Bodo Pfündl asked Matt Fulton:

Hi Matt! How did you develop your 5 key characters? I love how nuanced and layered they are! And I'm especially interested to learn with what ideas you were juggling around with when you created David Kazanoff and if there were other famous villains that influenced him?

Matt Fulton Thanks for the question, buddy. Jack, Ryan, Nina and Harris all serve to fulfill very specific emotional goals that will come to pass in Part III of the trilogy--which I can't really talk about!--so it's hard for me to go into great detail about it; but they are all carefully carved pieces of the puzzle.

Regarding Kazanoff...he's a pretty special guy. He's always been the "big bad" of the story, going back fourteen years now, but how I've interpreted him has changed a lot. I went through a bad depression in college a few years ago and that had a HUGE impact on his character. You know, in a way, he's not really even a villain (in the sense that, would you call a lion a villain for shredding apart a gazelle?) but more like a virus rampaging through the DNA of this story. At the end of it all--after the politics, after the tradecraft--Kazanoff is just Death coming for everyone and everything. He's the great equalizer.

And a quick addendum! If you're really a sick SOB and want to get into Kazanoff's mindset, check out THE CONSPIRACY AGAINST THE HUMAN RACE and TEATRO GROTTESCO by Thomas Ligotti, antinatalism philosophy, or any sort of cosmic horror by Lovecraft or Robert W. Chambers--monsters that aren't scary because they render us dead, but rather render us insignificant against our own universe. All good beach reading!

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