60 seconds with Michael Nunn

Many author's place a lot of themselves inside their books. Some take themselves back to their most haunting experiences and peel open the doors they worked so hard to close to ensure their novels are as raw and realistic as possible for their readers.

Thriller author, Michael Nunn is one of them, and in 60 seconds, Michael delves into the inspiration behind his novel, Echoes of the Forgotten, and the themes and messages of suicide and depression that he explores within it.

How did you first become interested in writing thrillers?

When I wrote in my teens, it was always demons and vampires. Works of imitation more than anything else, trying to write my own Interview with the Vampire, Salem’s Lot, and anything else written by Stephen King. I’m still consciously influenced by King, but my writing is no longer imitation. I hope. I was a horror writer, in my mind.

It wasn’t until I’d set writing aside to focus on my graphic design studies that I started to read more thrillers.

It was Gone Girl that inspired me to write again in the summer break of the first year of university. I rewrote it a couple of times over the years that passed and then wrote a couple more thrillers.

I didn’t have the same thrill writing thrillers that I did writing horror, but I figured it would be harder to get an agent and get published writing horror.

It was while reading John Connolly’s Charlie Parker series that I realised it didn’t have to be one or the other. That series is primarily detective thrillers but they include horror and supernatural elements, particularly later on. That realisation gave me the freedom to give my attention to the idea of Echoes of the Forgotten, which never went away.

Are there any particular themes or messages that you aim to explore in your books?

I try and draw emotional themes from my own experiences. I am interested in exploring broken people and, if it’s possible, to put them together again. In Echoes of the Forgotten, these themes were depression, suicide, grief and loss.

Drawing from my own past feelings allowed me to make the novel feel real, at least to myself, but I still wasn't sure whether it would feel real to others. It wasn't until a colleague with a history of suicidal depression read it shortly after release that I felt I'd done justice to that element of the story. She loved the story and connected quite emotionally with the main character. 

Are there any key messages you'd like your readers to take away from Echoes of the Forgotten?

Given that we follow the main character for the majority of the novel, there's a lot about his depression that is quite upfront.

Most notably, is the idea that suicide doesn't end the pain, it just spreads it out amongst those who are left behind, which acts as an ironic contrast to the main character's journey, as he planned to kill himself the night he and his friends disappeared, and instead, his friends remain missing for more than eleven months, leaving the main character behind.

It's difficult to talk about depression while you're in it, even though that's when it's most important to talk about it. Now that I'm out of it, I can talk about it quite openly, and I hope doing so makes people feel a little less alone in their own struggles.

Did you find the depression and suicidal scenes in Echoes of the Forgotten therapeutic or challenging to write?

It was a challenge writing some of the scenes in Echoes of the Forgotten. I have never reached the depths that Will Campbell does but I have experienced being suicidal and it was massively important to me that, if I was going to incorporate this narrative, I wrote it as genuinely as possible.

It had to feel believable and relatable to those who have and also those who have not experienced such a rock bottom.

Without spoiling it for readers, I also found some of the scenes in the last one hundred pages quite difficult to write, for the most part because the novel is influenced by a number of other stories, some of which will be clear to anybody who reads it, and I became fraught writing the final act that the scenes I was writing would read as too similar to those other works.

What inspired the story of Echoes of the Forgotten?

I had the idea of a group of students going missing at a creepy fairground as a possible short film when I was sixteen or seventeen.

The brief outline I made was more of a slasher than a psychological horror, and I wasn’t convinced it was very good. I spent my teens writing about monsters and vampires and this idea had neither.

I put the idea aside and for the most part, I put writing aside too. I was pursuing a graphic design education and writing was a hobby I accepted would never be my career.

It wasn’t until years later when I’d written a couple of novels, that the idea came back to me and I started to see the possibilities of the story taking place outside of that one night.

In the original idea, everybody died in the end, but I thought, what if one of the group came back, and what if he didn’t remember anything except a fairground.

The story was instantly more complex and interesting to me than that original treatment I’d written.

What convinced you to self-publish Echoes of the Forgotten?

I never considered self-publishing as an option. I’m ashamed to say it now, but I considered self-publishing fiction as a last resort of failed writers, which is obviously not the case.

I wrote six novels before I wrote Echoes of the Forgotten. I queried three of them. The first time I got some positive feedback from some of the agents, and even got two requests to read the full manuscript instead of the three chapters you provide with you initial submission. But ultimately received no offers.

The next books I tried was given a couple of polite rejection emails without feedback, but a lot of the agencies never replied. By the time I queried Echoes of the Forgotten, Covid had happened and most agents had switched to the response of ‘if you haven’t heard from us in 12 weeks, we’re not interested…’ so there weren’t really any replies, even to reject it.

But Echoes of the Forgotten wouldn’t leave me alone. I wrote sporadically and inconsistently after the experience of putting myself out there and not even receiving a rejection and I was even wondering if I should continue trying.

I couldn’t stop thinking about Echoes, though. Even if it hadn’t been good enough in the eyes of any of the agents who read the first three chapters, I was insanely proud of the novel and I thought it was genuinely good.

Looking back at my other books that were rejected, I’m glad they weren’t picked up because they’re not up to scratch. But I believed Echoes of the Forgotten was worth reading and I’d enjoyed writing it immensely. I wasn’t ready to give up on it.

Agents have a rule that you can’t query them with the same work twice but a friend at work self-published a book last year and explained how easy the process was. I looked into it and realised it was actually a viable option, one many choose without ever querying. I rewrote and edited Echoes of the Forgotten all over again to make sure it was as good as it could possibly be, designed my cover, and published it. And now here we are.

About Michael Nunn

Michael Nunn is an independently published thriller novelist, living in County Durham with his wife and cats. An avid reader with a love of writing stories growing up, he discovered Stephen King at age eleven or twelve and became fascinated with writing about monsters, demons, vampires and all things macabre.

This passion was temporarily set aside as he studied for a degree in Graphic Design at Teesside University. Shortly after graduating in 2016, Michael found himself drawn once again toward his love of writing, and devoted much of his spare time since working on his craft.

Check out Michael's thriller, Echoes of the Forgotten, on Amazon.

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