PHOTO: Elyse Salpeter, acclaimed author of supernatural thrillers and cross-genre fiction, known for weaving the real with the fantastic.
Blending Reality With The Fantastic
Elyse Salpeter discusses her passion for creating worlds where reality twists into the extraordinary, exploring vulnerability, resilience, and survival through supernatural thrillers, horror, and young adult dystopian tales.
Elyse Salpeter is a writer who thrives on dissolving the boundary between reality and the fantastic. Her work invites readers into worlds where the ordinary fractures to reveal layers of mystery, danger, and transcendence. Whether delving into Buddhist lore, unsettling horror, or the pulse of dystopian futures, she writes with a rare combination of imagination and intensity, unafraid to test the limits of both her characters and her readers.
Her acclaimed Kelsey Porter series, beginning with The Hunt for Xanadu, draws upon spiritual mysteries and personal resilience, weaving together tales of loss, survival, and hidden truths. From the paranormal suspense of Flying to the Light to the unnerving terror of The Mannequins and the haunting island survival of Nowhere to Run, Salpeter creates stories that constantly remind us the world is never quite what it seems.
What unites these diverse genres is her fascination with human vulnerability and the strength that emerges from it. Time and again, her protagonists—often scarred, often tested—are forced to discover inner reserves of courage and ingenuity. This exploration of endurance, paired with her willingness to bend reality, gives her work a striking emotional depth that resonates across genres.
Beyond the page, Salpeter’s passion for craft is matched by her energy for community and connection. With an ever-growing audience and a commitment to bringing stories directly to readers, she embodies the spirit of an author who not only imagines other worlds but actively builds bridges to them. Hers is a voice that both unsettles and inspires, reminding us that resilience itself can be a form of magic.
Family and mental health themes recur in your work—how do your personal experiences inform the emotional arcs of protagonists across different novels?
I have always been a fan of characters that have some sort of vulnerability to them. My family has suggested that I must be working through some demons when I was younger because my novels tend to be very dark. There’s a lot of violence to them, as I feel like this puts characters in situations where they must find inner strength to survive.
I use that theme throughout my novels, be it YA or supernatural thrillers, each time creating worlds where things are not quite as they seem. And I always seem to make the characters, at times, superhuman versions of myself. Again, that theme that perhaps I always personally wished I was stronger, smarter, more capable. I don’t know. It’s just this recurring theme I have where I want my characters to be faced with insurmountable odds and through their own sheer will and tenacity, survive whatever ordeal they are dealt with.
In my six-part supernatural thriller series, starting with THE HUNT FOR XANADU, Kelsey Porter suffered unimaginable loss at the age of ten and barely survived a brutal beating that nearly killed her. She has spent the subsequent years of her life trying to avenge the people that hurt her family but along the way she discovers things about herself she never thought possible. This entire series is steeped in Buddhist spiritual mysteries and I take real lore and twist it to my own literary devices.
In my supernatural thriller, NOWHERE TO RUN, Rachel is kidnapped and brought to a deserted island with nine other victims. She learns that they are being kept there because there may be things about them that are different than other people on earth but the only way those differences emerge is under severe emotional and physical stress. My character has to survive in order to learn who she really is and how far will she go to save the ones that she loves.
In my YA dystopian tale, THE DOOR ON THE RIGHT, my main teen character, Hayden, is frustrated at the life she is living. She and other teens have been kept prisoner in a single building their entire lives because they don’t have an immunity to fight a disease raging throughout the planet. But she starts to question everything and as she peels back the layers of what her life is like she realises nothing is as it seems.
There’s a recurring theme in my novels where my main characters seemingly live their ordinary lives but then something tantamount happens to thrust their worlds out of orbit and they each must in their own way look deep into themselves, and deal with their vulnerabilities in order to survive.
With The Hunt for Xanadu praised by Douglas Preston, how did that early accolade impact your confidence and readership trajectory for subsequent releases?
I have been a huge fan of Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child for years. I am obsessed with the Aloysius Pendergast novels that they co-write together. They are complex novels dealing with an eccentric FBI agent who through his own brilliance and tenacity solves complex crimes. The authors do an incredible amount of research for each novel and I’m always learning something in their books.
When I started writing the Kelsey Porter series, with THE HUNT FOR XANADU, I had this vision that I wanted to write a novel that I thought Douglas and Lincoln would personally like to read. I researched for over a year all the different elements for the novel, from Buddhist lore, to Tibet, the story of Siddhartha, etc. I really delved into as much as I could and as I began to write the next novels in the series, I spent months researching the links between Buddhism and other different religions and cultures to find the threads to link them all together.
Just a few years after THE HUNT FOR XANADU came out, I got the courage to contact Douglas Preston and in a leap of faith, pitched my novel to him. I told him what it was about and asked if he would like to read it and if he enjoyed it, could I use his review as a blurb on my front cover. He read it and gave me a glowing review. I was over the moon. When your favourite author vets something you write, it’s like winning the lottery.
That bolstered my confidence and I continued with the series weaving together all the intricacies and links throughout them creating something I am really proud of.
Finally, what one piece of advice would you give to aspiring authors seeking to write across genres and sustain a long-term creative career?
I was told early in my career that I made a mistake by not writing in one genre. That I was never going to be able to sustain one base of readers because I was too fragmented. I write supernatural thrillers, horror, science fiction, YA and I’ve recently finished a straight thriller with no supernatural elements.
I would tell aspiring authors to “write their truths.” Writing is a love of mine, my hobby. I have a day job so I have the luxury of being able to write what I want to write and if it’s cross-genre, then so be it. That’s how my brain works. I get this idea in my head for a story and I just go with it. My advice is to just keep writing. Keep putting down your words, get your stories out of your head and onto paper. Be your own truth.
