Author Ryan Schneider's Blog

This Author Spotlight features Kathe Koja author of Bastards' Paradise Kathe Koja’s novels span several genres - historical, YA, horror - and have won numerous awards, including the Bram Stoker Award and the Parents’ Choice Award, and have been optioned for film and performance. Her 16th novel, THE BASTARDS’ PARADISE, the final in the UNDER THE POPPY trilogy, is out this fall from Roadswell Editions. She adapts and directs performative fiction with her ensemble "nerve". I distinctly recall purchasing a paperback copy of SKIN from Waldenbooks when I was in high school. Kathe Koja is big-time. Author photo: Copyright Rick Lieder 1.How did you get into writing and why do you write? I’ve been a writer since I was a very small child: since I knew what a story was. 2.What do you like best (or least) about writing? It’s very serious, very nourishing play: the initial blossom of the idea, the research, “feather...

The Cipher by Kathe Koja is in The Philip K Dick Award Storybundle! THE CIPHER is Kathe Koja's classic, award-winning horror novel: the story of Nicholas, a failed poet, and Nakota, his feral lover, who discover a strange hole in the storage room down the hall: "Black. Pure black and the sense of pulsation, especially when you look at it too closely, the sense of something not living but alive." At first it’s a curiosity, a joke - the Funhole. But then the experiments start. "Wouldn't it be wild to go down there?" says Nakota. Nicholas says no—but from the first, they’re not in control. And the experiments turn to obsession, and violence, and a very final transformation for everyone who gets too close to the Funhole. The Cipher was the winner of the 1991 Bram Stoker Award as well as a Finalist for the Philip K. Dick Award , and was named one of io9's Top 10 Debut Science Fiction Novels That Took the World By Storm . Here’s ...