By Kurt Anthony Krug
Omar Hussain always wanted to be a storyteller. There is no singular moment in his life when he said, “I want to be a writer.”
“It’s just something I’ve done since I was 4 and started making my own Superman comics,” recalled Hussain, a veteran journalist and publicist. “When I was 9, I wrote 40ish pages of a biography on my favorite baseball player. I’ve always had a desire to chronicle matters. It persists.”
Hussain’s debut novel, A Thousand Natural Shocks, centers around Dash, a journalist in Monterey, CA, who is desperate to outrun his past. At the same time, he is investigating the return of a serial killer and gets involved with a criminal cult that promises to give him a drug to purge his traumatic memories. As a result, Dash begins to forget things. Further, he learns a dark secret about this cult and must find this serial killer before his memories fade away, along with his sense of self.
“There were a series of questions that I was musing over that I just couldn’t get out of my head, and I wanted to craft a story based on them,” said Hussain. Those questions include: If you could forget the worst, most traumatic experiences of your life and/or biggest regrets, would you? If you did, how would it change you? And would you have any control over what you might become next?”
The book’s title is a quote from William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. Unfortunately, Hussain couldn’t go into more detail. “I really can’t fully unpack the connection without giving away too much,” he said. “What I can say is that Hamlet, in many ways, is one of the oldest tales about a grief-stricken main character reconciling what’s real and what’s not.”
He could say more, though, about how chess is integral to the novel.
“What game demands more from the mind than chess?” said Hussain. “And considering A Thousand Natural Shocks is a long swim within the head of a character losing his mind, it felt like a terrific analog in which to wrap the story. We have a character that is not just losing his grip on reality but also losing his memories and his sense of self. But, yet at the heart of it, his recollections of himself are imbued in chess. It was just too fun not to include.”
He also spoke about what inspired the creation of the serial killer. “Growing up in the Bay Area, there are no shortages of stories related to the Zodiac Killer. He’s become this boogeyman figure for me, so I definitely wanted some of his letter-writing and cryptic gameplaying to factor into the book somehow. The serial killer’s dwelling is based off Leonard Lake and Charles Ng, two other California-based serial killers who custom-built a compound just for the sake of their horrific crimes. There are 2-3 others like the Golden State Killer as well.”
While A Thousand Natural Shocks is categorized as a thriller, Hussain doesn’t quite agree. If anything, he sees it as an exploration of grief and what it can do to the human psyche. The delivery mechanism has thriller and speculative fiction elements, however.
“I think it’s a book that falls pretty evenly on the upmarket line – 50% literary fiction, 50% genre,” said Hussain. “It’s literary because of its themes around grief and trauma and the role memory plays in aligning or dissecting those two experiences. The language is also more literary, particularly the last third of the book, which required some serious work to capture Dash’s fractured state of mind. It’s a thriller because the book is written with elements of a noir atmosphere, and the plot contains common devices like cults and killers. At the end of the day, how the book is classified is probably a net result of how it makes you feel once you’re finished reading it.”
