Nathan Hill Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Interview

Nathan Hill discusses his debut book, The Nix, and how video games influence the book - and his life.

What is the story of The Nix and how does it inform this novel?

A Nix is a spirit of the water that appears in Scandinavian folklore and is variously known as a nixie, neck, nikker, nøkk, and so on. It's one of many Norwegian folktales I use in the novel. I love those old ghost stories, where spirits appear incognito and cause all sorts of trouble. In the Norwegian version, a Nix is usually described as a horrible ugly ogre-type thing that sometimes appears to young children as a beautiful white horse. It will attempt to lure the children onto its back, and if they climb aboard, it'll gallop into the water and drown them. And I imagined that, for the kids, suddenly taking possession of their very own horse would have been the coolest thing that ever happened to them. They must have loved it, until they realized what was really happening, by which time it was too late. The moral of the story seemed to me something like: the things you love the most can sometimes hurt you worst. Which is a lesson also learned by the characters in the novel, who are undermined by the things that mean the most to them: a son abandoned by his mother; a sister disowned by her twin brother; a workaholic swindled by his company; a gamer ...