We chat with author T.R. Moore about The Gods Must Burn, which follows a disgraced war hero who is transformed into the Wolf God, protector of the Forest God, and must earn her trust in this healing dark fantasy.
Hi, T.R.! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
Hello! I’m T.R., and I’m queer Korean-American writer of fantasy, horror, and sometimes romance. Before I was a novel writer, I was a poet, and found my love of language really young through reading Edgar Allan Poe and Sylvia Plath. Nowadays, I’m focused on writing messy, angry Korean girls (mostly likely with a god complex or two) and responsible mental health representation. And a lot of fat girls, because we’re really fat positive in this house. If I’m not writing, I’m usually playing video games, eating strawberries with a good book at the beach, or laying on my floor listening to the entire discography of Japanese-American indie pop singer Mitski.
When did you first discover your love for writing and stories?
When I was nine, I was given an Edgar Allan Poe anthology, and I absolutely fell in love with his dark, gothic, weird poetry. As any nine-year-old would, I started copying his style in attempts to create art myself. It netted me being called emo at recess and a lot of weird teacher interactions where they asked me if I was okay. I was always a reader, like I ran through a huge volume of books from a young age, but poetry felt much more beautiful—and doable—than novels did. For a kid, that was probably true. But, eventually, and most likely from digesting copius amounts of fanfiction.net, I started writing novels. My very first was when I was fourteen, penned in purple ink during math class. (I really hate math.) From there, it just grew, and grew, and grew, and now we’re here.
Quick lightning round! Tell us:
- The first book you ever remember reading: The Nancy Drew books!
- The one that made you want to become an author: The Wild Girls by Pat Murphy.
- The one that you can’t stop thinking about: The Salt Grows Heavy by Cassandra Khaw.
Your debut novel, The Gods Must Burn, is out now! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Lush, lyrical, raw, grim, (but) magical.
What can readers expect?
Something dark, but beautiful. But dark, first. While TGMB has romance in it, (and it really burns like a forest on fire, wink wink) it is not a romance book. TGMB is about questioning who you are as a survivor—who you are after trauma—and the messaging is really centered around doing the work in order to move on. So, I guess what I’m trying to say is that readers should expect a dark fantasy where we’re talking about environmentalism, anti-imperialism, and healing after trauma. The sort of slow, yearning romance is just the cherry on top.
Where did the inspiration for The Gods Must Burn come from?
I had a 3 a.m. dream back in, oh, 2021 maybe? I was slowly meandering out of studying gender and sexuality and more toward environmentalism, which was something I’d always been really passionate about, but was an aside to sociological queer theory for me. The dream was about a deer god and a wolf god, who ruled over the forest together—everyone who lived in the forest believed the wolf god was most powerful, but in reality, it was the deer god who held all the power. It was a few years later that I played Monster Hunter: World, a video game that explores environmental colonialism, which helped combined all the pieces I had of TGMB into the story that will be on shelves.
But honestly, the book itself was an attempt for me to come to terms with who I had to become to live again after trauma. It was writing a letter to myself that I could grow again. And that—the idea that I needed to write something to prove that I could be someone again—inspired Basuin’s character, and his subsequent journey through the book.
I like to call it what it is, still: a love letter to survivors who never wanted to be survivors.
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
Ren was my favorite character to write. She was extremely hard to get right. Ren is independent to a fault—has her whole world on her shoulders—but at the same time, chooses a path of pacifism which doesn’t make her whole I-can-do-it-myself schtick very easy to deal with. It was tricky to write this powerful character who obscures herself to everyone around her, including Basuin, while still showing the bits and pieces of her that fall through the cracks in her carefully-crafted protective shell.
My favorite moment also involves her—but I can’t talk about that too much. Big spoilers. I’ll just say I hope readers love it as much as I do.
Did you face any challenges whilst writing? How did you overcome them?
Who doesn’t? Every book seems to come with its own challenges. I can say that because I’ve written five now and none of them seem to make it easy on me. It’s always something.
My biggest challenge was remembering how to love writing again. This story came to me at a time when I thought I would give up on writing for good. And, when I came back to it because I wanted to learn to love writing again, it was disastrously hard to accomplish. Writing a book is no easy feat. Writing a book because you know you’ll never write again if you don’t write this story, right here, right now, seems impossible. But I did it, and now I’m here, and there’s really nothing that can match my love and passion for writing, so I might as well keep doing it.
This is your debut novel! What was the road to becoming a published author like for you?
Yeah! Wow. It feels like it was forever ago. To make a long story short, it was a tumultuous year of grinding. And that’s just the year it took me to become a published author—not all the years of writing it took to get here.
I queried my first book at the beginning of 2023, then wrote TGMB later that year. It was ready to query by the start of 2024, so I did, and I signed with my agent. We went on sub after some really necessary edits, and by the end of the summer, Solaris offered to buy it. When I went and looked back at the dates, I had gotten a book deal in less than a year of writing TGMB—which is so lucky, I can’t express that enough. Truly so grateful that my editor, Amy Borsuk, saw the heart of this book and took a chance on it.
But summarizing my journey like this makes it look really pretty, and it wasn’t. Every step of the way, there was so much ugliness and rejection. Being an author was my dream, and I was never going to stop until I made it, but it hurt a lot more than I thought it would. When I talk to prospective writers, hopeful writers, I always tell them that no matter what, you have to keep moving forward. It’s probably going to be hard. It’s always going to hurt in some way. But it’s going to be beautiful once you get there.
What’s next for you?
Who knows! Life is always changing. I don’t think I’ll ever know what’s next until someone is telling me “this is what’s gotta be next.” All that to say, I’m writing a lot of girls kissing right now. I’m really hopeful I’ll get to share more of that with the world soon.
Lastly, what books are you looking forward to picking up this year?
There are a ton of amazing debuts happening this year that I’m itching to get my hands on. Letters from the Last Apothecary by Bita Behzadi, a really beautiful romantic fantasy with incredibly written leads. A Viper Among Kings by Sydney Olivia, which is a really fun, chaotic epic fantasy. The Forest Bleeds by Rachel Kitch, which is a dark (but kind of sexy?) Appalachian horror. So many more, but these are my standouts.
