About

Katherine Kim was raised in the high Andes, the product of a mixed marriage.  Her mother was a “Norske flicke” (meaning, “blonde”, as a rough translation).  Her father was an ordo-elf.  This may be the source of all the psychological problems so evident in her books. 

 

Or perhaps the problem was that her mother was an Anglican, and her father, being an ordo-gnome, was (---what???  Oh.  Ok, ok, all right, an ordo-eEeelf, if you have to be so damned picky.) Anyway, he was more inclined toward economics, or Unitarianism, or toward some other radical heresy, which caused difficulty in the household.   These issues were the excruciating hemes of her early childhood, being the subject of daily turmoil over the breakfast table.  They were the almost unendurable fracture of her life until, of course, the blessed moment she was seized by demons.  That upset the Blue-Camilla-teakettle, I can tell you for damn sure.

 

They were soul-suckers.  The Demons.  They were soul-suckers as you can tell from her writing; she’s pretty obsessed by that.  But she quickly put them in their place.  “Don’t you even think about sucking my soul”, she told them, “suck your own damned souls”; demons, being somewhat below the red-line on the IQ scale, were intrigued, and tried it.  After that, they nosed and snouted around her slippers and tried to sit on her keyboard while she Facebooked, and she had to pet them and stroke them feed them twice a day in dishes on the floor.  It was pathetic. 

 

But she did have the opportunity during this period of her life to observe the Demon realm.   I suppose we have to grab whatever opportunities present themselves in life, however meager.  And to be fair, not all the demons in the realm had devoured their own souls.  Some were fairly intimidating, even for her.  But she had her household and her pets and was safe enough.  She was as safe there as in the high Andes among the Unitarians, or Anglicans, or whatever her family was over their grits and bacon, and of course it was a shitload better to live with demons than with economists. She settled in and was satisfied, for a time.

 

So she lived among the demons for many years.  Being a mixed-breed half-ordo-elf, she did show a special---how shall we say this---a special “character”, I guess, turning now into a were-beast, and now into a dame-du-lac, and now into a puzzling hive of proto-spirits, but apart from that part her life was pretty much like yours, or anyone's.  One day moved into the next, and that moved to the next-next, and so on.  You know how it is.

 

Then one day she found the “gate”---we’ll call it that, although there are much less polite words that are sometimes used for it among the grown-ups.  And she walked through. 

 

Lord, we could spend years, centuries, long, winding geological ages, following her exploits through the “gate”.  God.  I don’t want to think about it.  Don’t even get me started. 

 

But in the end, she wound up here, and for the next few ages, the gate is closed, or at least prohibitively expensive unless you know someone.  She had to make a living somehow.  So she writes.  And writes.  And days pass, and she writes.  And one day turns to the next, and that into the next-next, and she waits for the demons to come to take her away again. 

 

Sigh.

 

You know how it is.

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