Jack Allison (previously a writer for Jimmy Kimmel Live! & the Academy Awards and co-host of the podcast Struggle Session) and Kate Shapiro (writer/journalist, MFA UNLV) have teamed up to write a novel called Kill the Rich (Clash Books).

Set in 2038, Kill the Rich begins with the public execution of Kim Kardashian, which puts into motion a series of events involving political advisors, online influencers, and even a pizza delivery driver that will have lasting consequences on the U.S. and the world at large.

Leading up to the release of their ambitious satirical novel, Jack and Kate were kind enough to participate in a Q&A with Genuine Gold. Kill the Rich will be released on September 12 from Clash Books. The book will be available at clashbooks.com and all other book-selling outfits.

Genuine Gold: Kill the Rich has an incredibly unique premise and we’d love for you to describe it for us. No spoilers, but what’s the plot of the novel in a nutshell?

Jack Allison: I don’t think it’s that unique. I think it’s pretty likely to happen. Basically, in the near future, America splits into three political parties: do-nothing moderates, conspiracy-kook right-wingers, and socialist progressives. With a third of the vote, a Communist president wins and puts his campaign slogan “Kill The Rich” into action with a televised public hanging of Kim Kardashian.

Kate Shapiro: Then the rich fight back, which puts three people—a senior aide to the president, a Las Vegas pizza delivery driver, and an American influencer ex-pat—on a journey where they’ll ultimately cross paths in a cryptocurrency-fueled secessionist city in Nevada.

JA: And of course there’s a breast milk delivery app and a Russian oligarch in there too. Pretty basic stuff.

GG: How did you two meet and how did you decide to collaborate on this book?

KS: This is going to be a slightly awkward question to answer.

JA: Kate’s best friend is someone who I am now divorced from. But Kate and I stayed friends.

KS: During the pandemic, I wrote a serialized Substack called Kill The Rich that was essentially connected short stories set in the world of what would become our novel. I thought of Jack when I was working on a second draft. I knew the book was in line with Jack’s sensibilities so I asked him to come on board and co-author the novel version with me.

JA: And I’m so glad she did!

GG: Most people think of writing a novel as a solitary pursuit, so how was the process of writing this book together? Did you encounter any difficulties navigating this project?

JA: Honestly, people ask this question a lot, and it seems like people think it would be a lot harder. It was actually a lot easier to work with a co-author!

KS: We kept each other on a schedule. We had each other to bounce ideas off of.

JA: The book has three perspective characters, so we each took one of the characters and split the third character’s chapters between us. So we were kind of writing separate interconnected novels, meeting every week and talking about it, until the stories became more entwined at the end. Then we had to be in contact a lot more.

KS: People are surprised to hear that it’s co-authored because they tell us the voice is so consistent. Maybe when you have different perspective characters having multiple, distinct voices is a good thing.

GG: We’ve had writers tell us that selecting names for their characters is something that causes them a lot of undue stress. Is this something either of you ran into? Did it take a lot of attempts before landing on the perfect character names?

KS: I don’t remember, for the most part. Sasha, I wanted to be Russian, so I looked up Russian names and I liked “Sasha” the most. Jay, I started with the last name, I stole my friend’s last name. He texted me saying how honored he was that I used his last name and I was like, “I stole your last name.” Chloe, I was trying to think of the most mundane American name an influencer would have, and I chose her last Thibodeux because I wanted her to have a backwoods, Louisiana-type history.

JA: Kate came up with all the names. I think the one I like best is our character who is definitely not based on Elon Musk, Willem Loots. How did you come up with that name?

KS: Willem Loots is from Lesotho, I was looking up common last names from Lesotho, that were also Afrikaans, which is the colonial language, and I found “Loots” which just seemed so perfect. I think that’s how I found Willem, too. I wanted it to sound like “Elon Musk,” so I guess I liked that they had the same syllables. You named Felix.

JA: Oh, yeah. Our CIA spook Felix is named after Felix Leiter, James Bond’s American CIA friend. I was reading the pretty canceled Live and Let Die when we were writing that part.

GG: Authors seem to always get asked about their favorite books, novels that inspired them, etc. But we’d like to know what books you’ve read over the years that you particularly disliked. Are there any novels you despise or at least didn’t much care for?

KS: I put everything in Goodreads, so this should be an easy question. I hated Wuthering Heights! I was reading Wuthering Heights and I was thinking it was going to be this grand love story, but I realized it was extremely selfish people who are mean to each other and everyone around then, and then they die and are ghosts for the rest of the book. It’s weird that it’s canonized as this great love story, when they don’t even seem to like each other very much.

JA: We’re working on the sequel to Kill the Rich which, spoiler alert, is about war, so I was trying to read some popular war novels. After a strong start, I found Hunt for Red October to be extremely tedious. Jack Ryan, who coincidentally writes nonfiction naval history just like the author Tom Clancy, is so smart that he made millions of dollars playing the stock market before he got bored that it was too easy. The bulk of the book is just boring maneuvering and characters explaining naval equipment like out of a technical manual. But it’s pretty funny when the Russians defect at the end and the best Clancy can come up with for them to marvel at in America is grocery stores and cable TV. I’m gonna skip the rest of Jack Ryan.

GG: The character Sasha in Kill the Rich is a pizza delivery driver. So in honor of that...if you could have a pizza dinner with any five authors (dead or alive) who would you choose to dine with and why?

JA: Are we attending the dinner together?

KS: I wrote down five. They’re all white guys. Mikhail Bulgakov.

JA: The Master and Margarita pizza!

KS: Alan Watts I put down, it’s always good to have an alcoholic zen guy. So he’s blackout drunk but telling everyone he’s not desirous of anything. Emily Bronte, to do a wellness check. I’ve been reading a lot of Homer, so I put down Homer, even though he’s not a person. Maybe just to ask who they are.

JA: Okay. That’s four. I’m tempted to leave the last seat empty so we get more slices. But I’ll go with Frank Herbert so I can ask if he read his son’s shitty Dunes and what the real ending was supposed to be.