Benjamin Percy is an award-winning novelist, comics writer and screenwriter. He has written three novels, The Dead Lands, Red Moon, and The Wilding, as well as two books of stories, Refresh, Refresh and The Language of Elk. Percy writes the Green Arrow series for DC Comics. His honors include an NEA fellowship, the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Plimpton Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and inclusion in Best American Short Stories and Best American Comics. Now, in his first book of nonfiction, Thrill Me: Essays on Fiction (Graywolf Press), Percy challenges the notion that literary and genre fiction are somehow mutually exclusive. The title essay is an ode to the kinds of books that make many readers fall in love with fiction. In fifteen essays, Percy looks to disparate sources such as Jaws, Blood Meridian, and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to discover how contemporary writers engage issues of plot, suspense, momentum, and the speculative, as well as character, setting, and dialogue. Thrill Me brims with Percy’s distinctive blend of anecdotes, advice, and close reading, all in the service of one dictum: Thrill the reader.
