Interviewing Stefan Mohamed

Hellooo!!

I recently reviewed a wonderfully strange novel The House on Utopia Way by Stefan Mohamed which mixes a noir detective tale with fantasy and surrealism with something to say about our world. Keen to know more Stefan kindly agreed to answer some questions on the book and a few other things.

How do you like to booktempt The House On Utopia Way?

I like to tell people it’s “The Book That Was Too Weird For Traditional Publishing!!!!”

I got quite far through the editorial process with a couple of publishers before their respective sales departments nixed the book on account of it being too bizarre, and therefore unmarketable. So it seemed worth trying to turn that handicap into a strength, and use its supposed unmarketability as a marketing tool. Not sure if it’s actually working but it seems a sound plan in theory!

What drew you towards a city that everyone has a slightly different view of?

It felt like a fun and dynamic way of taking this feeling I think we’ve all had for at least the last decade - that everybody exists in their own reality - and making it literal. The concept also gave me a lot of scope to get creative and weird, coming up with different neighbourhoods with their own rules, cultures, symbols and so on - the isolated tech district, the rose-tinted Little England, the gated community of robots, the neighbourhood where everything down to your takeaway coffee cup has its own god that must be prayed to. It gave me a nice big canvas to play on.

With such a changeable location was this harder to plot through or did it allow you to explore the story more organically??

I think it made things more organic, because the story is very much about the unreliability of perception and memory, and how terrifyingly fungible the idea of reality can be. Having a setting that makes that literal, so you’re travelling through a physical representation of those themes, ties everything together quite nicely. And no matter how bizarre and surreal it gets, there’s also a level of consistency.

What did you enjoy about using the classic noir style plot but in a more unusual way?

For starters, it was a useful delivery mechanism for weirdness - everyone knows what a detective story feels like, so there’s an immediate element of familiarity to ease people in. But it was also a fun opportunity to take some recognisable tropes and approach them from a different angle. Sometimes that just meant a silly joke, as with the dame who walks into the detective’s office and turns out to be a pantomime dame rather than the traditional femme fatale. But it also offered some more thematic opportunities - much of classic noir fiction, movies etc are about navigating these morally compromised, broken worlds full of damaged people, and The House on Utopia Way takes that idea and turns it up to eleven in a way, with a world that is quite literally broken and coming apart at the seams.

What else can we look forward to you in the near future and in this weird world of social media where can we find out more??

Self-publishing is a bit of a brave new world for me, so I’m still deciding what my next project will be. I have a few different works in progress at various stages, including a high concept sci-fi character drama, a grotty horror about toxic masculinity, and an urban fantasy adventure about a heist in Hell. The problem is - as you can tell - those are all very different in terms of mood, so I really go back and forth on which one I want to focus on! Hopefully I can defeat the indecision and one of them will appear at some point soon.

Apart from that, I have a new poetry collection coming out next year. And anyone interested in my work can keep up with me on Bluesky - https://bsky.app/profile/stefmowords.bsky.social - or Instagram - instagram.com/stefmowords.