M. L. Rio is an author of upmarket fiction leaning toward the literary, with heavy influences from theatre, music, mythology, and the long troubled history of the world. Her first novel, If We Were Villains, will be published in April 2017 by Flatiron Books. In the meantime, she is hard at work on the sixth draft of a second novel and the first draft of a third. The former is a loose retelling of Euripides, which came partly from living in North Carolina for way too long and partly from noticing that the Southern Gothic genre and Greek tragedy actually have a lot in common. The latter is a fictional road trip through the music and madness of the 1970s, inspired by her deep weird love of Led Zeppelin and her dad’s tales of bouncing CalJam II at Ontario Motor Speedway in 1978.
