure out what she was going to do next.

And she realized she still had to warn her friend that the Gestapo would be waiting for him when he came back to her apartment the next day. Then she realized she had to go back to the same town and get past the Nazis to get word to him what was going on.

So she sucked it up. She got moving again. She went through the town, past the guard, didn’t pay much attention to her.

Then she realized the Nazis would be setting up checkpoints once they realized she’d escaped, because now it’s like the crack of dawn. So as she’s walking, she sees these women working in the field and they’re basically gleaning in corn, picking up any missed corn from the threshers. So she just kind of veers off in the field and joins them.

And she’s watching the Nazis set up the roadblock. And she just keeps moving with the women and they’re not paying any attention to the women in the field. She just keeps moving with the women until she’s past the roadblock, makes it to the lieutenant’s house, warns him, and manages to save the spy line.

She actually made it to the end of the war. And hers, I think, was one of the few lines that actually survived to the end of the war. She was extremely resourceful. Interesting, interesting woman.

Another one was Virginia Hall. She was an American. She had a wooden leg. She only had one leg. She had been in France driving ambulances for the French against the Germans. She would drive ambulances, one leg. And she nicknamed her leg Cuthbert. And so she had a nickname for it.

And eventually she started operating and setting up her spy networks without any help from the SOE at all. She did hers independently. And what was funny was that at one point she had to get through the Pyrenees and I think she did eventually join the SOE, but don’t quote me on that. I can’t remember exactly.

But she was trying to escape. They would escape through the Pyrenees and then to Spain and from Spain to Portugal, who was neutral. If you could get past the Spanish, who were not neutral, they were kind of quietly backing Hitler. And there’s a whole ‘nother history of that. I’m not going to go there right now.

But as she was going through the mountains, she radioed her contact in the UK and she said Cuthbert is giving me trouble. Because he’d asked her how things were going. She said Cuthbert is giving me trouble. And he said eliminating him. So.

Travis: [laughs]

T. Frohock: [laughs] Because he thought she was talking about one of the people with her. You know and I mean, we laugh. But that was that was exactly how it went.

The last one I’m going to tell you about was Odette Sansom. She was also known as Odette Hallowes and Odette Churchill, and she was a part of the SOE. She was interesting in that she was actually captured, I want to say, in 1944. So she was captured late in the war.

And she endured horrible, horrible torture, never gave up any of the people in her spy line at all. And she was just almost used as an example at times. There was one episode where an airman who had been captured talked about actually seeing her in the hallway and she looked so horrible.

I mean, they pulled her fingernails out, her toenails out, and she was just so thin. They made her sign her own… He said it just terrified him, just looking at her as to what the Nazis could do.

And you have to realize that this was state sanctioned violence. I mean, the government didn’t just say it’s OK to do this. They gave approval for doing it.

So you want to think of the psychological ramifications of that just on regular people like you and me, you know, would you go through that for your country? For an ideal?

Travis: Nope.

T. Frohock: Knowing what you’re going up against. Yeah, see. And so in some ways that were very, very brave. And in other words, they were daredevils, too.

But anyway, Sansom, whose codename was Lise. She was forced to sign her own death warrant, and they sent her to a concentration camp. But she was eventually liberated, so they didn’t kill her. She made it through the war, too.

So there’s a really great book called D-Day Girls by Sarah Rose. And she talks about a lot of these women that it’s just really fascinating. There’s another one, Codename Lise, which is really good if you want to read about that.

But they’re all just, I mean just, a huge number of fascinating women. And what I wanted to do was take all of these really incredible, ingenious women and roll them up in the Ysabel. Because she has that kind of mettle.

You know, she was the one in… A lot of people don’t remember it from Los Nefilim. But I established her character very early on when she’s telling Rafael, who she just barely knows that, you know, we’re Los Nefilim. Nobody screws with us.

And she’s been like that, I mean, at that time, she’s like seven. So here she comes up and now she’s a woman and she knows what she was born to do. And she’s OK with that. And she takes no prisoners.

And I would one day would really love to do some more stories just with her, because she is just this beautiful combination of both her mother and her father. She’s got some of Guillermo’s sentimentality, but at the same time, she’s really more angelic and she’s going to get the job done.

Travis: Yeah, that was one of the treats, even just from book two, was seeing Ysabel like come into her own and like actually show where she’s gone from this, like, very enthusiastic kid who wants to be a spy and take over the family business.

T. Frohock: Yeah. So in A Song with Teeth she really comes into herself and she goes up against her uncle Jordi, who is old and dangerous. And I won’t say anything more because there are spoilers involved. But she really rises to the moment. And so she was just a load of fun to write. She really was.

Travis: Yeah. And so we’ve already gone to some dark territory talking about all of this history because, you know, history is dark…

T. Frohock: [laughs]

Travis: …but to keep us in that realm, you’ve mentioned before that your research into the 1930s Spain kind of uncomfortably paralleled the current political trajectory of the United States. So what was that experience like for you?

T. Frohock: Well, it was it was dreadful, to be honest. I mean, really, it was. I think a lot of it reflected back to Spain in the thirties when the atmosphere had become so politicized and so radicalized.

In the early thirties, or I think it was like in 1936, January of 1936–there’s a scary parallel for you. Spain had its last free elections before the Nationalists took over in the summer. That was when they actually began their offensive.

And during that time it was Antony Beevor in The War of Spain, talked about how polarized the political commentary had become so that on the right, a vote for the right was a vote for Jesus, and a vote on the left was a vote for the workers.

And they had become so diametrically opposed and they had become so polarized that they couldn’t meet in the middle and compromise. And without that compromise, democracy simply cannot work.

So it’s been incredibly frustrating, I guess would be the best way to say it. Having watched all of that go on in America at the same time as I’m reading about what happened in 1930s Spain and what happened really in France as well, became very polarized.

They didn’t reach the level of either Spain or Germany, but Germany also utilized that polarization to good effect to put their leaders in place. So it was, it was just really, really difficult to watch on all levels and be writing about it at the same time.

So it was frustrating on the one hand and kind of depressing on the other. So it was really difficult for me as a writer. I wanted to keep the novels to some extent fun, OK. In terms of readable and not so depressing and so sad that people really wouldn’t want to read them.

And at the same time, keep the political situation focused in the background. But I think in some ways it lent quite a bit of reality to what I was writing because we were experiencing it here in the United States at the time.

As a matter of fact, I even had some people tell me, which in a way is a compliment, that they couldn’t read my books during that time period because the parallels are so close to what was happening in the US and they read as escapism. And because it was so real, they couldn’t quite escape from reality, if that makes any sense. And it did to me.

And it was kind of disappointing that they weren’t able to read it because I want people to enjoy the books, not just… But she told me. She said, I am, as soon as things change, I’ll be able to get into them again, which is why I like to make the characters so important in the books. And to show how the characters can survive by nurturing one another.

I think that was a big point to me for all three of the books, not just men and healthy relationships and men nurturing men, but how families can pull together and support one another emotionally through some really scary times, which is what we’ve had recently as well. So that was it was difficult.

But at the same time, I think it really meant a lot of reality to the characters perceptions of what was going on around them.

Travis: Yeah, and books, especially those in a historical setting, are kind of timeless as well. So just because it’s very uncomfortable to what we’re seeing now doesn’t mean that, you know, hopefully this time next year and a few months from now or something, it’s a very different situation.

T. Frohock: [laughs] Yeah, exactly.

Travis: But yeah, I mean, so it was a difficult time period to be researching, but also apparently it was a difficult time to be actually writing. Because I believe you said you rewrote almost the entirety of A Song with Teeth in just six weeks. So how the hell did you survive that?

T. Frohock: It was it was due to my husband, a large part due to my husband. He took over all of the cooking, the cleaning, everything. He did it. While I would basically get up at five thirty.

I would write before work. I’d go to work, come home. He would have dinner ready, we’d get the dishes up. And then it was back to writing from the time from then until like 11 or 12 o’clock, however long it took.

And at the same time all that was going on. I got my notes back from my editor, my agent, and my A1 beta reader, Glenda Harrison, who’s just absolutely marvelous. And they really pegged a lot of issues with the first draft that I had turned in back in February.

So what I had started to do was… And I think part of it goes back to your previous question, it was kind of a point of self preservation. I had written some rather dreamlike things, mainly to pull myself out of the situation more than, and the reader as well.

It was almost like a cushioning effect with the prose. And it didn’t work. It didn’t work for any of them. So I had to completely rethink how I was going to do those scenes, especially from the concentration camps.

And I wanted them to be realistic. I wanted them to be intense. And it was, it was really, really intense for some readers of the ARC had problems with it. Others did not. So, you know, your mileage will vary greatly there.

But in order to do that, in order to rewrite those first parts of it, it creates in any novel a butterfly effect where you have to kind of go through and correct everything.

And this necessitated some scenes, especially the last quarter of the book had to be completely rewritten. So it was just constantly writing, constantly book. I had no movie, no books, no TV, nothing. I just did nothing but right and ate, slept and breathed in that world.

This was also in March when we were having to revert to remote working and oh my God, it was just a nightmare. Because I had to bring half my office here at home and just, I don’t adjust to things really well, really quick. It’s just not in my makeup.

So I had to, I just didn’t do well emotionally a lot of times. So it was, it was just craziness. And I don’t even know how I got through it. You can do it if you have to. It’s not fun [laughs] and I don’t recommend it [laughs].

But I’m very happy with it, very, very happy with how the story came out and where it left the characters. And I think they’re in a good place. I wanted to express some of that hope, some of the hope that we felt at that time or wanted to feel at that time and couldn’t.

Travis: Absolutely. And so I know you said you left the characters in a good place, but will we ever see any more Los Nefilim stories? Maybe something set in the Spanish Civil War, maybe something in another incarnation, or maybe picking up after these stories?

T. Frohock: Absolutely. I sometimes I write them just as writing exercises and also because I know the characters and it’s kind of relaxing for me. And sometimes I refer to it as fan fiction of my own stuff.

But readers tend to enjoy the little vignettes that I put on the blog, sometimes just quiet moments with the characters, scenes that really wouldn’t have a place in the novel but work independently. One is A Rose, A Dragon that I put on the blog. It’s more like a short story.

Some of the other things are just like little snapshots of their lives than the characters because people tend to enjoy the characters so much. Some people have wanted me to write Guillermo, Diago, and Miquel in their first born lives, and I usually tell people, no, they were assholes. You wouldn’t enjoy that story. They weren’t nice people. And I sort of let that that one go at that.

I would like to write the Rasputin story. He makes a brief mention in A Song With Teeth, and I would like to write the story that goes along with that scene with Diago and Peter.

And I would also like to just write some stories with Ysabel because I just fell so in love with her and maybe her and post-World War Two Germany would be a lot of fun because she’s just she’s such a dynamic character. She’s the best of Guillermo and her mother, Juanita. And she’s got part of Guillermo’s sentimentality.

But at the same time, she’s going to get in there and take care of business, by God. So those are some of the things I would like to do when I have time.

Travis: Well, I know even outside of Los Nefilim, your blog says that you’re currently working on a modern Gothic horror. So is there anything about that you can share with us?

T. Frohock: Not a whole lot. I think the main thing is going to be it’s about adult adoptees, because I am an adult adoptee, so it would be an #OwnVoices kind of book. And it’s also going to be a lot like the scenes in Where Oblivion Lives, where Diago went into the Greer mansion and the haunted house kind of thing. I really like that kind of Gothic horror.

Usually when people think of horror, they think of slasher fic. And that’s only one aspect of horror, kind of like epic is only one aspect of fantasy.

It’s a lot of really, really intense Gothic horror out there. And those are the kinds of things I enjoy to read. So those are the kind of thing that it’ll hopefully be. Cross your fingers.

Travis: That sounds fascinating, and I’m looking forward to it. Well, speaking of looking forward to, something I like to kind of close out these interviews with, is just asking you, what’s one thing you’re excited about right now?

T. Frohock: I got, well I have a couple of things. One thing I’m excited about is I want to go to bookstores again. I’m so excited that vaccines are coming and hopefully we’ll be past the pandemic and be able to go to bookstores and just shop and enjoy ourselves.

And I also, I’m looking forward to being able to see people smile from a distance without having to see them behind a mask. That’s something I’m really looking forward to.

And to get back to going to cons, I’ve really started going enjoying cons again–conventions, science fiction conventions–and would like to start doing that again. Hopefully. Hopefully this summer.

Travis: Yes. [laughs] Yeah I just started going to cons in the last couple of years. So that got cut short.

T. Frohock: Oh, no.

Travis: Well, thank you so much, Teresa, for taking the time to have such an incredible conversation. I can’t wait for the world to experience this third novel and the Los Nephilim series, and I can’t wait to read what you write after that.

So until then, I’ll watch for you.

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T. Frohock: Oh, I will watch for you, too. Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Travis: You can find Teresa Frohock on Twitter as T_Frohock, on Facebook as Teresa Frohock, or at her website tfrohock.com. The Los Nefilim series takes a mountain of history, religion, and creative worldbuilding and condenses it into a character-driven fantasy series you can’t help but to love.

As always, you can find us over at thefantasyinn.com. Or click the invite in the show notes to join our discord server, where you can hang out with us in real time and find more books than you’ll ever be able to read. If you’ve been enjoying the podcast, consider nominating us for the Hugo Award for Best Fancast. Nominations are open from now through March 19th. And of course, don’t forget to subscribe to the show to catch all our future episodes.

That’s it for this week. Until next time.

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