Victor Ladis Schultz’s first novel, The Book of the Jaguar, follows sole survivor and anti-hero, Álbaro Ceynos, as he and his nag, Rozi, trundle their way across a decaying, post-colonial empire, carrying with them the remains of his slain battalion. With each comrade’s return, Schultz steadily reveals the details of the tragedy that preceded Álbaro’s journey, and in doing so authors a fascinating epic about grief, loss, and survival.
It’s hard to imagine that this is a debut novel. The prose is sparkling: confident, lush, and tight as a fist. The book is written in a format that breaks the story into short, two-to-five-page chapters, each of them introducing a new character, a new story, and yet this feels not like flipping through a manifest but rather like transport to New Serraña itself. Reading Jaguar feels archaeological, a whole dusty, dirty, corrupting empire to look at, where we are shown the gamut, from the small, sacred funerary objects offered by each family to the entrenched prejudices that appear when city and country folk mix. This novel is also extremely funny.
Schultz and I have been close friends since high school. He was my first and always most encouraging reader when I started writing fiction. I met up with him at a bar in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood last month to discuss the book. We did our best to avoid distraction from the baseball on the television and the loudening graduate students that eventually boxed us into a very small corner of the bar.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
John Honkala
This novel is composed of short chapters or vignettes, each of which ostensibly focus on a single character but ultimately reveal the much larger story of Álbaro’s life, the attack itself, and, in general, the decaying empire in which he lives. How did you approach or plan the plotting of the book? Did the plot completely precede the chapter structure?
Victor Ladis Schultz
I had a lot of notes on the through-line plot, which is the attack on the Presidio and its resolution. I did have that planned out first—and some key chapters related to that—but really the construction of the novel was a massive throwing-shit-against-the-wall, note-taking process. In some ways—it’s not a story cycle, it’s very much a novel—but in some ways it resembled putting together a short story collection, because my initial concept was that there would be a little narrative associated with each soldier whose body was brought home.
I just had pages and pages of potential chapter ideas, which could also be considered story ideas. That turned out to be impractical. Eventually I had to cut so many of them, and also, look, life’s not that exciting, there’s not going to be some dramatic story that happens every time Álbaro brings a body home. So I realized I needed more ruminative chapters and essayistic pieces in there. It was basically constructing a main skeleton of the plot, and then a bunch of little narratives, and seeing the ways I could make each little chapter add onto the skeleton.
John Honkala
Did you ever get to the point where you thought, “Okay, in this chapter I need to push the plot forward, I need to reveal X?”
Victor Ladis Schultz
Yeah, there was a lot of planning out of the facing of the main through-line plot. I need to remind readers of that main conflict, so I always made sure to return to that before too many chapters had passed. There was, in general, a lot of balancing of those more narratively propulsive chapters with the more ruminative and essayistic ones. I did a lot of work trying to balance the pace and tone around that so people don’t get too bored or feel like things are getting too sensational. So yeah, that was something I spent a lot of time thinking about and planning.
John Honkala
Organizing the book the way you did had an effect I really loved: it elevated the minutiae of Álbaro’s and his fellow soldiers’ worlds into something perhaps more meaningful than if they were included in a more traditional narrative. Things that might get buried in a traditional long-chapter novel really popped in this one. There are capital-B big themes in the book, but I thought so many of the fragments and minor moments were poignant and memorable. With all the chapter stops, there are opportunities for words to hang in the air. Did you feel that as you were writing?
Victor Ladis Schultz
From a practical standpoint, there are a lot of drawbacks and a lot of positives with this scheme of a lot of small chapters, and so many of them being so self-contained. So, yeah, it was very much a thing where, as I was writing, it helped me feel more of the texture of the world, to be able to concentrate on those little things. I don’t want to say “Oh, this chapter is going to be about the trim on the house” or “In this chapter we’re going to make sure to include this little detail,” but Álbaro is such an itinerant narrator and he goes to so many different strata of society and locations over the course of the book, it really gave me a chance to touch on many granular things. And yeah, I did like that about it.
John Honkala
Yeah, there was one chapter where Álbaro thinks he might die. He ends up not dying, but he ends the chapter by saying, “Most of all [my tears] were for tragedy averted: never would I have wanted my last word to be mami.” I thought that was awesome. Obviously it builds the character, but also something that maybe gets lost in a more traditional story.
Victor Ladis Schultz
I appreciate that.
John Honkala
The scope of the book is quite large: bureaucracy and the state, tradition, ritual, decay, entropy, masculinity and manliness, mortality, theology, I can keep going. Obviously you can’t control how people read your work. But if you could somehow force it, are there any themes or concepts that you wish readers would consider?
Victor Ladis Schultz
What do I want readers to take from it, huh?
John Honkala
The answer can be “no.”
Victor Ladis Schultz
(pause) Generally, no, but I’ll say that I myself, as just a reader now—the book is out there, so I’ve relinquished it to other readers, and now I’m just another reader like them—maybe I have a little more insight into the process, but some themes that I think of as being a little more salient: obviously colonialism is a big one. But it’s not really a critique of colonialism. I mean what’s a critique of colonialism? Colonialism is bad? (laughs) So it’s not even a critique of it, it’s an attempt to portray life as we live it. I was attracted to the idea of telling stories in that setting, and whatever the ramifications of that are, I don’t know, but I think it’s an important part of the story to think about.
Grief, survivor’s guilt, faith, camaraderie, those are other themes that were front of mind when I was writing it. But I would never tell anyone how to read it, and people don’t need to concentrate on those things, and they should take what they want from it.
John Honkala
There’s also a lot of incompleteness in this novel. Álbaro doesn’t know a soldier’s last words. A priest doesn’t remember the man for whom he’s delivering a homily. A beloved comrade is revealed to be a domestic abuser. And there are lies throughout—Álbaro is constantly lying, mostly in service of his own personal ethical code, but still he’s lying. We as readers see the whole story, but the characters inside the novel get a very incomplete or inaccurate view of things—a lot of truth, yes, but also a lot is hidden from them. Was that something you were conscious of, or was it just the nature of Álbaro’s job, what he was doing, the world he lived in?
Victor Ladis Schultz
Incompleteness and lies/falsehoods weren’t overarching themes I was addressing directly. It probably comes, in small part, from the way I see the world: incomplete understandings, necessary small lies sometimes becoming big unnecessary ones. But also, when you’re talking about something as complex as a story covering so many people, each suffering a terrible tragedy, the pieces are not going to all connect. It’s impossible. I don’t see how it could. The world to me isn’t balanced that way—it certainly isn’t to Álbaro—and I guess that came out on the page.
John Honkala
Did you ever get to the point where you were like, “How do I describe somebody’s grief again?”
Victor Ladis Schultz
(laughs) Yeah, that might be the reason that occasionally I had somebody happy that the person had died.
John Honkala
This novel is set in a world that strongly recalls colonial Mexico. The blurb on the advanced reader copy calls the story “Latinx weird fiction,” and you, of course, are half Mexican. Do you think labels like “Latinx weird fiction” work better as marketing terms to help potential readers understand what kind of book they’re holding, or do you think it’s an important way to describe this book?
Victor Ladis Schultz
That particular quote was about my earlier short fiction, talking about my work more generally. I would not categorize most of this novel as weird fiction. (pauses) I am a Latino, so that label applies. But is it just a marketing term?
John Honkala
Let me interrupt real quick: I don’t mean to ask “Is it a marketing term?” I mean to ask is its value in helping to describe what the book is to someone reading the jacket, or is there a deeper meaning to a phrase like that?
Victor Ladis Schultz
There’s some of my work that it certainly describes. I think there are parts of this novel it can apply to as well. I do think it has some value, whether as a marketing term or just a general descriptor, because in speculative fiction there’s been, for a number of years, what’s called the OwnVoices movement, which is the idea that if you write fiction from a certain perspective (usually marginalized), it’s better for that fiction to come from somebody who has that background. So it is useful for readers to know, if that’s important to them, that this is an “OwnVoices” novel or not.
So I would say that maybe its value is somewhat limited, but I think it does have value for some readers.
John Honkala
Sticking to the label theme, like it or not, we do need some shorthand to categorize books, if for no other reason than to sell them. I’m not sure how this one will be categorized, but it’ll probably be “literary fantasy” or something similar. As you know, I don’t really read fantasy. But I loved this book. I did find it “fantastical,” and enjoyed that element, but I never really felt like I was reading a fantasy novel per se. So my question is: do I just not understand the fantasy genre, or have you written something other than that?
Victor Ladis Schultz
With all due respect, I think you don’t fully understand the fantasy genre. But also a lot of people don’t understand the fantasy genre. There’s a rich tradition of, for lack of a better term, “literary fantasy,” or really well-done, full-throated, full-blooded fantasy that really engages with its own fantasticalness and genre tropes, and is also written in a register that’s equal to much of the best “literary fiction” or classics. There are great writers and poets who have worked in fantasy, and science fiction too.
John Honkala
(interrupting) I don’t mean to demean or degrade fantasy, as if it can’t be literary. I know that it is. I’m sure the fantasy community deals with condescension from the literary world all the time. But for me—and again I don’t know if I totally understand fantasy—it’s not magic realism or something like that, but there are similar elements. To me it just felt like a very realistic, relatable story that happened to be set in a world that’s partly invented. Like when I read Richard Ford’s Frank Bascombe novels, it’s New Jersey, but he’s inventing city names too. It doesn’t seem to hew too far from that.
Victor Ladis Schultz
I was joking a little saying you don’t understand fantasy. What we’re really talking about is a minority tradition within fantasy. Most of fantasy, like all genres (including to some extent literary fiction if we think of it just as a market category), is dominated by the popcorn stuff that soaks up most of the attention, while the more artistically ambitious work (I’m not saying mine is there but I try to write at a high level, and whether or not I succeed isn’t up to me) lives on the margins. It’s the exception to get to become Cormac McCarthy doing Westerns.
John Honkala
So I am reading a fantasy novel when I read The Book of The Jaguar?
Victor Ladis Schultz
Yes.
John Honkala
I really enjoyed the cadence of your sentences, the syntax, the rhythms. They were maybe my favorite element of the whole book. How much did you think about your sentences and how they read and sound as you were writing and editing?
Victor Ladis Schultz
I don’t think of myself as a sentence fetishist, but I guess I probably am. I’m a copy editor by trade, I’ve been an editor my whole adult life, and as a writer, yeah, I want to write stuff that I, as an editor, wouldn’t be embarrassed to read. So I do think about that stuff a lot, though I tend to think of the paragraph as the primary unit in my writing. But I do love sentences, I love language play, so yes, I put a lot of thought into them. Did I answer your question?
John Honkala
Yeah, you did. I wanted to know if you think about how your sentences read and sound.
Victor Ladis Schultz
Yeah, I do a lot. I read quite a bit of my work out loud. Not always, but probably most of this novel I’ve read aloud.
John Honkala
Where do you read it aloud?
Victor Ladis Schultz
Wherever I’m writing, my bedroom, my study. Only me and my dog hear it.
John Honkala
Among the many virtues of this book, I think it’s super funny. Was it important to you that this book could be funny?
Victor Ladis Schultz
There are eighty-some chapters in the book, and every one of them could easily be funereal. A dead body is returned every chapter. It’s a potentially very dreary, gloomy setup. So I think it was probably a conscious choice to bring in some levity, otherwise, even if people give the book a chance, they’ll want to check out by around chapter thirty. But also, you and I have known each other a long time: I’m an easy laugh, I like to make people laugh, and probably some of that personality just soaks onto the page a little bit.
John Honkala
It’s interesting because, yeah, I know you and your sense of humor, so there are times when I know the jokes are Victor jokes, and they’re mostly funny. But there are also times where the joke comes from the contrast between really stately, beautiful language and a fart or something crude.
Victor Ladis Schultz
Part of that is that it’s a story about soldiers, and soldiers are complicated people with many aspects, but one thing they often are is crude. So there’s a lot of language and low humor, but I like both high and low humor, so I guess mixing them appeals to me aesthetically, whether in humor or elsewhere.
John Honkala
Was it hard to write this novel?
Victor Ladis Schultz
Yeah, it was hard as fuck.
John Honkala
One assumes. (laughs) But you do hear stories where authors are like “This one just came to me so easily.”
Victor Ladis Schultz
Because of all the elements in this book, and having to, in some ways, write a new story for each chapter—the reason short story collections are unpopular is that even though a novel might be three or four hundred pages, once a reader has gotten themselves into that world-speed and are in that world, they have momentum—but with all these little narratives in each chapter, in some ways I’m asking people to restart again with each one. That’s really hard to sustain, to hold a reader’s attention. I worked hard and hopefully succeeded well enough.
My work in progress is much more the sort of thing that might just flow out of you. Nothing ever comes easy for me, but comparatively there’s much less scheming and planning, fewer angles, less to balance. There were just so many elements in this novel that it was very difficult.
John Honkala
I do know that if I ask Victor Schultz if the work was hard, the answer, of course, is going to be “yes.” I can’t imagine you ever having an easy time writing a novel, just because of the way you approach it, but you never know.
Victor Ladis Schultz
In general, I find writing to be hard. I think I’m pretty good at it, but it would feel very strange for me if even just a short story came easily.
John Honkala
But has it gotten harder as you’ve gotten older?
Victor Ladis Schultz
No, I don’t think so. I’m still learning novels in a way I feel I’ve already internalized with short fiction. But in general, it’s not that it gets harder. You learn lessons and strategies to deal with some of the problems when you spend as many hours as I have doing this. But it’ll never be easy. The greatest writer in the world isn’t perfect, and any good writer is striving for perfection, so it always feels hard. I’m a slow writer because I’m a perfectionist and I’m not a naturally good writer.
John Honkala
Sometimes it’s easier than other times, but it’s always hard.
When we were younger, we used to drink a lot of beer and smoke cigarettes and talk about writing and go through hypotheticals about what it would mean to find “success” in this world. It’s a little hazy now, but I remember even in our twenties we were aware that we were working in a form where you could find first success at a much older age than most industries. Whatever happens with this novel, I feel like you’ve arrived at the place we always talked about getting to. How does that feel? Have the goalposts moved at all as you’ve aged? Are you able to accept and enjoy what you’ve achieved?
Victor Ladis Schultz
Having the book be a thing feels great. I’m really excited to share it with readers. That’s the main thing. As far as career stuff, honestly, the goalposts have probably moved, and I think they’ll continue to move. I’m ambitious as a writer and I don’t just mean career success with publishing, I mean artistically. So yeah, if the goalposts aren’t moving, how do you write another good book? You have to be hungry for a new project that excites you, and hopefully get within spitting distance of succeeding at that project.
John Honkala
Are you allowing yourself to recognize you’re at a place we talked about for years? Especially with you, it always felt inevitable, but I couldn’t quite see how it would happen. But it always felt like this was going to happen, and now it is happening in some way. Who knows where you end up, but I feel like you should allow yourself to enjoy that.
Victor Ladis Schultz
I don’t know, maybe toward the end of the year I’ll take a breath and do something like that. Honestly, when we were younger we talked about that stuff, and we still do in other ways, but we’re middle-aged now, and we know a lot of people who are just relieved to be alive. So things like publishing success matter but I haven’t enjoyed the public-facing part of putting out a book nearly as much as I enjoy writing, so I’ll say I’m focused on the creative goals more than the career goals.
John Honkala
Do you think if you wrote this novel and never got published, no one asked you any questions about it, no one read it—maybe a few friends read it—and then you moved on to the next one, would that be as satisfying as this arc?
Victor Ladis Schultz
No. I’ve always understood that it’s great to be a good writer and write just for yourself, and by and large I do. But a writer of a certain caliber does themselves and the world a disservice by not doing the annoying publishing part of it. The publishing stuff feels good initially, but writers are private people. That’s why it turns out I don’t really love the public-facing part of putting out a book.
I enjoy that people get to read the book, that’s the way I like to share it with the world. This is fun, and you’re my friend, but a lot of the promotional part of publishing is not. It’s something I look at as serving the work, but I don’t enjoy it as much as the primary work, not even close. I’m pleased that some people have seen my creative work as worth sharing with the world that way, but publishing the book has given me perspective on just how much I treasure the writing part of it versus the publishing part. But yes, I’m glad I published it. It’s a duty, I think, for a certain kind of writer.
FICTION
The Book of the Jaguar
By Victor Ladis Schultz
Fairwood Press
Published August 25, 2026
