When Steve Zell was living in Redondo Beach, California, in the 1980s and ’90s, he got into gardening. Loath to use pesticides, he followed the suggestions of friends who recommended he buy a mantis egg for pest control. “As the summer went on,” he recalls, “I noticed fewer and fewer mantises, but the ones who remained got bigger and bigger. One day, I was reaching down to remove what looked like a twig from one of my tomato plants. It moved! It was the queen of all mantises; she had eaten all the others. That left an impression on me.”

That impression manifests itself in the character of Alena, the killer in Mantis, Zell’s sequel to True Creature (2019), which introduced the formidable team of investigative reporter Deanne Mulhenney and medical examiner Sarah Poole. (Mulhenney made a solo appearance in Zell’s 2017 horror thriller, Running Cold.) 

In Mantis, Mulhenney and Poole are reunited just weeks after the events of True Creature to investigate a pair of grisly murders in which the male victims died during sex. Their bodies are covered in bites. Alena works as a contract killer for a crime family that’s concerned that she is going rogue. She is a “superb” new character, at once “sympathetic and terrifying,” Kirkus Reviews praises.

“Write what you know” goes the familiar writer’s maxim. Beginning with Wizrd in 1994, Zell’s novels are imbued by his eclectic resume, childhood obsessions, and oddball life experiences. For example, the setting for his debut novel was inspired in part by his childhood spent wandering Jerome, Arizona, then a ghost town and located near his uncle’s cabin. “There were a lot of abandoned buildings from the Old West you could walk through,” Zell recalls.

Mantis is set in 1968, as were his two previous books. Not coincidentally, that was the year Planet of the Apes was released. Zell, who started drawing as soon as he could pick up a pencil, he says, was so in thrall to that SF classic that he drew on his bedroom wall portraits of two of the major ape characters, Zira and Cornelius. 

But beyond that, 1968, he notes, “was a very pivotal and impressionable time for America and for me. I was…going into my teen years; the space program was getting into high gear. I remember the scariness of the assassinations [of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy]. Everything that happened during that period had a huge impact on me.”

The Robert Kennedy assassination casts a shadow over Mantis. During the course of their investigation, Mulhenney and Poole determine that the killer they’re pursuing is tied to the mob, which was a prime target of Kennedy’s when he served as attorney general. “We’re in way over our heads—but it’s not the first time,” Poole ruefully comments. 

His first three years at the University of Arizona, Zell studied veterinary medicine after a friend’s dog was hit by a car. But then he joined a theater company and was putting in 40 hours a week with them. He also had two vocal scholarships. (Fun fact: He would later move to Los Angeles to pursue a music career, becoming a session vocalist, most prominently as what he jokingly refers to as the “Voice of Doom” on the series Baywatch. That was his voice singing the over-the-top emotional power ballads when heartbreak or tragedy visited one of the characters).

But with all his creative outlets, Zell was ultimately inspired to try his hand at writing a novel. He read Anne Rice’s Interview With a Vampire, which he liked, but not so much The Vampire Lestat or the novels she wrote under the pseudonym Anne Rampling. “I thought I could probably write something better,” he says, then adds with a laugh, “I wrote this rambling, stupid vampire novel. Four hundred pages into it, I realized I didn’t know how it would end. From that point, I said I would never write anything until I knew what the ending is.” 

Other disciplines helped shape his writing as well. While at college, he served as editorial cartoonist for the Tombstone Epitaph. “Cartooning helps you focus,” he says. “What is the dominant visual image that will draw people in?…Acting also really helps from the dialogue side. Another thing that helped [with the Mulhenney and Poole series] was having had a roommate for a year who was a forensic pathology major and worked at a morgue. I’ve also spent some time taking forensic pathology classes in the LA County Crime Lab.” 

This lends an authenticity to scenes in which Poole tries to get a handle on what investigating authorities are dealing with: 

“The drug profiles are too consistent not to be premeasured doses—as if delivered through a hypodermic syringe. But she can’t be using a standard syringe as a weapon. Way too clumsy to hide and wield,” Sara explained. 

“Our killer is fast and efficient when she needs to be; her life depends on it. The radius and evenness of the bite-marks suggest a denture of some sort. That denture could be hollow.” Cromwell sat back.

“You’re saying she stings with her bite? Like a mosquito?” 

“The flow of bruising could indicate injection sites at the bite, yes. An insect’s not a bad analogy. It’s possible her teeth are her syringe.”

Zell lives in Portland, Oregon, where he writes full time. He prefers to write early in the morning. “I tend to go to sleep early,” he says. “I try to get up at 4 in the morning; if I’m still in a dream state, I don’t edit myself. I do like to write in coffeehouses when I can, but I’m very claustrophobic, so wearing a mask [during the pandemic] didn’t work for me.” 

Of all his creative pursuits, writing scratches a particular itch. “Singing offers the most immediate gratification for me,” he says, “but there is something about writing and creating a world. I can start it, but once I flesh out the characters, they develop minds of their own. I imagined Running Cold, which introduced Mulhenney, would launch a series and [that] she would be part of it. Sarah Poole didn’t come into play until True Creatures, and once I put the two of them together, I immediately knew I had to keep them going.”

As for Alena? While she will not appear in his next book, a sequel to Running Cold, he is not ready to let her go. “I have plans for her,” he says.

Donald Liebenson is a Chicago-based writer.