Hypertext Magazine asked Lee Matthew Goldberg, author of Orange City and Runaway Train, “As a thriller writer normally, what made you release both a Sci-Fi and a YA book this year?”

I am a thriller writer first and foremost. My first four books have all been thrillers, even if some have been literary or even historical, but I never want to think of myself as just a thriller writer. That would limit me too much. My last novel The Ancestor was about a man who believes he’s been frozen on ice in the Alaskan wilderness for over a century, so it already had natural science fiction elements like my latest novel Orange City. My favorite works are ones that push the boundaries of genres. My biggest influence in terms of a career has always been David Lynch, who would be hard to classify. His movies have thriller elements and supernatural ones as well, but his style is his own. That’s what I want to aim for with my own novels.

Orange City takes place in the future where the War to End All Wars has decimated the United States and left it unrecognizable. A City is born for rejects and felons except they are bound to the City forever and can never leave. They are ruled by a monstrous Man in an Eye Tower who resembles a giant arachnid spider from all the limbs he’s attached to his body. The novel evokes George Orwell, Philip K. Dick, and even Lost the television show. But at its heart, it is a thriller too. It follows an ad executive in the City who begins to wake up to the prison he’s in and starts to form a rebellion against the Man and the City. What I love about thrillers is that the stakes are always being raised, and I approached writing Sci-Fi in the same way. It’s important to make sure it’s both a page-turner, but also has something to say because the best science fiction works draw parallels to our own society. That’s what can make it accessible to readers who don’t usually seek out that genre. I think of a show like Battlestar Galactica, which was set in space but also dealt with the political issues of the crew who are forming a new society and mirrored our own at the time.

As for Young Adult, the idea for my upcoming series Runaway Train began as a way of challenging myself. I’d written about film directors, book editors, Wall Street execs in need of a new liver, and Alaskan fishermen, but never attempted the voice of a sixteen-year-old girl. To make the challenge a little easier for myself, I set the series in the 1990s, since at least I was a teenager then. It also allowed me to avoid cell phones and social media as a part of the book. The novel begins when the main character Nico’s sister dies, her home life is a wreck, and she runs away from home to become a grunge singer and meet her idol Kurt Cobain. While it’s not a thriller, there are elements I used to move the plot along in a breakneck way. Each chapter is based on a grunge song from the nineties that reflects the character’s journey, and the deeper Nico gets from home, the more perilous her adventure becomes. While thriller books are usually set in worlds of criminals and those who’ve had a moral lapse in judgment, it was refreshing to write about teenagers dealing with real life problems. Nico’s journey is realistic enough that a reader could’ve had a similar experience.

Lee Matthew Goldberg is the author of the novels The Ancestor, The Mentor, The Desire Card and Slow Down. He has been published in multiple languages and nominated for the Prix du Polar. His first YA series Runaway Train is forthcoming in 2021 along with a sci-fi novel Orange City. After graduating with an MFA from the New School, his writing has also appeared in The Millions, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, LitReactor, Monkeybicycle, Fiction Writers Review, Cagibi, Necessary Fiction, the anthology Dirty Boulevard, The Montreal Review, The Adirondack Review, The New Plains Review, Underwood Press and others. He is the editor-in-chief and co-founder of Fringe, dedicated to publishing fiction that’s outside-of-the-box. His pilots and screenplays have been finalists in Script Pipeline, Book Pipeline, Stage 32, We Screenplay, the New York Screenplay, Screencraft, and the Hollywood Screenplay contests. He is the co-curator of The Guerrilla Lit Reading Series and lives in New York City. Follow him at LeeMatthewGoldberg.com