Q&A with Michael Koryta
Michael Koryta, best-selling novelist, joins us for a brief exchange. He authored Those Who Wish Me Dead, reviewed here, among many other thrillers.
Are there one or two authors that have had an outsized influence on your work overall?
There are dozens, but I'd say Stephen King, Michael Connelly, and Dennis Lehane probably led the way. Those three were my guiding lights on the page at the start of my publishing career, and I'm still chasing them, obviously. They've all been generous and supportive, too, which means the world.
Do you have a favorite novel or novelist or fiction genre?
I'm happy to say that I don't! One of the greatest gifts to a writer is the chance to read widely. I read about 100 books each year, split pretty evenly between fiction and non-fiction, and across all genres. Books that have inspired me lately include The Only Good Indians, by Stephen Graham Jones, My Life as a Villainess, by Laura Lippman, and revisiting some Toni Morrison. I'm excited to see what Josh Malerman has done with his latest, Malorie, and I just listened to a fantastic book about the Chosin Reservoir campaign, On Desperate Ground, by Hampton Sides. So there's a lot of variety in there, and it is all grist for the mill.
Can we expect more books from you in the future?
I certainly hope so! There's nothing else I'd rather be doing, so I'll keep writing them and I hope they'll keep publishing them! This year will be a fun one, with two out under two different names. Never Far Away, under my own name, comes out next week, and then a horror novel called Where They Wait is out in October under the name Scott Carson. So I'm keeping busy.
