Pyres, by Derek Nikitas is a 2008 Edgar Nominee for Best First Novel by an American Author.

Like his novel’s protagonist, Derek Nikitas was born on Saint Lucy’s Day, December Thirteenth.  Raised in Manchester, NH, then Rochester, NY, he earned his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, then sought adventure in the Czech Republic, England, and Costa Rica. He is currently pursuing a PhD in English from Georgia State University, and has published stories in The Ontario Review, Chelsea, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and The Pedestal Magazine. Joyce Carol Oates nominated him for a Pushcart Award in ’05, after she said his fiction was “subtly written, and quite touching and powerful.”    

Learn more at: dereknikitas.com

 

"I've long been an admirer of Derek Nikitas's unusually engaging, subtly rendered short fiction.... Any subject Derek handles, channeled through the lens of his unique sensibility, is likely to be of unusual worth and interest."

Joyce Carol Oates, National Book Award-winning
and Pulitzer Prize nominated
author of, most recently, Black Girl/White Girl

"Pyres is an utterly absorbing heartbreaker. It also takes a hard look at the dark side of the modern American family, from trailer park to university campus, and the unlikely roads that connect the two. If you think you had a tough time turning 16—trust me, it's nothing compared to what Pyres's heroine, Lucia Moberg, has to endure. Derek Nikitas has written a blazing debut, and I'm looking forward to whatever he writes next."

Duane Swierczynski, author of Severance Package

"Derek owes me a night’s sleep... Loved it! My God how [Pyres], excuse the pun, burned me, in all the best ways…. just took my battered heart and crushed it to smithereens…. It revived me, hurt me, and most of all, invigorated me…. The writing is to roar for and loud and triumphant. Just a marvelous, wondrous book!"

Ken Bruen, Shamus Award winner
and author of American Skin

"A fever dream and a waking nightmare—a hypnotic, sophisticated descent into hell.  Nikitas is the heir apparent to Joyce Carol Oates."

Marcus Sakey, author of The Blade Itself

"Nikitas’s story is literary and smart. His effortless prose and genre-melding style is reminiscent of John Connolly, his ability to tap into the disturbed teenage psyche as masterful as Lisa Carey. Pyres is a must read. I couldn’t put it down."

J.T. Ellison, author of All the Pretty Girls

"This novel is like a dream that haunts you in the daytime, masquerading as a memory of real events…. It is not only the concentrated beauty and unrelenting lyricism of Nikitas's language that ensnares the reader, but his unflinching immersion into the unlit corners of the human heart and conscience, our most hidden hopes, humiliations, and rationalizations.   Although this novel is a page-turner in the classic sense, rich with villains, victims, and vengeance, Nikitas's original perceptions come as quickly as the explosions of violence, and the unlikely flashes of beauty  and meaning his seemingly doomed characters find in the most hopeless, harrowing moments will take your breath away.   At every turn Nikitas elevates this tale far above the conventions of the crime genre, returning again and again to life's great unanswerables -- as one character puts it, to "how little it would take to lose whatever (makes us) human."

Wendy Brenner, Flannary O’Connor Award-winner and author of Phone Calls from the Dead