Ira Blythe grew up with words: Jumbles and cryptoquips after school with her grandmother, Scrabble and Boggle in the living room, and stories picked out on a 1920s Underwood typewriter before she was old enough to articulate the heart that impelled her storytelling.

By the early Nineties, she had graduated to a hulking Packard Bell and stories with actual, albeit small, chapters. Her earliest influences included Lois Duncan, Lois Lowery, Caroline B. Cooney, Mary Downing Hahn, and Richie Tankersley Cusick; Vivian Van Velde and Clive Barker; and Agatha Christie, Christopher Pike, and Dean Koontz, writers who taught her early that menace could live in an ordinary house, that children and teenagers were capable of recognizing darkness long before adults admitted it was there, and that a mystery can also be haunted by ghosts.

Her influences eventually broadened to include Heller’s Catch-22, Eco’s The Name of the Rose, Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible, Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, the poetry of Emily Dickinson and e.e. cummings, Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Borges’ “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Mikhail Bulgakov, whose The Master and Margarita remains her most favorite novel, one that she can reread endlessly. She is particularly drawn to stories where the strange and the ordinary occupy the same room with—or without—explanation.

Ira Blythe writes modern Gothic fiction, murder mysteries, and supernatural thrillers animated by longing, violence, memory, salvation, and justice. Her stories are populated by protagonists with big hearts and real fears, but she guarantees that every novel ends happily: that is, no unnecessary angst between the lead couple, who need and deserve each other—their friendship and love, safety and solace. Justice features at the heart of every novel, although you’ll have to read to learn for yourself exactly which kind of justice…and for whom.

A native of the Ohio River Valley, Ira Blythe enjoys her century home with her family, pets, and gardens. When she is not writing, she can be found gardening according to a philosophy best described as chaotic native, negotiating gravity in the pool or on the aerial silk and lyra, or twisting down rabbit holes about Art Deco, Brutalist, and Mid-century Modern design and architecture. She’s not allergic to gluten, and she has an abiding affection for cocktails involving lychee, elderflower, or blackcurrant.

You may contact her at IraBlytheWilde@gmail.com or via the Feedback button below!