Beginning to End - Dark Factory: Author, Kathe Koja
Dark Factory is Kathe Koja’s wholly original “immersive” novel that combines her award-winning writing and her skill directing immersive events, to create a story that unfolds on the page, online, and in the reader's creative mind.
A near-future dance club, Dark Factory is three floors of DJs, drinks, and customizable reality, everything you see and hear and feel. Ari Regon is the club’s wild card floor manager and Max Caspar is a stubborn DIY artist, both chasing their own vision of true reality. Rogue journalist Marfa Carpenter is there to write it all down. Then a rooftop rave sets in motion a fathomless energy that may drive Ari and Max to the edge of the ultimate experience.
Meerkat Press released Dark Factory on May 22, and will follow up with Dark Park, in 2023. For our next Beginning to End*, Spine follows the project through author, agent, publicity, and design.
*And since the project hasn’t actually “ended” (thus the asterisk) we’ll finish with a creative collaborator bringing a version of Dark Park to virtual reality in 2023.
Next up: Agent, Christopher Schelling.
Dark Factory is a novel that starts in a hot dance club and expands outward into a world of customizable realities and universal human longings. And even before I started to write it, I knew Dark Factory was, is, immersive fiction, it offers an invitation to readers to be part of that expanding story.
So how to make that happen?
Think of a little cartoon person jumping up and down on a hugely overstuffed suitcase, vainly trying to get it to close—that was my first pass at getting everything this novel is into a traditional, preordained format. After almost a year of that, I knew this book was going to need a new kind of publishing. But that meant a publisher willing to think totally outside the traditional definition of publishing: everything from editing to design to marketing had to expand across multiple platforms to make this narrative truly immersive, feel truly real. It would take a shared commitment and a shared leap of faith.
Enter Tricia Reeks at Meerkat Press.
I’d happily worked with Tricia on my second collection, the Shirley Jackson Award-winning Velocities: Stories, and on the reissue of The Cipher, my first novel that accumulated a devoted following delighted to see it reprinted. So I knew we worked well together. But I didn’t yet guess how well Dark Factory would work.
Tricia was a true collaborative partner, and we took that leap together: conceptualizing, discussing and refining everything from the book’s website, DarkFactory.club, to the use of social media to enlarge the narrative, to what kind of condoms to buy for the preorder swag pack. (Answer: the fun flavored and glow-in-the-dark kinds!) The book’s design is part of the narrative, the invitation to be interviewed by one of the characters is part of the narrative, the downloadable paper doll and branded t-shirts and mask contest are all part of the narrative . . . The level of creativity, of meticulous detail and care, made every aspect of Dark Factory come alive.
What does it mean to me as a writer, to have a publisher pour this kind of energy, passion, and supportive belief into my novel? I’ve worked with a lot of editors and houses, from the large and commercial to the small and literary, and I’ve never had a better experience, never had more fun, than with Tricia and Dark Factory. And all of that fun is there on that dancefloor, waiting for readers to hit the club.
Visit Kathe Koja’s website here.
Editor, artworker and lifelong bibliophile.