It's true and it's cool, and you can read The National Book Review interview here, as well as some excerpt below. Which is also cool, yes? Indeed.
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Q: Let’s talk craft, and how you determined the best means to unpack and make sense of the chaos we’re experiencing was drawing on the mythology of the Norse gods to tell this story?
A: The through-line is the idea of absolutism and the uses we put it to whether that’s political, religious, or maybe even personal absolutism. The first two are obvious, but what’s personal absolutism, you’re probably asking? Maybe it’s the reality of a cult of personality like the one Trump’s developed, the primacy of his persona and ego taken to the extreme at which his followers completely suspend reason and choose to believe in the figure at the center of the cult, even though what he says makes no sense.
My use of a pantheon of fallen gods no one believes in as the main culprits in humanity falling to fascism again and again, is a way of deconstructing the uses we put absolutism to, a way of asking why we keep coming back to it in its many different forms: fundamentalist Christianity or Islam, fascism, communism? Is the world just too scary for us, scary enough that we can’t take it as a species? Is that why the 20th and 21st centuries have seen the rise of so many forms of absolutism? Are the problems we face so great that we simply can’t deal, that we have to fall back on “God said” or “Dear Leader said” in order to navigate reality?