Nikki Bodie | Author & Storyteller

Anybody seems ordinary until you know their story.

Everything does, too.

Nikki Bodie reading an antique copy of The Masquerader by candlelight at a draped table.

Nikki Bodie has always been interested in what gets overlooked.

People. Places. Houses with histories trapped in their walls. Objects that have passed through a hundred hands. Legends polished smooth by generations of retelling. The person history remembered incorrectly. The person it forgot altogether.

She is a writer, traveler, collector of oddities, and compulsive explorer of whatever lies beneath the obvious.

She has never met much of a stranger. Give her an empty seat beside someone in an airport, a bartender with time to talk, an old bookstore, an unmarked road, a peculiar artifact, or a local legend that begins with “people around here say…” and there is a reasonable chance she will disappear for a while.

She may come back with a friend.

She will almost certainly come back with a story.

Curiosity has carried her around the world and into the lives of people she might otherwise never have known. She is fascinated by what people love, what they fear, what they believe, what they remember, and what they would rather forget. But she is equally interested in the things that cannot speak for themselves.

Giving voice to the voiceless has become the quiet obsession beneath her work.

The voiceless are not always silent.

Sometimes they have been spoken over for so long that someone else's version of them became the truth.

History has a habit of handing the pen to whoever survived with the most power, leaving everyone else trapped in the margins or buried in the footnotes.

Villains inherit crimes they may never have committed.

Places outlive the people who knew what happened there.

And legends are repeated for so long that no one remembers where the truth ended and the telling began.

Nikki writes across genres because she follows the story wherever it wants to go.

Her fiction is difficult to shelve neatly, which is probably the point. It moves between psychological thrillers, Southern Gothic, speculative fiction, romance, history, folklore, science, metaphysics, and the uncanny, often borrowing from several at once.

Her stories are less interested in genre than in the questions hiding underneath it: who gets to decide what is true, how perspective changes reality, what we owe one another, what consciousness actually is, and how much of what we call fact, history, identity, or even existence depends upon who is looking, and who has the power to decide what everyone else sees.

She is particularly drawn to the places where disciplines begin bleeding into one another: psychology into physics, science into spirituality, history into mythology, love into obsession, life into death, and fiction into an examination of itself.

Some of her stories bend time.

Some question the narrator.

Some question the reader.

A few seem increasingly suspicious of the person writing them.

She is especially interested in contradictions: the uncomfortable possibility that two opposing things can both be true, and that the most interesting stories are often buried somewhere between what happened and the story everyone agreed to tell about it.

There is usually something hiding beneath the first version.

And she likes to dig.

Black and white portrait of Nikki Bodie holding an open book and a lit candle in a dark room.

But some stories do not wait to be unearthed. They arrive like an old friend who has been waiting to talk, already mid-sentence, already oversharing, already deep into the good parts, and her hands do their best to keep up.

Good Bones

I've been renovated a few times. The bones are original.