Erik Dussere grew up in the town of Oswego, New York, where it became clear at an early age that he was unlikely to have any talents, abilities, or useful interests of any kind. As a result, when he did finally begin to show some aptitude for writing, he decided that it would be a good idea to exploit that for all it was worth. He declared an English major in college, surprising nobody, and then spent the next several years getting a Ph.D. and learning how to be a teacher.
All in all, this has worked out pretty well, and he currently teaches classes in literature and film at American University in Washington, DC.
He has written short pieces about X-Men and Black Panther comics, and has published two scholarly books. The first, Balancing the Books, is a study of the novels of Toni Morrison and William Faulkner. The second, called America Is Elsewhere, is a study of the noir tradition in film and fiction; it won an Edgar Award in 2014.
His first novel, The West House, was published in 2020. It’s a literary mystery about blood and class in America, about the traumatic pasts that haunt the book’s characters, and about the stories that it is possible for us to tell about those pasts, those hauntings.
Erik and his wife and daughter live in Maryland, in a house where the floors tend not to be level and the doors never close properly. The cats, at least, seem to like it that way.