Nik Korpon, Author of Wear Your Home Like a Scar

I first met Nik Korpon at a Noir at the Bar event he put on at Slainte in Baltimore. Outstanding and versatile writer and a hell of a nice guy. Our Venn diagrams intersect through quite a few friends and we tend to show up at the same Noirs at Bars and his writing never disappoints, even sometimes becoming performance art. He straddles the line between science fiction and crime as well as anyone I know and he always has thoughts worth sharing so it’s a treat to have him here today.

One Bite at a Time: It’s been almost two years since we last got together here. You’ve wasted exactly none of that time, I see. Two books coming out the first half of this year with Down & Out Books and a recent announcement of another deal. How did you hook up with Down & Out?

Nik Korpon: Thanks for having me back! Yeah, it’s been a pretty busy year, or two or three or… I’ve wanted to work with Down & Out for a while but, for a variety of reasons, things never lined up right. Then Eric (the head of D&O) approached me after the press that had released Old Ghosts and my short-story collection went dark, asking if I wanted to put them out with D&O. Of course, I jumped on it. It’s been a long road with both of the books but I’m very proud of what we came up with.

OBAAT: Old Ghosts came out in February. Give us a little scoop on that.

NK: I’ve written a lot since the first iteration of Old Ghosts but it’s always been a special book to me. I think it was because, prior to that, I’d written about Baltimore as a way to “visit” it while living in Europe or Massachusetts. But I wrote Old Ghosts in this little crappy apartment in east Baltimore where my wife and I lived when we got married, and I’d walk through the same streets in the book on my way home from the tattoo shop where I worked at the time. There’s something about the love triangle within the book that I’ve written around a couple times, with the main character Beto being pulled between mundane life with his wife, whom he loves, and the idealized past of Chance and Delilah. It’s like that pg. 99 song, “In Love with an Apparition.” So he’s pulled between these two possibilities, both of which are real in their own way, but some are more real than others.

That said, I found a lot of stuff I didn’t like as I was editing. Some passages were overwrought (hey, I was still figuring out how to write [actually, I’m still trying to figure out how to write; I just suck less now than I did then]) and there were a couple narrative inconsistencies within it that I fixed. But overall, I wanted to make the book a little more current, more applicable to life in Baltimore as it is now, so there are more themes around gentrification, immigration, stuff the city is dealing with. I couldn’t go into it as much as I wanted/should’ve (as one reviewer pointed out) but that’s the trade-off with novellas: choosing between propulsive stories or expansive themes. Still, I’m proud of how it turned out. It was nice to see that I’ve learned something over the last ten years.

OBAAT: Wear Your Home Like a Scar is the next book up, due out May 13. Tease us with something about it.

NK: I’m super, super stoked about this one. One of the books Down & Out asked about was a collection called Bar Scars. I initially said sure, why not, but after reading through it—and looking at all the stories I’d written between publishing the collection and now, I felt like I was doing a disservice to myself to put out that collection again. So I pitched a new, better version to Eric, which he thankfully was cool with. I took three of the stories from Bar Scars and re-edited them—one of them changing a ton, as well as moving from the Jersey Shore to Medellín, Colombia—then found a handful that had been published in places like Thuglit and Crime Factory along with others I loved but had gone in small anthologies that didn’t get the recognition I felt they’d deserved. To round it out, I wrote a couple new ones that filled some thematic spots within the flow of the collection.

What I found especially interesting was revisiting all of these stories and seeing my various preoccupations pop up across the years. There are a lot of stories dealing with dislocation or trying to reinvent yourself, things I’ve become more aware of as I’ve gotten older. But it was also a chance to push myself with new settings, different narrators and such. I made up worlds when I wrote the Memory Thief books but in crime I’ve never written about any place other than where I’ve lived—everything’s Baltimore or Massachusetts. So it was fun to pull other interests into these stories, try new things. There’s a second-person la Llorona story set in Mexico. More set on the border and in South America. I actually got ideas for a few of them from a podcast called Radio Ambulante, which is like a Spanish-language This American Life. They did a two-parter on the ruta negra—the clandestine plastic surgery trade— in Medellín that was tragic and morbidly fascinating. I asked a friend in Cali (Colombia, not California) about it and we had this long conversation about how pervasive it is, the socioeconomic implications of it, plus how these various illicit markets still thrive despite the city making massive moves to overcome the stigma of Pablo Escobar. (Though I did write an Escobar-adjacent story that was based on a line I heard in El Patron del Mal, but it’s not the typical narco story.) I think that, overall, the collection is very much a Nik Korpon book, but a different and better one. If that even makes sense.

What was I just saying about learning how to write?

OBAAT: I struggle with titles and often don’t have one until I’m halfway or more through the drafts. Wear Your Home Like a Scar is a fantastic title. How did you come up with that?

NK: Ha. Basically, a long text chain between me, Chris Irvin, and Angel Colón. I initially felt like there should be some sort of connection to Bar Scars because I didn’t want people to think it was a totally new collection and feel duped but also wanted to make the name better.

Then it turned into a wholly new collection, so the name had to change. We were texting back and forth about ideas and whatnot, and eventually I hit on the idea that most of the people in the collection are trying to reinvent themselves or find a new place where they fit but are unable because of whatever baggage they carry from before. They’re hampered because they can’t leave their home (whatever that means to them) behind. It came pretty quick after that.

OBAAT: Your new news is a deal with ChiZine Publications for your novel Rogue Matter. Tell us a little of the deal and what we can expect from the book. I also hear rumors there’s a film agent linked to the book. Do tell.

NK: When I was just starting as a writer, I loved the hell out of the books ChiZine put out and it was always one of my white whales, so I was super stoked they loved the book. I’ve gotten to know Sandra and Brett (who run CZP) over the last few years and we hit it off really well. I’m looking forward to working with them.

Rogue Matter was a really fun book to write. I’d been killing myself trying to figure out a different book and it just wasn’t happening, so to clear my head on the way to work, I listened to a podcast that was The Shield writers’ room reunion. I kept thinking, Man, The Shield was so damn good. I should write a book like that. But of course, The Shield is The Shield and I couldn’t top that. Then I thought, if I can’t top it, just make it different—like, The Shield in Space. A week or two later, I had a full outline and was laughing my ass off as I was writing it. I kept calling it Fly Hard, to which my agent said Yeah, that’s funny; no, we’re not using that title. But that gives you an idea of the book. It follows a group of rogue space cops called the Meros as the former-straight-arrow lead cop tries to earn enough money to save his adoptive mother in Mexico. It’s kind of like the lead-in to a bad joke: a Swede, a Colombian, and a Brazilian walk into a bar with their capybara and it all goes to hell. There are a bunch of insane fights and explosions. Outer space chases and a bunch of soccer references. Though it’s a crazy book, I think the emotional underpinning—what constitutes family, trying to find something that fills your missing parts—keep it from being just an action book and give it some grounding. Another bonus of that whole world is that they can go to different planets, and each one acts as a different movie genre. So in Rogue Matter, they visit a cartel planet, a Shaw Brothers/Hong Kong planet, a Blade Runner-type planet. I have ideas for additional books that let me write all these sort-of mini-genre-movies, which is really exciting.

As far as the agent, Eric Reid from WME heard about the book and really dug it, so he took it back to the in-house team at WME and they all loved it, so as far as I know, it’s making the rounds. I’ve heard some things here and there, but nothing’s ever done until it’s really done so I can’t say much more than that. I’m crossing my fingers and making every kind of offering I can think of, but mostly trying to keep my head down and work on this next book to keep my mind off it.

A Conversation With Nik Korpon

Here’s Nik Korpon’s Amazon bio:

Nik Korpon is the author of The Rebellion's Last Traitor (Angry Robot 2017), Queen Of The Struggle (2018), and The Soul Standard, among others. (Editor’s note: Plus my personal favorite, Stay God, Sweet Angel.) His stories have bloodied the pages and screens of Thuglit, Needle, Out of the Gutter, Crime Factory, Shotgun Honey, and a bunch more. He lives in Baltimore.

That’s fine as far as the writing credits go. It’s the “He lives in Baltimore” part I take issue with. He doesn’t just live in Baltimore. He absorbs Baltimore. He squeezes the life out of Baltimore then shakes it back into existence. To say “Nik Korpon lives in Baltimore” is like saying “Batman lives in Gotham City.” Marlo Stanfield crosses the street to avoid Nik Korpon. Anyone who doubts this didn’t see Nik’s precedent-shattering performance at last month’s DC Noir at the Bar. You don’t fuck with Nik Korpon.

He’ll talk to me, though. And did.

One Bite at a Time: Let’s start with how glad I am we finally got together here. We talked about doing an interview a while ago and things never quite came together. Tell me a little about your new book, The Rebellion’s Last Traitor.

Nik Korpon: Thanks! I'm glad to be here too. The Rebellion's Last Traitor is about a former revolutionary-turned memory thief called Henraek. About ten years before the book starts, he and his best friend Walleus led the rebellion against the brutal authoritarian government party, but when it became clear that the rebellion wasn't going to succeed, Walleus went turncoat, trying to talk Henraek into coming with him. (This all happens in the first chapter so I'm not spoiling much.) Henraek flipped his shit and started a riot, which accidentally killed his wife and son. So the book starts with Henraek stealing memories for the Tathadann, and selling some on the side on the black market where they're consumed like drugs. But after one mission, he finds a memory that suggests the story he'd heard about the riot isn't quite true. The book follows him as he searches for the truth about his family. And obviously, a ton of shit goes massively wrong along the way.

OBAAT: I tend to say writers are tripping over ideas and the real challenge is to find the one we like, suits our abilities, and we feel like living with for a year. The concept for The Rebellion’s Last Traitor isn’t the kind of thing one trips over every day. Where did you come up with that one?

NK: This book has been through a ton of different iterations, but, if I'm remembering correctly, it started with wanting to write about a thief, but a thief who steals something other than money or jewels or whatever. Eventually I stumbled over the idea of stealing memories. It ended up tying in well with other themes I tend to write about: what it means to be family, relationships between fathers and sons, the idea of having a homeland, how memory intersects with our conception of ourselves. And overall, I thought it was just a cool twist on the usual mystery novel.

OBAAT: I love that concept. When everything else is taken away from us, all we have left are our memories and whatever comfort they can bring. The idea of memory theft risks the removal of much of what makes us who we are. That’s got to be the scariest part of the book, the concept of memory theft.

NK: I definitely agree. Part of it comes from reading a lot of books on Buddhism, which looks at your relationship to the concept of self and reality. That easily slips into "Well, if I'm not really happy/angry/mad/hungry, I'm just experiencing a mental reaction to certain stimuli, then what if that stimuli is just a reaction to something else," and suddenly you're living in a simulation or whatever.

OBAAT: I think of you as a crime fiction and noir guy. Is this your first foray into science fiction?

NK: Pretty much. A lot of stuff I've written crosses the genre line—I think it's called slipstream but I can't keep up with all the categories—but this is the first real sci-fi thing I've done. And technically it is sci-fi, but part of me feels weird to say that because it's definitely not hard sci-fi. The comparison I always give is think X-Files, not Star Trek.

OBAAT: We met at a Noir at the Bar event a few years ago, I think it was at Slainte in Baltimore. I mean, we knew each other online, but we met face to face there, and I always think of you when a Noir at the Bar is scheduled for DC or Baltimore. How did you get hooked up and what keeps you coming back for them?

NK: Yep, Slainte is right. That was a great reading. The weather sucked but all the readers killed it.

I ran a reading series called Last Sunday, Last Rites for three years with my buddy Pat King out of the hostel where I worked at the time. I eventually stepped away because my son was born and I was too busy, but I missed being involved in them. So Brian Lindenmuth and I started talking about setting up crime readings in Baltimore, maybe a year before we did that first Baltimore N@B, but it never came together. Then Kieran Shea hit me up because he and Steve Weddle were looking at doing an N@B in town and thought I could help find a place to do it. Kieran lives in Annapolis and OC, NJ, and Steve is in Virginia, so it made sense that I would be the one who kept doing them. I don't do as many as I'd like, but the answer's somewhere between being really busy and being kind of lazy. And also because Ed Aymar does such great ones in DC that I have a hard time keeping up.

OBAAT: Speaking of Aymar, he set up the DC Noir at the Bar event we both read at last month. You and I are also on a panel with Cristina Kovac he’s running this Friday at One More Page in Arlington, assuming he’s not a ward of the state by then. (It will be the next Friday by the time this runs. Don’t panic.) How did you get hooked up with Ed, assuming you’re allowed to tell?

NK: When I was little, Ed was famous. He was the greatest Samurai in the empire, and he was the Shogun’s decapitator—wait a sec, wrong story.

Ed came to that Noir at the Bar we were talking about earlier, at Slainte, and introduced himself. We've become good friends, in large part I think, because he pulls me into a lot of his schemes, and man does that dude hustle. He's always organizing a reading or a panel or some kind of event, and he's really generous with his time and making sure to include local readers. I'm thankful for him because I get to participate in a lot of things that I'm too lazy or busy to set up myself. 

OBAAT: The Noir at the Bar Ed pulled off last month in DC was, I think, the best I’ve been to. The quality of writing was exceptional, as was the quality of the reading. Eryk Pruitt won the machete, but you stole the show with your performance art piece that put me in mind of the Reverent D. Wayne Love from the group A3. This may be of interest primarily to those who were there, but where the fuck did you come up with that? It was the single most memorable thing I’ve seen at a Noir at the Bar event.

NK: Thanks for saying that. It was a lot of fun to do. It started after Ed told everyone he got an engraved machete as the Audience Favorite prize. Then he texted me, saying Eryk had given him a clip of his shit-talking video and we'd all better bring it. So my goal was, basically, to out-sacrilege Eryk. The whole thing was a story at first, then I thought it'd be cooler to have it be more of a performance art kind of thing, and it all went to hell from there. But I think the main thing was to be entertaining. We're lucky at N@B because many of the readers are characters and sarcastic loudmouths anyway, so the readings are interesting. But a lot of readings are quiet, navel-gazing events, and I wanted to do something off-the-wall that people would remember.

OBAAT: I know there are writers who don’t like to read in their own genre when they’re working on a book. They think they’ll fall into the other writer’s style or voice. What—and who—do you like to read, and does that ever enter into it?

NK: It doesn't bother me much anymore. I think I'd avoid reading people when I started writing books, but by this point my own voice is fairly defined (or is evolving constantly enough) so it doesn't affect me much. I guess I try to read in the genre I'm writing to sort of get my head in the game. But I do read certain authors before starting a book if I want to try to channel them. Don Winslow and Dennis Lehane are two I fall back on frequently. I'm really looking forward to having time to read their new books this summer. Tana French is another one. Her writing amazes me because she'll have nine pages of interrogation—and that's nine pages of small type and narrow margins—but they're absolutely riveting. I don't understand how she does it. Gabino Iglesias is another writer I read when looking for inspiration for the book I'm (hopefully) starting soon.

OBAAT: I need to read Winslow. I’ve been tripping over his name for a couple of years now. I’ve been in the tank for Lehane for quite a while. I’ve heard him say he writes about the people he writes about—basically the working class and criminals—because he understands them and doesn’t give a shit about the rich. Stay God, Sweet Angel revolved around characters—notably Damon—who can’t catch a break. It doesn’t sound like Henraek and Walleus exactly have the road rising to meet them, either. What attracts you to these kinds of characters and stories?

NK: Winslow is fantastic. For my money, one of the best writers working today. I was lucky to get to interview him when he was touring for The Cartel (again, thanks to Ed pulling me in) and kind of froze, so I ended up asking him about surfing and fish tacos (which, if you've read the Boone Daniels books, makes sense). But he was really nice the whole time and I think happy to get different types of questions. I'm really looking forward to the books he's doing with Michael Mann. 

I'd put Lehane in the same boat, too. What I like about Lehane is the focus on working class people, people I know and grew up with, which is probably the reason I write about who I write about. Maybe it's the class-warfare chip on my shoulder, but I don't give a shit about the rich. Rich people problems are boring. Most people have no conception of what $50,000 is really like—like, in cold, hard cash—much less millions, so there's inherently more drama is someone scrambling to find $20,000 or something because you can imagine yourself in the character. It's like that old Elmore Leonard maxim: "Never have more money than you can fit in a suitcase." And people always want to root for the underdog, the downtrodden and the dispossessed. Although I torture characters in books, I think I tend to write happy endings (relatively speaking) and if I wrote about rich people, I'd just destroy their lives and not give them any hope for redemption.

OBAAT: What are you working on now?

NK: I've been writing a ton of essays and lining up interviews to promote Traitor, so that's taken up a lot of my (scant) free time. I also pitched on two really cool projects that didn't pan out but had a lot of fun with them. In between that, I've been working on a synopsis for a new thriller, which I'm really excited about since I've never written an out-and-out thriller before. Or at least my version of one. I've found that if I have a good, detailed synopsis, writing the book is a lot easier because I'm not constantly worried that it's going to fall apart at any moment and allows me more mental space to have fun with it. Which has been a good thing, because I've rewritten this story from the ground up about six or seven times. I'm pretty sure I found the right one this time.

Noir at the Bar - Washington DC

Last Saturday night Ed Aymar hosted Noir at the Bar at the Wonderland Ballroom in Washington. Ed picked a great line-up (plus me), and no one disappointed. (My established standards are such that I rarely disappoint anyone.)

First, kudos to Ed and everyone connected with the venue. The weather was crappy, parking is difficult in that part of DC, and yet the room was SRO. Events such as this sometimes come down to writers reading for their peers on the bill. Not this time. A large and enthusiastic audience was there. This was such a good crowd, I sold a book. Can’t get much better than that.

Lest you think my sale skewed my thinking, here’s who else was there:

Peter Rozovsky (his excellent noir photos of the event are at his blog, Detectives Beyond Borders.)

David Swinson

Ed (E.A.) Aymar

Nik Korpon

Sarah Weinman

Art Taylor

Austin Camacho

Jen Conley

There were a few raffles sprinkled in, with books and booze distributed free gratis to several lucky winners. I was one, scoring an ARC of Davis Swinson’s The Second Girl, scheduled for a June release by Mulholland.

I’m not going to try to sum up the stories. First, I couldn’t do them justice in summary, and, B.) you didn’t go, so it sucks to be you. Suffice to say the standard of writing was high, the atmosphere was perfect, and it’s safe to say a good time was had by all.

Noirs at Bars are popping up faster than Republican presidential candidates all over the country, and gaining a foothold in Europe. If you hear of one near you and are into excellent noir-ish fiction, by all means, go. Admittance is free (of course food and beverage are on you; literally, if you’re not careful around the bar) and you’ll be in the company of others who not only take their crime fiction seriously, but know how to have fun with it.

Ed hopes to make a pre-Bouchercon DC event a regular thing. I know I’ll be there. Whether I get a reading slot, or not.

Information Leak (Don’t Tell The White House)

This news isn’t breaking; it’s not even damaged much. Some of it will break soon, so don’t say you haven’t been warned.

The audio book of Grind Joint is complete and awaiting final approval by the powers that be at ACX. Based on their most recent communication, it should be available at Amazon, audible.com, and iTunes next week or the week after. Mike Dennis did a hell of a job with what is not the easiest book to read aloud if you’re not a native speaker of Western Pennsylvanian. I’m not sure of the price at this time, but it’s not going to be an arm and a leg; I draw the line at “or.”

Speaking of Grind Joint—and what else have I done without surcease for the past several months?—the e-book will release next week. Exact date TBD, but I plan to finish the formatting and post it to Amazon over the weekend, if not before. I do know the cost of this one: $3.99. That’s right; four bucks. I promised I wouldn’t be like one of those big publishers and charge damn near as much for the e-book as for the real thing, and I haven’t. And if I ever get a contract from a big publisher that wants to do that, I’ll tell them I forbid it. (Unless they pay me a lot of money in advance, in which case you’re on your own, dear and valued readers.)

The successor to Grind Joint is complete. Resurrection Mall is the counterpoint to the casino in Grind Joint, a religious-themed shopping center with a church as the anchor. It is hoped this will revitalize the decaying downtown area of Penns River. We’ll see.

Speaking of Resurrection Mall, that manuscript isn’t destined to sit on my hard drive until I get a bug up my ass and do something with it. I signed a deal to be represented by Bob Mecoy earlier this month, and the manuscript went directly to him, which frees me up for another couple of projects:

1. Right now I’m working on a chapter in a progressive novel called The Bank Job, where each of over fifteen writers contributes a chapter. It’s a multi-POV story, and that’s all I’ll say about it, except that I’m delighted to have been asked, considering the company I’m keeping. (Eric Beetner, Les Edgerton, Nik Korpon, Terrence McCauley, Tom O’Mara, Charles Salzberg, and about a dozen others who were willing to risk their reputations by allowing my name in the credits.) The plan is to have the book ready by Bouchercon in November.

2. The fourth Penns River book (working title PR4—I’m not wasting any of my limited creativity on a title I’m going to ditch) is undergoing final outline revisions. I’ll start on it as soon as my chapter for The Bank Job is finished. Doc and the cops have to solve what appears to be a random homicide while dealing with a new drug boss and a federal consent decree that mandated more female cops in Penns River.

Updates as they become relevant.