Why I wrote THE FEVER KING

This is the letter that I sent out with the galleys of The Fever King to bloggers and reviewers in advance of publication date. I hope it explains some of the inspiration behind the book. Although it’s relatively short by requirement, it was very personal to write. I hope to expand on it with some blog posts (and guest posts on other blogs) in the near future, so…stay tuned, I guess?

Click below the cut to read–

Why I Wrote THE FEVER KING

by Victoria Lee

Two weeks after I moved to Sweden, I walked out of my socialist reading group and into a neo-Nazi rally. There were three hundred of them crowding the streets of Gamla Stan, Stockholm’s Old Town. They kept shouting about Trump, and Swedish nationalism, and—of course—how Jews were the root of all evil. Even in Europe, in a relatively left-wing city, I couldn’t escape it: the knowledge that there were a lot of people out there who wanted me dead.

Two weeks before I left Sweden, at a music festival in a public park, I tried to explain to a Swedish girl why it was difficult being a Jew, and especially a Jew in Europe. I told her that when I went to Berlin, I encountered a dissonance between feeling like Berlin should be my heritage—I’m German Jewish, specifically—and knowing that Berlin had massacred their Jews. She said, “but no one wants to kill the Jews anymore.” To her, Nazis existed only in history. Putting a pin in that, I told her that people were still anti-Semitic, that lots of people still believed in things like a secret Jewish cabal ruling the world. She looked at me like I was maybe a little bit stupid and said: “But Jews do run the world.”

At that point, I was pretty sure there was nothing I could tell her that would make her understand the terror of being Jewish and caught up in a Nazi rally. Of posting videos of the rally online and having dozens of those same Nazis swarm your inbox explaining, in lurid detail and with self-righteous pedantry, that a smart Aryan girl like you could surely realize all her liberal beliefs were really just Jewish propaganda.

The Fever King is a very personal book for me in so many ways. It deals with trauma and trauma recovery—both personal trauma and intergenerational. Much of the main character’s experiences as a refugee in Carolinia was broadly drawn from the Jewish experience. Noam is the child of refugees and has spent his whole life fighting for refugee rights—but when he gains magical powers, he’s elevated to a position of privilege in his society and has to reconcile the intersection of that new identity with his other lived experiences. I think all of the Jewish diaspora is familiar with the sense of being an outsider in one’s own country of birth, and Jewish people still struggle to reconcile the impact of pogroms and the Holocaust as they reverberate down through the generations. And when this intergenerational trauma intersects with personal trauma, everyone reacts differently. In The Fever King, each of the three main characters has experienced trauma. One reacts by externalizing it into revolutionary activism. One internalizes it and becomes self-destructive. A third perpetuates trauma by becoming an abuser themselves.

Like one of the characters in the book, I was abused as a child. It took a long time before I could say it like that, as if it were an easy thing to say. For years I was embarrassed, as if I were the one who had done something wrong—by existing in his sphere, by being too pretty, being too naïve. There are so many stories tackling the process of recovering from abuse. I wanted to write a book that might speak to those who are still surviving, for whom the abuse is ongoing. Whose abusers are respectable people, the kinds of people who would be believed—unlike yourself: a troublemaker, promiscuous, an addict, mentally ill. I hope that this book will reach readers who will feel seen and understood by it.