Blog Tour: Dark Matter

 

We're happy to help Meerkat Press support the release of their latest title, Kathe Koja's Dark Matter, the final book in the Dark Factory Trilogy, by participating in their blog tour. 

We're thrilled to have Kathe Koja hanging with us today, giving us a sneak peak into Page 69 of Dark Matter. 

Kathe Koja’s books include The Cipher, Skin, straydog, Buddha Boy, Velocities: Stories, Under the Poppy, and the Dark Factory trilogy, Dark Factory, Dark Park, and Dark Matter. Her work has won awards, including the Stoker, the Shirley Jackson Award, and the ASPCA’s Henry Bergh Award. She also creates and produces live and online experiences that bring the story directly to you. Find her at kathekoja.com and on IG, FB and Bluesky.

Check it out: 

Set up page 69 for us.

 The driving engine of Dark Matter is the compelling and combustible Bunny Graves, who laces up her spike-heeled boots and goes after whatever she wants, while keeping her own background secret. On page 69 she’s busy musing over her last lunch with Felix Perez—a gifted DJ who literally brought the house down at a rave—because Felix is married to the man Bunny wants to annex, event producer par excellence Ari Regon, whom Bunny recognizes as a force of nature just as she is. By asking questions and listening, listening, listening, Bunny’s learning more about Felix, so she can use that knowledge to pry Ari away, and involve him in her own explosive plans.

 

What is the book about?

 Dark Matter is about connection, how we find, or don’t find, the people we really need, how we struggle to connect through chaos, jealousy, loss, whatever life throws at us, no matter how dark it all gets. Bunny and Felix both prize connection with Ari, Ari seeks connection with the world itself. And Ari’s friend Max, the gaming guru, finally admits he truly needs that connection, when he meets the quiet genius Charmskool.

 Dark Matter is the third book in the Dark Factory series, and each book blends and interacts with the others, and with the Dark Factory site as well. The story takes place in all those places, in the art, the videos, everything shared by its readers, everything’s there for the reader to interact with—and an ongoing invitation to add to that story, too.

 

Do you think this page gives our readers an accurate sense of what the novel is about? Does it align itself with the novel’s theme?

Oh it does—everything that happens on this page links, like life does, to everything else these characters do, what they want, how they navigate their relationships, the mistakes they’re about to make . . . Makes me wonder what our own page 69 would say, if our lives were novels (and maybe they are!)

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PAGE 69

Page 69 – DARK MATTER

 

She had asked Felix, finally, about the Jericho set, as they sat in late afternoon shadow on some restaurant’s walled-in patio, over the dregs of a salad niçoise and shaobing bread and a bottle of overpriced Riesling. At first he was quiet, then What was it like? he said. The whole place was moving, I was making it move, the people, walls, all of it. I wasn’t even wearing the mask that time, the Mister Minos face, does Felix still have that, is it lost somewhere or trashed? And they never wanted me to stop, Alaine didn’t want me to stop—

Then why did you?

I had to.

Why did you have to?

I couldn’t handle it then, picking up the bottle, refilling their glasses. Let’s finish this off.

But that opened him, finally, to talk about his music, how he studies the power of polyphony, acoustic ecology and musique concrète, the subtle body and the autonomic nervous system and the way sound releases dopamine and serotonin, how certain frequencies can change perception, change behavior, simulate the effects of nitrous oxide and regulate vascular function, and There’s this surgeon, he said, Dr. Ibrahim Abra, he uses music in the ER instead of anesthesia.

And his twin sister is a tournament backgammon player. Razia Abra.

Seriously? you know her? Did you ever play her?

No. I never played tournaments, only money games.

What’s a money game?

I’ll show you sometime.

Only now there is no more time, Ari is in a hurry, so “Expedite,” she says, and the car accelerates, past rowhouses and bodegas, people queueing, walking, hurrying, even stressed and diminished this is still a real city, Ari and Felix have never lived in a place like the place they will live in now. But she knows exactly what it will be like there, a shitty town with a shitty language no one speaks, bad roads and iffy grid access, at least two overpriced state liquor shops and a very old church with a Virgin on top, like the towns around the shrine—

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December 2, 2025

Speculative Fiction | LGBTQ

Meerkat Press | Bookshop.org   | Amazon

When the world ends, chaos begins–

–for feral Bunny Graves, playing life like a high-stakes game, where the only way to win is to smash the board to bits–

–for Max Caspar and Charmskool the scholar, chasing ancient myth all the way to the real world–

–and for Ari Regon, caught between dangerous jealousy and passionate love, corporate war and ambition so intense that failure is death, making the party to end all parties, a party that never ends.

Dark times.

Dark dreams.

DARK MATTER

The third and final book in the DARK FACTORY series.