Hello again dear or listener, I am back for my next Breakdown (not the mental kind – that is scheduled on a weekly basis while offline), this time with an author who, incidentally, did cause an emotional crisis and give me a mother of a book hangover because of the cliffhanger she throws in front of us with her book. So I thought, what better way to work through my grievances with this woman than to ask her to let me pick her evil, evil, mind? Seriously, it’s been a year and a half since I read Asunder and I am still not ok.
For those who missed my inaugural post for this segment with author Anthony Ryan (check that out here if you like), Breakdown of Chapter was inspired by those Notes on a Scene interviews with movie directors, and is a chance for me to ask authors the deeper and more technical questions as well as to touch on topics that I can’t normally discuss in my reviews so as to avoid spoilers.
What if I got to pick an author’s brain fully and share it with those who have either read the book already or those who don’t mind the occasional spoiler? What is the author’s process like? Why did they make the narrative choices they did and so on.
My main goal with these interviews is, in fact, not only to scratch that fan itch but to also hopefully attract new readers to authors whose work I had an amazing time with and believe deserve all the love.
Let’s dive in!
Book Blurb
A decade ago, Karys Eska locked herself into an irrevocable compact with Sabaster: a terrifying eldritch being who granted her the power to speak to the dead. Ever since, she has paid the rent by investigating suspicious deaths around the troubled city she calls home. When an especially dangerous job goes sideways, she meets a dying stranger— an outwardly charming man named Ferain, who offers a ludicrous sum in exchange for her help.
Karys can’t say no.
But Ferain keeps his own desperate secrets, and his enemies will stop at nothing to see him eliminated. While attempting to save his life, Karys accidentally binds him to her shadow — an act that might doom them both.
If they want to survive, Karys and Ferain will need to learn to trust one another. Together, they must journey to the heart of a faded empire, all the while pursued by arcane horrors and the unquiet ghosts of their own pasts.
And all too soon, Karys knows, Sabaster will call in her debt.
Asunder – Chapter 31
My guest today is Kerstin Hall, and we’ll be talking about her most recent novel, Asunder, which was a finalist for both the Nebula and Locus Awards in 2024. Initially published through Tor Books that same year, Asunder was also picked up recently by Rebellion to be distributed through their imprint Solaris Books this January! Needless to say I loved this book (here you can find a longer review explaining how it killed me not so softly) and I am waiting with bated breath until we get sequel shaped news because we desperately need it.
While we wait in hope then, Ms. Hall is generously sharing some craft and storytelling secrets.
[This is your official warning for very minor spoilers overall except for one relatively big plot twist being discussed.]
Short recap of events prior to this chapter:
Having reached Varesli, Karys and her friends, Ferain, Haeki, and Winola, find themselves stranded without the transport they need to continue their journey. They are compelled to accept the hospitality of a rich eccentric named Vuhas, who introduces them to a covert club called the Grateful Society.
It turns out that this society is comprised of murderous skin thieves. Vuhas wants to offer Ferain membership … although doing so necessitates obliterating Karys.
Karys, poisoned, allows Ferain to take over control of her body. He promises to set things right.
Let’s start from your writing process for this book a little more in general:
For those completely new to your work and to Asunder, how did the story and characters first come to you?
Asunder emerged from a short story I wrote around 2018, which covered some of the same events that eventually appeared in the novel — specifically the part where Karys returns to the village where she grew up.
That was a difficult yet important part to get through personally, I can see how it had time to develop!
Is there anything special about this chapter in particular that you can remember thinking or doing while writing it?
I drafted this sequence about…three and a half years ago now? Probably in the first half of 2022. My memory is a bit fuzzy. I know it was a really fun chapter to write, and a section I had been building towards. Sort of the mini-climax of an act.
Oh wow, that’s a while! I can barely remember last year.
Did you plot out the story beats necessary for it or did you just have a general goal in mind and “let it happen”?
It’s a relatively chaotic, feverish sequence, but none of the detail is incidental—and what was especially fun for me is that the overwhelming density of the action enabled a lot of authorial sleight of hand. I don’t know, there’s just a real creative kick in being sneaky. It always makes me feel weirdly gleeful.
So I knew upfront that I needed to drop a lot of detail about Toraigus and amity beads in order to set up a later twist. Ideally, I wanted to accomplish this without the reader noticing they were being clued in. I also wanted the reader to learn more about Ferain, and to infer his feelings for Karys…and I trusted that the character stuff would do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of distracting everyone from the giant neon Big-Twist-Being-Set-Up-Here signs.
It certainly did for me! I had quite a few moments of being mindblown at how things clicked into place almost without me noticing later in the story.
So then did this chapter make it to the end of the writing and editing process intact or did it go through significant changes throughout drafts?
No, I feel like it survived pretty much untouched from the first draft. Although it was a logistically complicated sequence with all the back-and-forth memory-to-real-time shenanigans, it was actually relatively easy to write. I could hopscotch characters directly to the most pertinent action without any of the usual scaffolding; I didn’t have to factor in ‘blocking’ the characters’ positions on the narrative stage. All the environments could be wholly discrete, self-contained — movement through the memory scenes was not (primarily) influenced by time or space, but consequentiality. What reveals this person, what haunts them, what has wounded them?
Having that near-exclusive focus on character drama made for natural, effortless writing, and that ease translated to a chapter I was satisfied with from the start.
That makes sense, after all we never quite remember the scaffolding. as you said, in our memories unless specifically relevant.
Do you write everything out in order or skip over sections to get back to later?
For linear narratives, I only write sequentially. Jumping around sounds like a nightmare. I wouldn’t know how to make the tone and character mood come out right, because…that all emerges from hyper-specific prior action? There’s an element of discovery to drafting, even if I have the main thrust of the action mapped out. Jumping ahead would leave me without that grounding. I mean, it might be fun, but I feel like I would end up needing to rewrite everything.
I don’t think I could keep track either and am yet to meet someone who can write out of order. I hear they exist though so I’ll keep asking.
And now for the deeper dive:
I think it’s safe to say this is a very layered chapter in that the characters go through a betrayal, Karys has to deal with losing control of a situation (something you’ve established she struggles with and avoids at all costs), and we get a true look into what Ferain is truly capable of.
What are, then, the key elements you wanted this chapter to have?
First off, I wanted it to be a treat. Things are definitely not going well for the characters, but it is supposed to be a good time for the reader.
Karys is an extremely reserved, careful person. Although she’s been gradually opening up over the course of the narrative, the involuntary intimacy of this scene marks a hard transition in her character arc. She can’t emerge from the experience unchanged; she’s been rendered too exposed and too vulnerable.
It’s also one of the only moments where Ferain achieves any measure of control and independence. He gets to have actual agency here. And it was really important for me to use that opportunity to demonstrate that, although he is consistently kind to Karys, he is far from benign when dealing with others. The flip side of his sensitivity is that he is capable of ruthless manipulation; his ability to read other people enables him to play them. I had hoped to demonstrate that he is by no means a soft person.
I wanted Karys and Ferain to mutually witness these sides of each other’s natures—the parts of themselves they had largely tried to conceal—and to understand each other more deeply as a result. After this point in the narrative, their dynamic shifts: Karys is far more willing to trust and rely on Ferain, which ultimately comes back to bite her.
Oh it definitely was a treat, with only some mild emotional damage.
Do you have a favorite scene/section in it that you were particularly looking forward to writing?
I enjoyed the initial back and forth telepathic conversation. I also liked Karys experiencing Ilesha from Ferain’s POV. But really, the whole thing was a great time for me.
Up until this point, even though Ferain and Karys essentially share a body, we’ve only really seen everything through Kary’s viewpoint. In what specific way has the fact that we now get more of a glimpse through his eyes, informed this chapter?
Although they’re connected, they don’t really share a body outside of this chapter. The rest of the time, Ferain’s sort of hanging onto Karys like a shadowy, spiritually-conjoined limpet.
This means that the reader’s impression of him is quite limited, especially because he can’t do much. The reader gets to see what Ferain allows Karys to see, basically. Therefore, with this narrow window of opportunity, I wanted to maximize his agency — demonstrate his cunning, his resourcefulness, his ruthlessness, and his immediate willingness to prioritize Karys’ life and security over his own.
Indeed, for this project, we like to pick chapters that will lead to some level of transformation for the protagonist(s). You picked this one and I couldn’t think of one I’d have liked to dive into more – other than some that are way too spoilery to use for this. How, then, are Karys and Ferain different from the moment they enter this chapter and when they leave it?
For better or worse, Karys is more emotionally open after this chapter — not just with Ferain, but with Winola and Haeki too. She also begins, at a glacial pace, to interrogate the intensity of her feelings toward Ferain; her violent fear of losing him eventually catalyses a little personal introspection.
On the other hand, Ferain has already developed a pretty clear understanding of his perspective on Karys by this point. What he finds profoundly meaningful, however, is her new willingness to trust him. He has spent two weeks involuntarily intruding on the personal space of a stranger who manifestly loathes being perceived; he has been ludicrously careful in his efforts to respect her boundaries. To take up as little space as possible — because he feels that he doesn’t have the right to take up any space at all. (Ferain might have some depressive tendencies.)
So the fact that Karys is voluntarily granting him this sacrosanct access, granting him permission to take all her space, comes as a revelation. It’s a massive relief, but it’s also a source of validation: Karys trusts him and Karys doesn’t trust anyone. If she believes he is worthy of her faith, then maybe he can be.
It’s sort of a healing moment for him, and a change of perspective. He leaves the experience easier on himself, and less careful in Karys’ company. They’re on a more equal footing after this point.
Aaah there go my feels again, right when I thought I might recover…
As for this chapter’s importance in regards to the wider narrative, why is it important for your story’s pace and development for these events to happen at this moment? I’d argue this is a culmination of the building blocks you’ve put down up to this point as to how Karys and Winola have to trust Ferain. As well as proof that Karys can truly depend on them as they will show up for her.
Should Winola trust Ferain? I intentionally left it ambiguous, but you can make the case that the person he manipulated most in this sequence wasn’t Vuhas.
Regardless of Ferain’s intentions and Winola’s own loyalties to Karys, the hard fact remains that Winola is forced to decide whether Vuhas is getting murdered or whether Vuhas is getting assaulted. Under the circumstances, Ferain would probably have a strong sense of what she would choose: to some extent, it’s a foregone conclusion. Karys, of course, remains blameless in all of this, even if she is a beneficiary of her friends committing war crimes.
But to answer your question, yes, this chapter is definitely the culmination of a number of intersecting plot points and character arcs. Its importance largely lay in bringing matters to the boil, in setting up how Karys’ relationships would develop for the rest of the novel.
Speaking of Winola, she is a very important secondary character, especially for Karys for a few reasons. Can you walk us through why and how it was necessary for her to be the one to help the situation rather than Haeki for instance. I loved the fact that we see the moment she realizes how far she is willing to go for her friend, for example, and we experience that also through Ferain’s similar emotions.
Haeki needed to stay out of the equation for a couple of reasons. Firstly, she did not have immediate utility to Ferain here — he had no reason to involve her, she would have been unnecessarily endangered, and there was a strong chance that she might have swayed or distracted Winola. Secondly, her being excluded served to brutally confirm her insecurities, which I wanted to bring to the fore in the chapters that followed.
In contrast, Winola was uniquely suited to remedying the situation. It was an opportunity to emphasise her potential to be a powerful, dangerous person, even if she is somewhat undone by her inherent gentleness and morality. It was also inevitable that she would be the one facing off against the Grateful, given that she is a foil to everything they represent, and to Ciene in particular.
Finally then, what is the core of this chapter for you? For me it was the themes of trust and loyalty being tested and proven. We as readers are often given all the reasons as to why two or more characters trust in each other, for instance, but we don’t often get to see the moment that bond is tested while still tenuous enough for there to be doubts.
I don’t know if the chapter has an easily identifiable core for me, per se. Sort of like how I would struggle to write achronologically, my work tends to only function when taken in full context. The significance of individual moments of action are only felt when they’re propped up by ten chapters of worldbuilding and a recurring motif involving a seagull.
Which probably sounds pretentious as hell, but it’s like…I’m just not a very ‘quotable’ writer? I don’t condense well. The chapter in its entirety represents the shortest way I could communicate what I wanted to say.
Not pretentious at all! It can be hard to cut out a single strand from a whole that is woven so tightly as Asunder is, so I can understand. And what a tapestry it made in the end!
With that, thank you so much for taking the time to do this with me! Are there any future projects or news you would like to share with us to wrap up?
I’m still floundering around in publishing limbo with Asunder’s sequel. (Honestly not the most fun experience, incredibly protracted agony, would not recommend, 2/10.) Once I’ve got an answer there, I’ll be able to share more.
Best wishes for a quick escape from the terrible limbo! I think I speak for all of your readers when I say we are rooting for you to be able to continue this story.
And thank you so much for this interview! It’s been fun.
Until next time, dear reader,
Eleni A.E.
Kerstin Hall is an SFF author living in South Africa. Asunder is her most recent novel and her other works include Star Eater and The Mkalis Cycle (The Border Keeper & Second Spear), that have been published by Strange Horizons, Fireside, and Tor.com.
You can find her on BlueSky or contact her through her website.
