Please help me welcome today’s guest, Lacunae…
Please tell us a little about yourself. Where are you from? Where do you live now? Family? Pets?
I am from Singapore and I live in Sweden now, which is a larger change of weather than anybody warned me about. I got married this August.
No pets of my own, which is an ongoing sorrow. I am a cat lover without a cat, so I get by on catnapping and cuddling my friends’ cats whenever I am allowed anywhere near them.
Where did you get the idea for Pantheon? Why did you choose this genre? Was there anything unusual about this book you would like to share? What is the most difficult thing about writing a book, and about this one in particular?
The idea started as a question I could not put down. What happens to a woman who has survived by becoming somebody else, and is then loved by a man who wants to know who she actually is? She used to kill for a living, for a private house in Geneva, and walked away from it to build a quiet life as somebody else. He is a Hong Kong businessman who loses a deal to her on a Thursday and wants her by the weekend.
Once I had the question, the genre was easy. Mystery and suspense are what I read and watch by default, crime and investigation most of all, and Pantheon began as a love letter to all of it. What surprised me was how much the romance and the espionage want the same thing from a scene, two people deciding how much the other one gets to see.
The unusual part is that it was going to be an interactive fiction, like my first work Perpetūra, and that lasted five days. Then I put the branching away and began again as a novel, and that was down to her. She cannot afford to be seen by anybody, and in a branching story you can always find your way around the worst of it. She has no way around anything. I wanted you to be as stuck with her as she is with herself, and it felt wrong to hand you a door she does not get.
The book also has songs. I write the lyrics, many of them from lines in the chapters, and the playlist is linked below.
In general, the hardest thing is everything after the draft. It is a whole other job.
The hardest thing about this one was making two people sound like different people from the inside, where there is no dialogue to help you. Her narration never names a feeling, because naming one would be a security failure for somebody who has been somebody else for five years. His does, because he is not hiding from anyone. Getting those two to sit side by side without one of them going flat took me longer than the plot did.
Do you have another occupation, other than writer? If so, what is it and do you like it?
I am a level designer, and I do like it. It is also why an interactive form was where my head went first with all of this. Building something a reader moves through by choosing is a very different craft from building something they move through by reading, and I am glad to have done both, because each one keeps showing me what the other is bad at.
How did your interest in writing originate?
For years it was fragments, characters and scenes I never got any further with. Then this year I wanted to make something that was mine from end to end, where every decision was mine to make and mine to get wrong. So I went back to those fragments and started putting them together, slowly, until the story went where I wanted it to go and the characters sounded like themselves rather than like each other.
How did you come up with the title?
Pantheon arrived early and never moved, which almost never happens to me. I have loved Greek mythology for as long as I can remember, and once the word was in my head nothing else fit.
I also like that it leaves room. This is the first of three books, and I wanted a title big enough to hold all of them.
What do you want readers to come away with after they read Pantheon?
That she was worth the risk she could not afford to take.
The whole book sits on one problem. Being loved means being known, and being known is the single thing she cannot survive. Everything else in it, from the money to the people looking for her, is there to lean on that.
If you finish it still feeling that you never quite got to the bottom of her, I will be delighted, because I never once said so out loud.
If you could spend time with a character from your book, whom would it be? And what would you do during that day?
Vivienne, and I know exactly how it would go, which is the sad part.
She would be wonderful company, warm and genuinely interested in me, and I would come away having told her a great deal about myself and learned almost nothing about her. It is five years of practice, and it does not switch off for a friendly afternoon.
So I would want a day with very little talking in it. A long walk somewhere with weather in it, or an afternoon in a market where we were both looking at the same things and neither of us had to perform. She is at her best when nobody in the room needs anything from her, and there is almost nowhere in the book where that is true.
I would like a day with Damien too, but he would ask me questions I could not answer, and then he would notice that I could not.
Do you collect anything?
Plushies, mostly from games. The newest one is Esquie, from Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, and I would recommend that game to anybody reading this purely on the strength of its story. It is some of the best writing I have come across in any medium, and I am fussy about that.
What was your first job?
I was a salesperson in a women’s clothing shop. It is the only job I have had where the entire task was reading a stranger quickly, which turns out to be reasonable training for writing a woman who does exactly that for a living.
Thank you for being my guest. Please tell us about your book.
He wants to know her. She cannot survive being known.
Excerpt:
The rule was five years old.
She had written it down once, in the first month, on the back of something she burned afterwards, and had never needed to write it again.
A face is a construction with a service life. Hers had survived daylight, cameras, six hundred people in a ballroom, a lawyer at nine hundred millimetres across a table. What it had never had to survive was proximity over hours, in poor light, with somebody who had no reason to look away and every reason to look. Heat and water took it apart by degrees. So did sleep, and so did being touched by a person who had already learned the difference between the shape of her jaw at eight o’clock and at three in the morning.
So the rule was: no. A practice. She had kept it without difficulty. The men who asked had been asking a beautiful woman who ran a fund, and refusing that is the easiest thing in the world. It costs nothing to say no to somebody who has not seen you.
The second half of the rule she had never written down. The rule protects the face. It also protects the person who would have to be lied to at close range, for months, in the dark, about everything. Vivienne had produced a great many people she was fond of and not one she had ever had to lie to properly. Fondness at a dinner table demands nothing and never says tell me about your mother.
Nobody competent had ever asked.
The sentence arrived in the tunnel, with the orange lights going over the ceiling. It was true, and she could not put it back.
Damien Tang had watched her for two and a half hours, worked out the precise mechanism by which she disposed of men, declined to trigger it, told her he was declining to trigger it, and then asked anyway with nothing in his hand. He had made refusing him a thing she had to actually do.
And she’d done it.
That was the whole of it, really. What she could not manage was that saying no had been the best few seconds of her month. A woman who is safe is bored.
She rested her head back against the seat. Under her clothes the chain sat where it always sat, and her thumb went along the inside of her ring finger, once, and stopped.
Buy links
Release: 1 November 2026, available now as a Kindle ebook, in paperback and in hardcover
Amazon: https://pantheon.lacunaedesigns.com/buy
Kindle+: included
Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/pantheon-lacunae/1151179248?ean=9789199236155
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/257263883-pantheon
Free sample, chapters one to seven: https://pantheon.lacunaedesigns.com/reader
Lacunae writes love stories about people who are very good at dangerous work. She likes them best at the point where being good at it stops being enough.
She writes in two shapes. Pantheon is a romantic conspiracy thriller, the first of three, about a woman who used to kill for a living and has spent five years making sure nobody looks at her twice, and the man who will not stop looking. Perpetūra is five interconnected stories across five centuries, published as two books and also readable free as an interactive novel.
Both are self-published, and both are written in the evenings around a full-time job.
Everything, including a journal about how the books actually get made, is at https://lacunaedesigns.com/
Social Media Links
Website: https://lacunaedesigns.com/
Pantheon: https://pantheon.lacunaedesigns.com/
Pantheon songs on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7lA6QnCTGqQ1RfNxdRQ3uA
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lacunaedesigns/
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/71887417.Lacunae
