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| photo: Kathryn Hollinrake | |
Kelley Armstrong is a prolific Canadian fantasy and crime fiction writer; her works include the Cainsville and Otherworld series (13 books), plus the Darkest Powers and Darkness Rising teen paranormal trilogies. Her most recent book, Wild Justice (Plume, November 26, 2013), concludes her Nadia Stafford crime trilogy. Armstrong lives in rural Ontario, Canada,
On your nightstand now:
Justin Cronin's The Passage and Lauren Beukes's The Shining Girls. And on my iPod, the audio for Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane.
Favorite book when you were a child:
There were so many! But I'll go with Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables.
Your top five authors:
Jane Austen, Stephen King, Anne Rice, Neil Gaiman, J.K. Rowling.
Book you've faked reading:
Herman Melville's Moby Dick. I recently said it was on my summer reading list... but it has been for 20 years. It's the only classic I can't read--never get past about page 50.
Book you're an evangelist for:
Richard Adams's Watership Down. It was the first fantasy book I read that wasn't meant for children. It works on so many levels.
Book you've bought for the cover:
Most recently Asylum by Madeleine Roux. I haven't read it yet, but the cover is so wonderfully creepy that I had to pick it up.
Book that changed your life:
Not necessarily my life, but my writing life: Anne Rice's The Vampire Lestat.
Favorite line from a book:
Oh, I'm so bad at remembering lines from novels. I actually try to avoid it, because if I love and remember a line, I might reuse it by accident! Can I cheat and use a poem? Sir Walter Scott's "The Lady of the Lake." The line is "The will to do, the soul to dare." I remember reading and loving that line in the poem. Years later, I found a necklace with it inscribed in tiny writing--too small for anyone to read, but I know it's there.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
I'm going with nonfiction here. Joseph Campbell's The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which brought me to James George Frazer's The Golden Bough, both big influences.