This episode is based on the book All Angels Have Wings by Mai Kristiane Thomsen. Bodies are found buried in the woods, all of them with wings carved onto the skin on their backs. Young women murdered, all looking the same and around the same age, all but one…

Welcome to this edition of Newsgram. 

Before we begin you should know that today’s program touches on Mental Health issues that are sensitive for some listeners. Depression, ADHD, anxiety, self-harm and suicide. It’s also about perseverance, strength…and the birth of a serial killer. 

Here’s Mai Thomsen, author of All Angels Have Wingsto set the scene. 

Mai Thomsen – The first scene in the book is the first chapter you’re going to read. It’s the Prologue. It’s about a woman getting buried alive in the first and that’s where we meet the killer for the first time… 

The sound of the shovel was deafening, and he was in no hurry. Took one slow but determined dig, one after the other. The soil slowly built in a pile next to him while the hole in the ground now reached his knees. At no point in time did he puff or complain, almost like he did not tire. He just kept digging and whistling the same short melody over and over. “Fffff fff fff fff, ff-fff fff fffff fff ff-fff.” Trish didn’t recognize the tune, but she knew that his whistling, along with sounds of the soil brushing against the shovel, would be the last things she heard. She was going to die. She could already feel it. The stab wound was bad, and she had been bleeding for hours now, going in and out of consciousness. She just hoped it would all end before she was put in the ground. Before the soil suffocated her and the ground took claim over her body.

Mai Thomsen…this forest and the white stones you see on the front page, this is very significant to the rest of the story. 

You probably have some questions. Who is burying who? How? What? Why? I know how you feel and you’re going to have to trust me that it’s not the most important part of this story. The fastest way to resolve those feelings is to stop listening to this podcast and download a copy of Mai’s book. Now, don’t actually do that because I have a lot more to tell you and it begins with the Why…because this story is a tale born out of therapy. It wasn’t even intended to be a story. Let me take you back to December of 2019. 

Mai Thomsen – I started to struggle a lot with my mental health. It got worse and I got into a very dark place and I started going to therapy because I needed it and I was very open to my therapist saying I have a hard time opening up to other people; to talk about my feelings and the tough things. I usually hide behind a smile or a terrible dad joke or something. So, I was very open in the beginning saying I need you to call me out on my Bullshit to be quite frank and my therapist was like that’s fine we can do that and as we talked he pointed out that i seem to be a very creative person and he said, “well, would it help for you to maybe write all this down?k Because you do writing in your everyday life anyway so maybe all these feelings that you cannot articulate to me then write them down”. and I found that if I wrote the feelings down and then blew them out of proportion, making them much bigger than the feelings I was sitting with, they became visible to me in a way that I could see them. I could see what could have caused them and then slowly I started to put them onto this person, Linda the main character. 

As she transferred her feelings to Linda, in a very dramatic way it became a self help journey for Mai and a page turning adventure for you and me. Linda is Mai at her roughest. 

Mai Thomsen – Heavily depressed. Doesn’t really take care of herself. Doesn’t really think about herself and wants to take care of everyone else. That’s not good for myself. 

There are other characters as well that owe their personalities to Mai like Andrea. 

Mai Thomsen – She is the me I need to be for myself. So you will see throughout the book how Andrea is this rock and this safe place for Linda through the story and I see that as the person I would  have wanted myself to be if I was going through that myself I would have needed a person like that. 

Then there’s Arnold, a character made up of a whole group of people. 

Mai Thomsen – That’s the support system. That’s all the friends and the family asking if you need help but you don’t want to quite accept it because you want to go through it yourself. Without him Linda would not be alive. I was pretty sure about Arnold how he was supposed to look and act. He smokes pipes and  there’s a bit of banter between him and his wife and that’s kind of how I saw my parents’ relationships and kind of based a little bit of my dads appearance. 

Together they make for a very interesting cast of characters along with others that you get to meet early in the book when they all gather together at a funeral. Oh, this is not a happy tale but it’s a good one and don’t worry, as dark as it seems there are plenty of laughs. However, this is not a crime novel.

Mai Thomsen – It’s not a crime story. It is a horror, thriller and suspense. It’s nothing to do with the crimes themselves, it’s more about the minds of the killer. How can a person do these things but also about Linda. What happens when we push a person to the limit. Arnold, her rock in the book, talks about at one point that she has this kind of switch that she can flick off and when she does all of her emotions disappear and that makes it so she can deal with all the stress. All these traumas and horrors from her past and also present and future and he worries for her what will happen that day, if it happens when she switches off completely. 

There are all kinds of shows that attempt to take you into the mind of a serial killer and no matter how many of them I watch it’s still very hard to see things from that perspective. That is probably one of the things that we find so fascinating about them. It’s a dark confusing world and gazing into that abyss can be a mind bending journey. 

Mai Thomsen – When you really reach rock bottom it’s not about being evil to other people but you’re being really evil and mean to yourself. So you have those similar feelings. I have had suicidal thoughts and been in a really rough state. I was not able to take care of myself and I was really rough to myself and those feelings, those thoughts, I don’t know how but I managed to turn that around I hope in the sense of maybe this is how a serial killer would think. 

Identifying with a serial killer is one thing but something else that makes a story one to remember is how you identify with the main character. 

Mai Thomsen – I have never really been able to just pick a genre and then find a character in there that I can relate to. I am a lesbian and I’m also realizing that I might be non-binary or transgender but that’s not something I’ve been able to work on because of my mental state but now I’m in a good place but I’ve never been able to identify that in a book. You know you can read a bunch of books that are LGBTQ related but that’s the main topic then. I would like to read a story or watch a movie where it’s not the main story, it’s just an aspect of it. It’s what the whole story is about.  So that was one of the really important things to me, that I would be able to create something that I would want to read growing up. 

Mission accomplished. The book is called “All Angels Have Wings” and in it…

Bodies are found buried in the woods, all of them with wings carved onto the skin on their backs. Young women murdered, all looking the same and around the same age, all but one. The latest victim appears a lot older than the rest, and she seems to be the only one who was stabbed and buried alive. When Arnold sees her, it is like his whole world stops. He knows her, and he knows that this means the angel maker is back. He is out there looking for his angel, the one that Arnold took from him years ago. 

Mai Thomsen – If you’re struggling with mental health and you are in a dark place  maybe this is not the book for you. It is a bit dark and it is a bit twisted. There is humor in there and I have tried to lighten the mood and I cannot promise if book number two is going to be happy but I will just say be mindful of yourself take care of yourself and maybe before you read this book because I don’t want to be triggering in any way. 

Good advice and for those of you who have listened this far into the podcast and are curious, yes…there is a sequel on the way. 

      All Angels Have Wings by Mai Thomsen is available now online at Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com and many other places where you like to shop for books. And that will do it for this edition of Newsgram from Webtalkradio.com. 

Mai Thomsen was recently profiled on the Books on Air podcast with Suzanne Harris.