My creative collaboration on the project started with someone I had never met (but not a stranger) appearing in my Twitter DMs with a question. “Hi Charlie! If you ever want to chat about AR/VR, I would love to hear your stories/perspectives.” Since it was Kathe Koja, whose many books lined my bookshelves, I was surprised, intrigued, and more than willing to talk with her about Augmented and Virtual Reality. She was working on Dark Factory, an “immersive novel” which involved a nightclub featuring futuristic technology that allowed the high-end guests to play around with reality. Kathe was interested in what was currently feasible in reality-shifting technology and what was coming down the pipeline.

Kathe Koja’s Dark Factory is a designer’s dream come true. So much opportunity from the book cover to the book design to the website to the merchandise and everything in between. As a writer, Kathe Koja has one of the most unique styles of anyone I’ve read. If there is one word in the many reviews that captures it for me, it is “propulsive.” Drop that into the setting of the club scene and you’ve got the perfect recipe for high energy fun.

The first time Kathe Koja mentioned Dark Factory to me was in 2019. It sounded intriguing—immersive fiction, a story that goes beyond the printed page, blurring the lines between fiction and reality. Who wouldn’t be excited. She continued to drop bits of info on the project regularly, but it was September 2020 when I received the first draft. The contract was signed in October, starting a creative journey with the author that exceeded my wildest dreams of what storytelling could be.

Though I’ve known Kathe Koja for over thirty years, and I’ve been her agent for over twenty of them, she still surprises me with every project. (In truth, she surprises me with every email but let’s focus on her books.) Her earliest work was rightly published as horror fiction, and a half dozen of her titles in the early 2000s were clearly YA, but most of her amazing novels form genres unto themselves, illuminating liminal spaces and the strangely familiar people who occupy them.

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.