They’re Not Simply Phantoms

Leland Cheuk talks absolutism and Norse gods with novelist Kurt Baumeister.

By Leland CheukDecember 12, 2025

• Fiction

• SF

KURT BAUMEISTER doesn’t come at things directly. In his second novel, Twilight of the Gods (2025), the world is under threat from Odin, the Norse god, who wants to make the old new again by bringing the Nazis back to Germany and spreading totalitarianism around the world. Meanwhile, his son Loki, a fallen-god-turned-human in Boston, stands up to his father.

The United States’ current president is not in the book. Neither are figures like Viktor Orbán or Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. But the book is deeply concerned about the proliferation of real-life authoritarianism around the world.

I have been friends with Kurt for a few years. As an acquiring editor for my indie press, 7.13 Books, Kurt prefers to take side roads when choosing manuscripts. Recently, Kurt and I discussed the side roads taken by his own new work, which brings a surprising amount of comedy to a serious topic: 21st-century political polarization and its destabilizing effects on society.

¤

LELAND CHEUK: How did you decide to center your book on Norse myths? What about that particular mythology resonates with you?

KURT BAUMEISTER: Focusing on the Norse myths wasn’t so much a decision, just sort of how things came out—as in, what interested me. Maybe I’m not as calculating as other writers, but I don’t become interested in an idea based on whether I think it will be commercially viable, or will even “work” as a book. That’s just not where I start or how I write.

Because the two novels I’ve published have had a lot to do with current politics, I suppose they’re oddly evergreen to me—not just as finished books but also over time, in their development. Twilight of the Gods, for example, focusing as it does on the last 100 years or so of human history—the emergence and reemergence of political totalitarianism in the form of fascism—well, that’s certainly been a theme in the world, and the United States, over the last decade.

Now that I think back on it, I guess I’ve been interested in and trying to write about the Norse gods within the context of contemporary fiction for most of my career as a writer, dating back to the time before I went to grad school in the mid-1990s, when I started working on the novel that would become my graduate thesis. Maybe it has to do with a deep interest in mythologies and religions, and the fact that the Norse myths don’t receive nearly as much focus in the American education system as those of the Greeks and Romans. They’re different, off the beaten path. Maybe there’s also something about the syncretism of the Christianity I was raised with and Norse myths, particularly in the way Ragnarok’s finality echoes the Armageddon of the Christian Book of Revelation. There’s an epic conclusion at the center of the Norse myths, something that’s being built toward.

Do you see Loki as an analogy for, say, the average American—a fallen god with a bad reputation who grows a conscience?

I suppose that’s a fair way to look at him, on one level. What we have in the United States today is a bad situation we’ve watched develop over time. The book’s main question, as I think back on it, isn’t so much whether fascism will win or not. As we’ve seen multiple times in human history, fascism does win, sometimes, for a while.

In the United States, we’ve seen this in that Donald Trump won in 2016 and again in 2024. I guess these are the book’s questions: Why do we keep doing it? What is it about absolutism that so attracts humanity? Why are we often happier to accept the simple answer we know in our hearts to be wrong, rather than admit that we don’t know the right one? Maybe the realities of life are just too scary for us? Maybe we’re happier to die a bit as a species, to murder some part of ourselves as totalitarianism regularly seems to do—the Nazis, the USSR, the PRC, all the wars that have been fought over religion—rather than admit that we don’t know?

Why did you choose Germany as the central place Odin targets with his evil ways in the book’s alternate reality? Why not the United States, or Hungary, or France?

I chose to center Germany in the book’s alternate present because the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 20th century and the world war it wrought may be the greatest existential challenge humanity has seen, certainly in the last several centuries, whether you focus on the scale of warfare, the genocide so painstakingly planned and transacted against the Jews, or the development of atomic weaponry.

To me, focusing the present-tense action in Germany underscores the fact that we’ve already been through this once on that level, highlights the danger we’re in now in the US, and raises a question that’s more important than that of whether extremism will win in the short term. It does, and has, on the political right, on the political left, and in the theocracies I focused on in my last book, Pax Americana. I also felt that not focusing overtly on the United States, though it’s beneath the surface the whole time, was a way to sort of trick Americans into seeing the truth about where we are as a country, and where we may be headed.

What do you see as the root of rising autocratic nationalism around the world? Is it the absolutism you mention above, as opposed to wealth inequality, populism, racism, sexism, classism, and the rest of the isms?

I’d say the answer is not either-or but a combination. The current popular absolutism—one of them, at least, and the one we’re talking about here—is autocratic nationalism. It feeds off many of the isms you mentioned and is in turn fed by them.

Humanity’s reliance on absolutism seems to me to be a degenerate response to a natural, legitimate—perhaps you could even say hardwired—desire for “answers,” just as racism and sexism are degenerate responses to real differences in race and sex.

While the absolutism I’m talking about is currently being expressed as autocratic nationalism, it could also take the form of totalitarian Marxism or some type of theocracy. But when these extreme movements take shape, they’re not simply phantoms, or the products of an intellectual exercise; they’re extreme, negative responses to real life and real struggles.

What do you think of Marvel’s Loki and other pop culture versions of Norse mythology, such as Assassin’s Creed Valhalla or Vikings or God of War? Did they affect the way you approached your book?

Tom Hiddleston’s a great actor, and I’ve enjoyed his portrayals of Loki. I’ve even seen some of the Mighty Thor cartoons from the 1960s; I enjoyed those too. I’ve been interested in all sorts of mythology since I was a kid, and since you didn’t see a lot of focus on Norse myths back then, mostly Greek and Roman, that was nice to come across, out of the ordinary. I haven’t played either of those games [Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and God of War]—though of course they look really cool. I loved Vikings, the TV series.

In writing Twilight of the Gods, I tried to steer away from what has been depicted before. I’m sure those influences you mentioned, and others, are active in my brain. For example, I’ve read Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, and I watched the first season of the TV show, both long after I started working on the book. But I made a concerted effort to get away from other pop culture influences, to engage with the myths directly. My primary source was Kevin Crossley-Holland’s The Norse Myths.

We work together as small-press partners, and we have different editorial tastes. What books do you see out in the bookstore that you are particularly miffed by? What do you want to see more of?

I don’t get miffed at books, Leland. [Laughs.] They’re inanimate objects! But to focus more on what I see in the slush, which I spend more time with than what’s in stores …

I’d love to see more slipstream, more attempts at the novel of ideas, more attempts at structural experiments, but with comedy, dialogue, plot, and story. Is it a tall order? I mean, I guess, probably. But I want what I want. As you know, the deal you and I have is one in which we split the cost of the books I do, so I’m putting my own money on the line too and losing it! As small publishers do. I want what I want. I’d like to see fewer writers who think their identity, any identity—especially that of the old white guy—is enough to justify their work.

I definitely agree. I used to love coming-of-age novels where not much happens other than a young person learning to accept their identity, but now I think I’ve just seen too many of them. Consequential plotting is becoming a lost art.

There’s an early section of Twilight of the Gods in which I joke about how my fictional character, the writer Kurt, gets too carried away with his prose and has a subconscious fear of plot. I don’t think the real Kurt—as in me—gets too carried away with his prose or has a fear of plot, subconscious or otherwise. It’s just that I write satire: I’m going to wind up making fun of anything I write about, including myself.

What are you working on next?

I’ve been working on a novel called As Below, So Above (or, The Nine Trials of Tina the Demon). I’m calling it a murder mystery set in hell, though hell looks a lot like the contemporary US, hence the title. The protagonist, another first-person narrator, is a demon named Tina, a lawyer—this is a hell that looks like the United States, after all, so you know there have to be plenty of lawyers—who works for hell’s attorney general, Mephistopheles.

¤

Kurt Baumeister’s writing has appeared in Salon, Guernica, Electric Literature, Rain Taxi, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Nervous Breakdown, The Weeklings, and other outlets. An acquisitions editor with 7.13 Books, Baumeister holds an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College. His second novel, Twilight of the Gods, has been nominated for the National Book Award for Fiction.