Featured Interview With Ian Kirkpatrick
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
Hey! My name is Ian and I'm an author of speculative and satirical author. I kind of love absurdity, so I deal a lot with exaggeration, both for serious and silly things because people… are bizarre, man, ahaha. I've kind of moved around a decent amount growing up. First, born and raised in the only desert part of Washington State then I moved to Alaska for a while, then I moved to the tropics, and, well… It's fair to say I haven't found 'home' yet, but I'm looking. I have one dog, an American Eskimo named Tate and he is a sweetie pie with a big smile.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
I have been writing since the first project my mom gave me in home school. It was a short thing where we picked a couple of words from a list to create a title. Mine was Sapphire the Pony… and then we had to write a short story about our subject. After that, I looked for any reason at ALL to write. I spent all my free time writing and playing pretend, really… Teenage years? College? When I wasn't at school, I was writing online. Even though I spent all this time writing, it wasn't until I was like 21 or 22 when I realized I could write for more than a hobby… and that's what I wanted to do. So, while I had been writing the whole time, that's when I took reading and writing seriously as something to pursue using books to analyze and improve.
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
Some of my favorite authors are Bret Easton Ellis, Brian Masters, Dan Simmons, and Phillip K. Dick. I don't know if I'd say I have a favorite genre to read, because it's the subjects that pull me to the author. I love reading stuff that explores reason and character choices, logic and psychology — I love things that lean on the magical realism side, so you've got the normal and the fantastic all at the same time — but nothing TOO fantastical., I guess even the ridiculous side or stuff with humor that's not necessarily mean, but you know, satire, points at absurdities hahaha, and I love criminal psychology. Brian Masters is easily one of the best biographers I've ever read.
Short answer is I guess I love the genres that I like to write, but they're harder to define. Horror, American Psycho, excellent true crime books, satire, and weird fiction that still makes sense.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
"Horror is What Happens When Evil Overtakes the Heart"
My latest novel (coming out October 31st, 2021) is called Bleed More, Bodymore. It's about a mechanic named Joey who goes to pick up her friend from the infamous Baltimore body dumping ground, but when she gets there, he's missing and when she gets his car back to the shop, she finds a body in his trunk. The cops are pretty sure he did it, but Joey's sure she knows her friend better. While she races the cops to find her missing friend, she stumbles upon a city of ghosts underneath Baltimore, meets a reaper, and watches the River Styx consume a soul.
This book is so much about regret, pain, anger, and grief. An inability to let go, how people affect each other and their neighbors without even realizing it, and just how motivating regret is. I'm so excited for readers to see this book because Joey was such a fun character to write, especially in building up to the climax. This novel took me about three months to get the first draft worked out and another month and a half to revise and edit it. One of the fastest books I've completed to date, but the novel just came once I started working on it.
While it took such a short time to write, I had the vibe hanging around in my head for months before working on this. Somewhere, I saw the phrase "caedis silvis" and I said I liked it — I got ghost forest vibes from it — put that on my idea wall and just let it sit for a while. Then, last summer while I was mowing the lawn, Joey unfolded in my head with where she wanted to start the story, taking it from a ghost forest with someone who committed to Baltimore and her missing friend. Don't worry, neither Joey nor her missing friend committed suicide, though the novel does deal with death and suicide among other things.
Ugh. And the birds. I'm just so excited to share this story with readers and I hope the story it tells means as much to others as it does to me.