Collaborating with the world’s best-selling writer

Derek Nikitas had a special place in his 10-year-old heart for horror movies: Night of the Living Dead, Creepshow, Frankenstein.

“I was terrified, but I enjoyed the experience,’’ he remembers. “I liked thinking about the line between what was real and made up.”

That early obsession paid off with the publication of a book co-authored with the planet’s best-selling novelist, James Patterson, who has sold more than 300 million books worldwide. Diary of A Succubus was released April 4.

“It was the best fun I’ve had writing anything,” says Nikitas, an assistant professor of creative writing.

The 132-page novella is part of Patterson’s e-book series, Bookshots. It’s about a succubus, a supernatural femme fatale who seduces powerful men to infiltrate their evil secret society.

As a shy child in Manchester, N.H., Nikitas wrote stories throughout grade school, then college. Fast forward to 2009, and his second thriller, The Long Division, was a Washington Post Book World Best Book. He joined URI five years later; shortly afterward, one of Patterson’s employees invited him to a sort of audition. Using an outline for a book that Patterson supplied, Nikitas was to write a few pages using the “Patterson house style”—clear, cinematic and energized with short chapters that each begin with a hook and end with a cliffhanger.

“It’s incredibly difficult to do,” says Nikitas, “even though people assume it’s easy.”

Nikitas must have captured the style, because he’s now working on another Bookshots novella, You’ve Been Warned—Again, a haunted-house tale set in Rhode Island and scheduled for release in late October.