- What is your “day” job if you are not a full-time author?
I wear many hats. But mostly I’m a stay-at-home dad. Household cleaning, fixing things, running errands, driving kids to school and appointments, homework help, and sundry, I’m our family’s go-to.
- If you wrote a book about your life what would the title be?
Long Walks by Night.
- What is the hardest thing about being an author?
I’m not giving any bullshit answers today. The pay sucks, the irrationality of the industry is a pain, the competitive and jealous environment is soul-sucking, but the #1 hardest thing is wrestling with a sense of futility.
Anyone who is serious about writing very quickly realizes how inordinately challenging it is to do well. When you have put yourself through that process -- not only the process of writing and editing a million times, but the brass-tacks business of securing a publisher or self-publishing, you confront the fact that a far fewer number of people are going to buy, much less read, your book than you had hoped.
Tethering our efforts to their demonstrable output into the world is a recipe for disappointment or disaster. I don’t have a good solution to this. Some days are good. Some days are bad. I tend to do the best when I think of my writing as a prayer offered to the world, and absolve myself of worry about whether the world accepts that prayer.
- What is the best thing about being an author?
The freedom! Anything that you can imagine, you can put down in writing. Few vocations offer its practitioners such godlike powers of creation!
- Have you ever been star-struck by meeting one of your favorite authors? If so who was it?
You know, I don’t really get star struck? And it isn’t like this is worth bragging about or anything, it’s just that when you meet someone in person you realize that they’re a human being just like you. Maybe their knees hurt. Maybe they haven’t gotten enough sleep and so they’ve been rubbing their eyes, which look sore. Maybe they are thirsty and have chapped lips.
That being said, I did get to meet Jennifer Egan pre-Goon Squad, and I hadn’t read any of her writing at that time. She was part of a panel discussion, and promoting her new novel The Keep (which I strongly recommend to all Lit Goths) but just seemed so approachable and friendly and helpful that I had to buy a hardcopy copy of her book and get it signed right then and there. I’m glad I did: The Keep is one of my favorites to this day.
- What book changed your life?
There are way too many to mention, but one that never gets its just due is Ann Radcliffe’s 18th century Gothic tour-de-force The Mysteries of Udolpho. Revered upon its release, parodied by Jane Austin in Northanger Abbey, and then largely forgotten to the mists of time, this 600-page tome exists as a footnote from the formation of Gothic literature. But to pick up the book and read it was a transformative, almost psychedelic experience for me. Radcliffe, a staid member of the early British middle-class produced this oneiric text that acts upon the imagination like drugs upon the brain. Poetry and prose swap places amid haunting evocations of lonely castles, bucolic cottage farms, and windswept mountain heights. Sometimes the plot dissolves into dreamy descriptions for pages at a time, and you find yourself so intensely imagining the scene that you become a participant along with the characters. Sometimes the story becomes dizzy to the point of incoherence only to fall again upon ideas about our vulnerability in the face of history and the enormity of nature. I have read this book four times, and am looking forward to reading it again.
- What were some of your favorite books growing up?
As a kid, fantasy and sci-fi were my go to: Tolkien, L’Engle, Leiber, the 80s/90s line of TSR paperbacks. Eventually I got into the Romantics, and especially Victor Hugo. I always liked big books that made me feel big emotions.
- What books are currently in your to-be-read pile?
I’m hoping in the next year to do a survey of the great Gothic novels I’ve never read; everything from Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer to that ghastly stuff Poppy Z. Brite put out in the 1990s. But I’m looking forward to the travel writing of Laurie Gough and poetry by Sarah Carson and Jonah Mixon-Webster. And Kelsey Ronan’s forthcoming Flint novel Chevy in the Hole. I’m also due for a reread of The Sound and the Fury.
- Which do you prefer ebooks, print, or audiobooks?
I love the convenience and affordability of ebooks, but any book I care about, I end up owning in print. I’m not one of those people who preserves his books like a museum. My books are dogeared with notes in the margins. I love my books to death.
- If you could live inside the world of a book or series which world would it be and why?
I think Earthsea would be hard to beat both for its staggering variety and an overall sensation of hope and promise, despite many troubles and threats.
The Darkest Road
Connor Coyne
Genre: General Fiction / Young Adult
Subgenres: Magical Realism, Teen Noir, Edgy YA
Publisher: Gothic Funk Press
Date of Publication: 9/22/2021
ISBN: 978-0989920292 (Print)
Page Count 639
Word Count: About 230,000
Cover Artist: Sam Perkins-Harbin
Urbantasm: The Empty Room is the third book in the magical teen noir serial novel inspired by the author’s experiences growing up in and around Flint, Michigan. It will be published in September, 2021.
Junior high was hard. John Bridge has made and lost friends, experienced and forsaken love, and discovered his true passions. But after his harrowing experience on the roof of St. Christopher’s hospital, John has decided to turn the page of his own life and plan for his future. Now he has new friends, a new girlfriend, and a powerful new goal: to get into Chicago and leave Akawe forever.
But Akawe might not want to let John go. The city is full of memories and ghosts — urbantasms, according his former friend Selby — and they leave traces of questions that John cannot easily escape: What happened to his abducted classmate Cora Braille? How does the Chalks street gang keep replenishing its stock of O-Sugar, a drug with seemingly magical properties? And why is Selby suddenly hanging out with a notorious drug dealer? Does it have anything to do with a man with a knife or some mysterious blue sunglasses?
John has a feeling that the dreadful answers to these questions might take him to a place that he does not want to go: a dark road in a forgotten corner of his dying city. Possibly the darkest road of all.
As a serial novel, Urbantasm has to be read in order.
New readers will want to start with Book One The Dying City.
Excerpt Book 3:
The summer dusk gave way to interstitial twilight. There was no sense in riding an hour back home in the dark just to turn around and come back the next morning. Instead, my friends and I bummed our way back to Camp Jellystone, where we got to camp in tents on the gravel and weeds off of the RV lot for five dollars a night. We sat around a fire and drank pop while the older actors – our mentors – went through six-packs of beer and homilized on their atheist Bibles. They quoted SNL routines, Monty Python, GURPS, Cthulhu, and the Digital Underground until we were all too tired to see straight. We all said goodnight and made our way back to our tents. But my tent had flooded during the week, and inside I found dead earwigs floating in slow circles.I didn’t mind.I was glad that this had happened.I gathered up my sleeping bag, which Eddie had dropped off in the morning before heading back to Akawe, and stumbled back through the purple dark to Omara’s tent.“Knock knock,” I said.I heard her sigh. “You got your own tent, John.”“Not tonight,” I said. “It’s flooded. Will you let me stay here?”“Fine,” she said. “If this ever gets back to my dad, he’ll murder you.”“I don’t think he will. I don’t think he’d murder a fly.”She didn’t argue. She knew that I was right. She unzipped the tent and beckoned me inside.In more than a year of going out, Omara and I hadn’t had sex. We hadn’t even been naked together. The driving thirst and curiosity that I had felt in seventh grade had been quenched by my confusing tumbles with Crystal. By my guilty nescience with Lucy. Still, here I was, sleeping bag in hand, stooped under the slope of the tent roof, wearing soccer shorts and a too-small t-shirt, and Omara stood before me, more stooped because she was taller than I was, her white panties and tank top bright against her dark skin. We unzipped our sleeping bags, made a bed between them, and lay down. Omara turned away from me, and I pressed into her back. I put my arm around her waist with my palm against her bare stomach. I could feel her shapes against mine, though there was still cloth between us.“It was a long day today,” she said.“Uh-huh,” I said.“We’d better get some sleep. It’s gonna be a long weekend. We got two more days to go. Then school. You know I got that job at the Olan Farm? It’s gonna be almost like this. I mean, I guess I’ll dress up like a milkmaid, like The Little House on the Prairie or something. But it’ll be acting, you know?”I sighed.“I’m not tired,” I said.“Me neither,” she said. And then, in a burst: “I can’t stop thinking about that woman on your block. Who murdered her baby.”I pushed myself against her. I held my breath. I said, “I can’t think about that. I mean. There’s nothing I can do about that. It makes me sick, but what does that even accomplish?”“But doesn’t it just stick with you? The idea of it? How awful it –”“I don’t want it to, okay? Anyway, it’s far away. We’re here now. Let’s stay here.”“We can’t stay here.” I felt the tenseness in Omara’s back.“Yeah. But someday, we’ll leave Akawe for good. And anyway. We aren’t there now.”“Aren’t you afraid your dad’s gonna lose his job?”“My father? Yeah. He’s already driving two hours each day ever since they transferred him to Canton. Ever since that strike ended last year, it seems like X is closing everything fast as they can. You know? I mean, they closed the Benedict Main. Most of the Old Benedict. Probably RAN, too. ‘Course, my aunt says they were going to close them all anyway.”Omara laughed. A slight untensing. “Sounds like you have thought about it.”“I think about lots of things a lot. Some things I don’t want to think about and some things I do. I mean, I think about you a lot.”I was trying to move toward her. In, you know, ways. But she wasn’t taking the bait.“Aren’t you afraid they won’t be able to pay for college?”She’d finally succeeded. Omara’s fears had become my fears.“No,” I said. “I mean, my mother is working at that new job at XAI. And even if my father gets laid off, he’s got options. Right? Transfer to other plants. Stuff like that. What about you? Why are you worried? Didn’t your grandparents get you a savings bond or something?”“Yeah. But I keep thinking someone’s gonna open a trapdoor beneath me or something. I guess ... I guess I keep thinking I’ll believe in college when I get there. And not before. It just seems a bad idea to get my hopes up, you know?”“You don’t have to worry about it for a while. It’s still years off. I mean, we just have to keep working, don’t we? It’ll happen. We just need to be patient or some shit, you know?”The wind buffeted the tent over our heads. I could hear low talking outside. Low chuckles. Through the tent wall, I could see the embers of the fire flickering faintly. Some of the older actors would be slouching in their folding chairs until the sky started to gray with dawn. That was still several hours away. I listened to it for a long, slow minute.“I do worry,” I confided. “I worry that something will happen that I don’t expect, and I’ll get stuck. That I’ll fail a class, fail a test I need to pass ... and I won’t get into college in Chicago, or I won’t get into college anywhere. I worry that my parents are lying about everything, and they can’t pay for shit. I worry that I’m just being set up to fail. I even worry ...” I caught my breath. Saying this all out loud was hard. Trusting a human being was hard. But at least I wasn’t looking into her eyes. At least the darkness of a September tent wrapped us and kept our secrets from everyone else.“I worry,” I whispered, “that you’ll go away to college in Chicago, and I’ll be stuck in Akawe, and I’ll never get out.”I heard a deep breath from Omara. I felt her belly raise beneath my cupped palm. She had fallen asleep, and I was grateful.
Urbantasm Book Two
The Empty Room
Connor Coyne
Publisher: Gothic Funk Press
Date of Publication: September 2019
Number of pages:
Word Count: 175,000
Cover Artist: Sam Perkins-Harbin, Forge22 Design
Book Description:
Urbantasm: The Empty Room is the second book in the magical teen noir serial novel inspired by the author’s experiences growing up in and around Flint, Michigan.
John Bridge is only two months into junior high and his previously boring life has already been turned upside-down. His best friend has gone missing, his father has been laid-off from the factory, and John keeps looking over his shoulder for a mysterious adversary: a man with a knife and some perfect blue sunglasses.
As if all this wasn’t bad enough, John must now confront his complicated feelings for a classmate who has helped him out of one scrape after another, although he knows little about who she is and what she wants. What does it mean to want somebody? How can you want them if you don’t understand them? Does anybody understand anyone, ever? These are hard questions made harder in the struggling city of Akawe, where the factories are closing, the schools are closing, the schools are crumbling, and even the streetlights can’t be kept on all night.
John and his friends are only thirteen, but they are fighting for their lives and futures. Will they save Akawe, will they escape, or are they doomed? They might find their answers in an empty room… in a city with ten thousand abandoned houses, there will be plenty to choose from.
Urbantasm Book One
The Dying City
Connor Coyne
Genre: YA, Magical Realism, New Adult, Teen Noir, Lit Fic
Publisher: Gothic Funk Press
Date of Publication: September 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0989920230
ASIN: 0989920232
Number of pages: 450 pages
Word Count: 85,000
Cover Artist: Sam Perkins-Harbin,
Cover Artist: Sam Perkins-Harbin,
Forge22 Design
Book Description:
Urbantasm is a magical teen noir serial novel inspired by the author’s experiences growing up in and around Flint, Michigan.
Thirteen-year-old John Bridge’s plans include hooking up with an eighth-grade girl and becoming one of the most popular kids at Radcliffe Junior High, but when he steals a pair of strange blue sunglasses from a homeless person, it drops him into the middle of a gang war overwhelming the once-great Rust Belt town of Akawe.
John doesn’t understand why the sunglasses are such a big deal, but everything, it seems, is on the table. Perhaps he accidentally offended the Chalks, a white supremacist gang trying to expand across the city. Maybe the feud involves his friend Selby, whose father died under mysterious circumstances. It could even have something to do with O-Sugar, a homegrown drug with the seeming ability to distort space. On the night before school began, a group of teenagers took O-Sugar and leapt to their deaths from an abandoned hospital.
John struggles to untangle these mysteries while adjusting to his new school, even as his parents confront looming unemployment and as his city fractures and burns.
“A novel of wonder and horror.”— William Shunn, author of The Accidental Terrorist
About the Author:
Connor Coyne is a writer living and working in Flint, Michigan.
His serial novel Urbantasm is winner of numerous awards. Hugo- and Nebula-nominee William Shunn has praised Urbantasm as “a novel of wonder and horror.”
Connor has also authored two other celebrated novels, Hungry Rats and Shattering Glass, as well as Atlas, a collection of short stories.
Connor’s essay “Bathtime” was included in the Picador anthology Voices from the Rust Belt. His work has been published by Vox.com, Belt Magazine, Santa Clara Review, and elsewhere.
Connor is Director of Gothic Funk Press. He has served on the planning committee for the Flint Festival of Writers and represented Flint’s 7th Ward as its artist-in-residence for the National Endowment for the Arts’ Our Town grant. In 2007, he earned his Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing from the New School.
Connor lives in Flint, Michigan less than a mile from the house where he grew up.
Urbantasm: http://urbantasm.com
Author Website: http://connorcoyne.com
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