Will > Books: suspense‎ (45)

The oldest monsters are unnamed. Unnamed monsters, Dennis learned before he even knew his own name, were the worst kind of all. When you gave a mon

The oldest monsters are unnamed. Unnamed monsters, Dennis learned before he even knew his own name, were the worst kind of all. When you gave a monster a name, you had it in hand. There, that one was anger. Rage. Sexual abuse. Dennis learned the names of all these before he was four, as items the child psychiatrists crossed off on their checklists. They were looking for answers. They were looking for monsters to blame.
But the worst monster of all? That one was as cold as sleet. He climbed up the hill at night and played with your feet. He washed the tears from your face and cooed like a mother before slashing your heart to ribbons. The worst monster, Dennis knew, was like Satan from the Bible some parents read to you. He came wearing disguises, and no one knew his real name. He pretended to be a lot of things, and the worst thing he pretended to be was love.

…all the boys here were throwaways. It was like being in a giant wastebasket filled with dirty tissues. You knew you were lost.

The idea for the scene depicted on the cover came during a trip to an Oregon beach for a mental health day when she spotted a little boy charging into the water - from the Spokesman (print) interview

Mist struck his face with force, and the wind tore at the institutional shirt he wore…Behind him, signs littered the dunes by the beach road: WARNING: TREACHEROUS CURRENTS. WARNING: HIGH TIDE. WARNING: SHARP DROP-OFFS AND SNEAKER WAVES.

She has ways to be mean where everyone around her stands up and claps. That’s the worst kind of meanness, son. The kind where everyone says it’s for your own good.

“Holding time” is a draconian, punitive method of treatment that sounds nicer than it is. It’s basically a physical and psychological torture that’s designed to break children down to the point of psychological collapse by physically restraining them. Some children have actually suffocated to death by this treatment. The idea is that children will somehow “start fresh” afterward, like rebooting a computer, which of course is not how humans work. If you destroy someone psychologically, they’re not reborn. They’re destroyed. Holding time has been thoroughly rebuked by scientists, and yet somehow it’s still used. - from the ZED interview

In the novel, sleeping giants are massive stone age carvings…But the real sleeping giants are the secret, hidden pains, and anger inside us that can come out in misdirected rage. In my experience, when these sleeping giants are awakened with a cause—especially one driven by white supremacy, misogyny, or other biases— a permission slip to commit harm is signed, sealed, and delivered. - from the Crimereads article

Most crime fiction focuses on the outliers—the outright, obvious sociopaths, usually unexplainably brilliant—or else criminal underworlds, like gangs or drug cartels. This is all interesting stuff. But I think it has the effect of othering violence. It assumes there is a world full of normal people who are blameless, who couldn’t fathom the idea of committing harm even if you suggested it. This creates a false dichotomy, an us vs them that is troubling and honestly, kind of disingenuous.
It’s true, most people don’t go around committing egregious crimes. Not directly, at least. But spend a few hours on a next-door neighbor site and you can see the seething anger that boils into outright discrimination, the rage that leads people to the voter’s ballot to pass even more punitive laws, and elect officials who will do their dirty work for them.These regular, everyday citizens might not be the ones administering the lethal dose, or locking people up, or torturing children, but they are the mass behind the monsters. Collectively, they can become the monster...[but] just as we are capable of everyday evil in the name of good, we are also capable of profound healing, joy, and goodness. - from the Crimereads article

Rene's novels are influenced by her work as a licensed death row investigator. She is the past Chief Investigator for a public defenders and has worked hundreds of cases, including exonerations and helping rape trafficking victims. The survivor of a difficult background, Rene regularly speaks on social justice issues, as well as writing and overcoming trauma.

A scream suddenly pierces the air. Startled glances are exchanged on the porch, a drink is spilled, a baby begins to cry, and your muscles tense; y

A scream suddenly pierces the air. Startled glances are exchanged on the porch, a drink is spilled, a baby begins to cry, and your muscles tense; you sense this is one of those plot leaps that writers use to punctuate and propel the narrative, like those bursts of biological creativity that scientists claim shock evolution into action. But you are unsettled; just pages into the book, is it too early? Should a mystery unfold in a more demure fashion? Aren’t the suspense and anticipation the real secret thrill of the book, rather than (let us be honest) the all-too-often disappointing dénouement, the magician turning over his cards for an audience that realizes, bitterly leaving the theater, that they’ve been had?

Other people’s secrets are easy. It’s our own that are hard

How often is he both lonely and alone, suspicious of everyone, accepting betrayal as the rule, not the exception? The deceits that begin to unfold the moment the client walks through his office door. Nights spent in parked cars watching illicit silhouettes behind shaded windows, receipts pulled from dripping trash bags, a five-dollar bill waved between two fingers before a junkie’s fixed gaze . . . the debased work of hundreds of cases, a file cabinet full of tragedies and comedies and tales too ambiguous to categorize.

As a general rule, in murder mysteries, the least likable character is the most likely to die. But devious writers can anticipate your knowledge of this cliché and thrust a character like Warren Burr into early prominence to surprise you, later, with an entirely different victim. Or, perhaps, more devious still, circle back and kill him off in a double bluff—destined to die all along, exploiting and perverting your expectations from the start. Of course, some writers, among them not the least skilled, use much the same trick to mask and unmask their murderers . . .

The novel takes place over a long July 4th holiday weekend —Thursday to Sunday — and so I had the idea of writing each day from an additional different perspective: “he”... “I”... “we”... etc. Thus, each section is stamped with its own particular identity. And of course, the “you” voice explores why the perspective suddenly shifts, and how that plays into the intrigue of the plot… - from the Bloomsbury interview

The superficial reason is that it was fun! The hairstyles alone defy belief. Some of the most entertaining hours I spent “working” on the novel involved paging through mid-70s clothing catalogs; that led directly to an entire paragraph early in the book that is just a listing of the trademarked (and fabulously named) artificial fabrics worn by the characters: Acrilan®, Fortrel®, PERMA-PREST®, Sansabelt®, Ban-Lon®…

More substantively, the zeitgeist of the 1970s felt intensely familiar to me. We’d lost trust in institutions and in each other; the old solutions didn’t work; the new ones seemed inadequate; a creeping disillusionment had overtaken the best of us, while the worst seemed full of passionate intensity. As an era, the 1970s seems extraordinarily relevant to writers and readers today. - from the Bloomsbury interview

I had to write this book to write one scene, which I saw clearly in my mind. Holly attending her mother’s zoom funeral. I didn’t have a story to go wi

I had to write this book to write one scene, which I saw clearly in my mind. Holly attending her mother’s zoom funeral. I didn’t have a story to go with it, which was unfortunate, but I kept my feelers out because I loved Holly from the first and wanted to be with her again. Then one day I read a newspaper story about an honor killing. I didn’t think that could be my story, but I loved the headline, which was something like this: everyone thought they were a sweet old couple until the bodies began turning up in the backyard. Killer old folks, I thought. That’s my story. - from Author’s Note

It's an old city, and no longer in very good shape, nor is the lake beside which it has been built, but there are parts of it that are still pretty nice. Longtime residents would probably agree that the nicest section is Sugar Heights, and the nicest street running through it is Ridge Road, which makes a gentle downhill curve from Bell College of Arts and Sciences to Deerfield Park, two miles below. On its way, Ridge Road passes many fine houses, some of which belong to college faculty and some to the city's more successful businesspeople—doctors, lawyers, bankers, and top-of-the-pyramid business executives. Most of these homes are Victorians, with impeccable paintjobs, bow windows, and lots of gingerbread trim.

I know that there are a lot of people out there on X, or whatever you want to call it, that are convinced that Covid is over and it’s not a going concern anymore. What do you think of that idea?
Well, Holly’s mother is a Covid denier, and she dies in the hospital of Covid. And to the very end, she’s saying, “I’ve just got the flu. The flu is what I have.” And I think that it goes back to this is not a new thing. There have been people for years who have just been vaccination deniers who say that if you get a vaccination for a certain kind of thing, you’re going to cause birth defects in your children, this and that. Or if you vaccinate your children, they could have strokes. And you see the same things about the Covid vaccinations. There’s this constant story that thousands of people are dying of heart disease because of the vaccinations. It’s not true, but it’s gained a lot of credence. So there’s a lot of that. And I tried to put that in the book. There are characters in the book who just say, “I don’t believe in this bullshit. It’s all crap.” And that’s the life that we live. And I always try to reflect the time that I’m writing in. – from the Rollingstone interview

The outsider masquerading as Terri Maitland was evil. So was the one masquerading as Chet Ondowsky. The same was true of Brady Hartsfield, who found a way to go on doing dirt (Bill’s phrase) even after he should have been rendered harmless. Rendered that way by Holly herself. But Roddy and Emily Harris were worse.

The power of this tale is the fact that nearly everyone on the planet knows the story, even though few have actually read the book. For the Victorian

The power of this tale is the fact that nearly everyone on the planet knows the story, even though few have actually read the book. For the Victorian reader, Stevenson hides the twist of the book until near the end. For those readers, Hyde and Jekyll were two men until Jekyll’s confessional letter sets them straight. - from the intro

He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something down-right detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point. He’s an extraordinary looking man, and yet I really can name nothing out of the way. No, sir; I can make no hand of it; I can’t describe him. And it’s not want of memory; for I declare I can see him this moment.

Every time you remember an event from the past, your brain networks change in ways that can alter the later recall of the event. Thus, the next time you remember it, you might recall not the original event but what you remembered the previous time. - from the Northwestern article linked in EXTRA STUFF

“Well! I’ve often seen a cat without a grin,” thought Alice; “but a grin without a cat! It’s the most curious thing I ever saw in my life!” - Alice in Alice in Wonderland

in one of my more wakeful moments, my eyes fell upon my hand. Now the hand of Henry Jekyll (as you have often remarked) was professional in shape and size; it was large, firm, white and comely. But the hand which I now saw, clearly enough, in the yellow light of a mid-London morning, lying half shut on the bedclothes, was lean, corded, knuckly, of a dusky pallor and thickly shaded with a swart growth of hair. It was the hand of Edward Hyde.

The weight on her chest lightens, her breathing slows. The ‘monkeys inside her head screech a little less loudly. That’s what is so brilliant about

The weight on her chest lightens, her breathing slows. The ‘monkeys inside her head screech a little less loudly. That’s what is so brilliant about certainties, even fleeting ones. They offer us respite.

The inspiration for Antonia and Jon inevitably stems from Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Antonia is that idealistic being, she does not hesitate to face the windmills, because she believes in a better world. Jon, on the other hand, is that pragmatist who has a dreamer hidden inside of him. - from the Hindustani interview

Just because we’re a unit created to avoid competition and secrets being kept between different police forces doesn’t mean we don’t repeat the same old mistakes.

A spasm of pure fear convulses Antonia’s body. Fear and loathing. Because she finally understands—with piercing, icy clarity—what has been going on from the very start.

Juan Gómez-Jurado was born in Madrid in 1977. His interest in literature led him to pursue a career in Information Science. No one at TVE, Canal Plus, La Voz de Galicia or COPE Radio Station —where he has worked— could have imagined what he would become in time. It wasn’t until 2006, when he published his novel, God’s Spy, that his talent became known, not only in Spain, but all across the globe.
Since then, he hasn’t stopped writing. Contract with God, The Traitor’s Emblem, The Legend of the Thief, The Patient, Scar... Year after year, his books keep on coming out. No time to rest. And his success keeps on rising and he keeps on breaking records. The trilogy made up of Red Queen, Black Wolf and White King, was the first to have all three books among the best-selling books in Spain simultaneously. In fact, Red Queen has been the most read book in Spain for two years in a row now, which translates into more than two million copies sold.

The spirit of a chief, you see, is a powerful thing. The skull became a head again when it was lifted from the grave . . . resurrected.”
“Resurrect

The spirit of a chief, you see, is a powerful thing. The skull became a head again when it was lifted from the grave . . . resurrected.”
“Resurrected?” she echoed.
“Alive again,” he said, his voice measured and grievously low, prolonging every word. “But not like it was before. Not like the old chief. It’s angry now that it’s been ripped from its rest. And ravenous. Hungry for revenge. It’ll eat anyone it encounters. It’ll tear flesh from bone.”
“How?” she said.
“It rolls, gathering mud and moss on its decaying flesh.”

Black bark to her sides and ash beneath her feet, she smelled the earthy odors of dirt, mud, burnt wood, and something so vile her stomach turned. It was the same smell the wind had wafted her way on the nights she’d been chased. Only the odor was stronger now. Inescapable.

She said Frog exemplified transformation. He entered life in one form and left it in another. From egg to tadpole, to tadpole with legs, to amphibian with tail, to tailless frog, he was never the same. He began life in water, only emerging once he was his true self. He symbolized change, rebirth, and renewal, and his spirit could bring rain.
Anna stared down at the ill-fated frog. The reservation was transforming. The asphalt beneath her feet was evidence of that. And yet the very symbol of change had become a victim of it. The absurdity didn’t escape her.

A Chicago native, Nick Medina is an author and college professor of public speaking and multicultural communication…Nick’s first short story was published in 2009 and he has since had dozens more published by West Pigeon Press, Dark Highlands, and UnEarthed Press, in addition to outlets in the U.S. and the U.K., such as Midwest Literary Magazine, The Washington Pastime, The Absent Willow Review and Underground Voices.

The difference between stalking and courtship is so thin, I thought then. It all depends on if the person likes you back.

The difference between stalking and courtship is so thin, I thought then. It all depends on if the person likes you back.

...there was nothing I could do to shake my stalker’s avid interest. It wasn’t even about me, although Marker Man would say it was. I was a shape to him, the outline of an object, filled in by him, interpreted by him. Not a person. I couldn’t stop him from coming after me, my friends, my family, because he stayed hidden, watching me, inventing me.

My daughter came to me in high school and was like, “Mom I think I’m on the autism spectrum…I’ve been reading about girls on the autism spectrum.” I’m like, “Honey, tell me why, what you think, because…that’s insane.” So she starts saying all these things and to every one of them she’s like, “well, girls on the autism spectrum do” this and this and this and this, and I would say, “Honey, that is normal. I was just like that. Every girl does that. OK?” No, they don’t! But the things she was describing were very very classic female autism, and seemed normal to me, because I was autistic…It’s cool that I was able to write Honor from a perspective of knowing what was really going on with her. - from Friends and Fiction interview

…this book is about gaze, like who is watching you and how does that change the power dynamic. - from the Friends and Fiction interview

I think that what really happened was I’d been trying to say something about my family history and the South, this land that I love, and I feel ambivalent about and I wrote a book called The Almost Sisters. And I’m not saying that I said it perfectly. I don’t think you can ever…the thing I was trying to say, I’ll never be able to say it better than in The Almost Sisters. I felt like a weight had been lifted. So I just started writing my next novel…I got a third of the way through the book and we were in negotiations and I was like this is a thriller. I’m writing a thriller by accident, and I called my agent. I was like “we can’t sign that contract. I’m writing a thriller. And she’s like “You’re writing a what?” - from Friends and Fiction interview

Q - How did you get into the head of a stalker and how did that affect you?

AHe made me need to take a bath. I didn’t want to write him. I didn’t plan to write him in there. I started writing the book. I knew it would be mostly Meribel’s story. Meribel narrates probably 80 percent of the book, but there are a few other voices that come in, and I did not plan to let that man talk, and then I was like, ok. He has to be more present than this. Like I thought people aren’t gonna understand how, why would she leave her town. They would have to understand. Because I knew how bad he was, but it wasn’t appearing on the page. So, then I wrote his letters. I was like maybe I’ll just show his letters, but even that was not enough. People aren’t gonna understand why she makes these extreme choices until they understand how much danger she’s actually in and how bad this is. But yeah, it was gross and icky and he’s not a good person. - from Friends and Fiction interview

“Evil is everywhere. Where you least expect it. It can seep out of the radio. Or a lobster salad.”
“Oh, Issy—why do you say that?”
“Because it talk

“Evil is everywhere. Where you least expect it. It can seep out of the radio. Or a lobster salad.”
“Oh, Issy—why do you say that?”
“Because it talks to me.”
“What talks to you?”
“Evil.”
“Iris talks to you, and evil talks to you?”
“Yes.”
“Are they the same?”

Part of me wanted to shut her up—if there’s one thing I couldn’t stand, it was a rich girl who felt unlucky in life. But another part knew that what she was saying was factually true. Her family was a train wreck, almost as bad as my mine except rich. Meanwhile, a third part of me couldn’t help noticing her long lashes and her lips—she had what they call a rosebud mouth, a perfect version of it. “I may have misjudged you, miss. If I did, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t soften on me,” she said.
“If it was a hundred in the shade, I wouldn’t soften on you, miss.”
“Good. Because I’m bad, Detective. I do terrible things. And if you soften on me, I’ll do them to you.”

Bigotry was shameless and rampant, with Mexicans forcibly “repatriated” by the hundreds of thousands, the Chinese Exclusion Act still in place, and hostile derision openly directed at “Okies,” a term then referring to poor white migrants from the Dust Bowl. In the 1940s came the Japanese internment, when full-fledged American citizens were literally caged off. For the first time, Blacks came to the Bay Area in significant numbers, pouring in from the American South in search of jobs, only to find themselves subjected to vicious prejudice, excluded by labor unions, denied entry into restaurants, theaters and hotels, and barred from living in white neighborhoods. Throughout this period, numerous other ethnic groups—such as Italians, Greeks, Poles, Slavs, Hungarians, and Jews—occupied a subordinate position too, not yet considered fully white. - from the Author’s Note

I chose to make Detective Sullivan a light-skinned mixed-race man in part because Berkeley’s police force in the 1940s included almost no women or minorities, but also because I wanted to explore the phenomenon of racial “passing.” Sullivan is part Mexican, part Nebraskan, and part Jewish on his Mexican side…But Sullivan can pass as white and chooses to go by Al Sullivan rather than Alejo Gutiérrez for reasons he has not fully admitted to himself. - from the Author’s Note

I hate to say it of a fellow Berkeley officer, but Dicky O’Gar was so thick he couldn’t tell which way an elevator was going if you gave him two guesses.

I put my collar up, pulled my hat brim down, and set off through the drizzle, wondering how much I’d been played in the last seventy-two hours and by how many different women.

Amy Lynn Chua (born October 26, 1962), also known as "the Tiger Mom", is an American corporate lawyer, legal scholar, and writer. She is the John M. Duff Jr. Professor of Law at Yale Law School with an expertise in international business transactions, law and development, ethnic conflict, and globalization.[5] She joined the Yale faculty in 2001 after teaching at Duke Law School for seven years. Prior to teaching, she was a corporate law associate at Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton. Chua is also known for her parenting memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. In 2011, she was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people, one of The Atlantic's Brave Thinkers, and one of Foreign Policy's Global Thinkers.

Our experiences and fears collect in the backs of our minds like dry kindling…

…there is really no such

Our experiences and fears collect in the backs of our minds like dry kindling…

…there is really no such thing as long ago

…at the far end of the room, an archway.
He stared at that for a moment. It clearly led away into some deeper chamber of the house, but the blackness there was impenetrable. [Detective] Laurence [Page] could hear the faintest rush of air emerging from it, and the sound reminded him of something breathing.

When I first started planning and writing The Angel Maker, all I really knew was that I wanted… the characters [to] be searching for a rare and forbidden text. Some of them would end up doing so for innocent reasons, of course, but there would be others who genuinely coveted the dark knowledge they imagined it contained…I settled on the journal of a fictional serial killer called Jack Lock, an item that would be valuable in and of itself to certain damaged people. But I also wanted it to contain some kind of secret knowledge, which raised further questions. What else might drive people to seek this book out?…in the end, I went with an idea that has haunted me more than a little for many years now, and which engages with a number of the themes that have always interested me. Nature versus nurture. The influence of the past on the present. How much control any of us really have. - from the Crimereads interview

“If you could see the future,” Sam asked her, “would you want to?”

It’s a familiar and recurring motif in fiction: the search for a work of art that may or may not exist. One that is difficult to find. One that is rare because it’s awful, and which is sought after for both reasons. The idea speaks to a human desire to face the forbidden simply because it is forbidden. To be a member of the select few that have gone through an ordeal that others have not. To be let in on a secret even if learning it will ultimately destroy you.

Dark Mill South’s Reunion Tour began on December 12th, 2019, a Thursday. Thirty-six hours and twenty bodies later, on Friday the 13th, it would be

Dark Mill South’s Reunion Tour began on December 12th, 2019, a Thursday. Thirty-six hours and twenty bodies later, on Friday the 13th, it would be over.

…souls are like livers: they regenerate and regenerate, until you’ve finally poisoned them enough that the only thing they can do is kill you…

He wasn’t meant to make it as far as he does in the book. The way I initially conceived him, he was gonna be this big bad killer who comes to town, and then within a matter of minutes, he gets put down. But then I built him too bad. He couldn’t be put down easily. - from The Big Thrill interview

Her fingernails aren’t painted black, and her boots are the dress-ones her lawyer bought for her. The heels are conservative, there are no aggressive lugs on the soles, and the threads are the same dark brown color as the fake, purply-brown leather.

Never planned on My Heart is a Chainsaw being the first installment of a trilogy, nope. But then in revisions, Joe Monti, my editor at Saga, said... what if everybody wasn’t dead at the end?
I hemmed and hawed, didn’t want to leave anyone standing, but gave it a shot anyway. And it worked, was amazing. And it meant Chainsaw felt like it wanted to now open up to a trilogy, which I think is the most natural form for a slasher to take. - from The Lineup interview

I wrote Don’t Fear The Reaper right at the end of rereading Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove. And that’s in parts, and each part introduces a new character and then it goes into everything else. And it cycles through all their heads. So that’s what I tried to do in Don’t Fear the Reaper—-and following that model was really productive. I don’t think I could have written Don’t Fear the Reaper if I hadn’t just come out of Lonesome Dove. – from the Paste Magazine interview

In the summer of 2015 a rough beast slouched out of the shadows and into the waking nightmares of an unsuspecting world. His name was Dark Mill South, but that wasn’t the only name he went by.

Now in 2023, I think the reason we’ve been into slashers the last few years….I think the 24-hour news cycle has greatly contributed to that, and also the election in 2016 that resulted in the news feeding us daily images, hourly images of people doing terrible things at podiums, at rallies, and then walking away unscathed. And what the slasher gives us is the ability to engage for two hours, for six hours, whatever, a world that is brutally fair. A world where if you do something wrong, you’re getting your head chopped off. That sense of fairness is so alluring to us - from the Paste interview

slashers never really die. They just go to sleep for a few years. But they’re always counting the days until round two.

Paste Magazine: So, the title Don’t Fear The Reaper —which is one of my favorite songs, by the way—I’m assuming that must come from Blue Oyster Cult.
Stephen Graham Jones: Well, it does come from Blue Oyster Cult, but really it’s that—in Halloween, Jamie Lee Curtis and her friend are riding in her friend’s Monte Carlo, and they’re listening to (Don’t Fear) The Reaper, and then in 1996 with Scream, a cover of Don’t Fear) The Reaper is playing over Billy and Sid, and so it seemed like that was a kind of momentum. I had no choice but to call it Don’t Fear The Reaper, I was going to honor my heroes.Stephen Graham Jones on Writing, the Pantheon of Horror, and Clowns by Leah Schnelbach – nada on Reaper

If you want even more interviews with SGJ, I posted a bunch in my review of My Heart is a Chainsaw. There are plenty more contemporary (2023) interviews to be had if you feel the urge.

Songs/Music
-----Blue Oyster Cult - Don’t Fear the Reaper
-----Largehearted boy - Stephen Graham Jones's Playlist for His Novel "Don't Fear the Reaper"

My reviews of (sadly, only three) previous books by Jones
-----2021 - My Heart is a Chainsaw -The Indian Lake Trilogy #1 - on Coot’s Reviews
-----2020 - The Only Good Indians
-----2016 - Mongrels

Items of Interest
-----Pop Culture - Horror Movie Characters - includes stats on them
-----William Butler Yeats - The Second Coming

Maude’s voice was far away, the way the chime of a bell can feel distant even if it’s right in front of you. “You’re too late,” she said to me, to

Maude’s voice was far away, the way the chime of a bell can feel distant even if it’s right in front of you. “You’re too late,” she said to me, to no one. “Every last one of them is dead.”

“Every gift comes at a price.”

For the first five years of my life, I lived in a trailer park, which, while not economically diverse, was diverse in just about every other way. So when my family moved to a small town in rural Ohio, I wasn’t prepared for how alien I would feel there. Everyone was related. They all looked alike. They went to the same church. They held the same beliefs. If you’re not from there, it’s unbelievable. But those places still exist.

When I was a kid, all I knew was that I didn’t fit in and wanted to get out. When I got older, I started to wonder what it was about this community that made them so afraid of letting the outside world in. - from The Book Club Kit

…most of the businesses in town—the grocery store, the antiques market, the candy shop—they’re all owned by the same seven families. The Wagners are the majority share, sure, but this town? It’s all one big family business.”
“That’s insane.”
“Not really. I’m sure it’s like that in a lot of places. See, those seven families have never left. Some individuals left, sure, but most of them stayed. People give their houses to their kids or their grandkids. Sometimes nephews and nieces. But it’s rare for them to sell to outsiders. Especially the houses close to the center of town. There are ordinances forbidding new construction. We don’t get many new people here.”

“You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting, but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory.”

An ancient poplar loomed at the entrance to the abandoned road, its rounded mass of huddled gray limbs reminding her of a brain. She passed beneath

An ancient poplar loomed at the entrance to the abandoned road, its rounded mass of huddled gray limbs reminding her of a brain. She passed beneath its lobes, twigs branching like arteries overhead as she entered the forest.

Deep in these woods, there is a house that’s easy to miss.
Most people, in fact, would take one look and insist it’s not there. And they wouldn’t be wrong, not completely. What they would see are a house’s remains, a crumbling foundation crawling with weeds. A house long since abandoned. But look closely at the ground here, at this concrete scarred by sun and ice. This is where the fireplace goes. If you look deeply enough, a spark will ignite. And if you blow on it, that spark will bloom into a blaze, a warm light in this cold dark forest.

I was living in Louisiana, working toward my MFA in fiction, and, like Maya,…had suddenly quit Klonopin after several years of taking it nightly for sleep. The doctor who had prescribed it back in LA never said anything about addiction, while my new Baton Rouge doctor treated me like an addict when I asked her for it. She cut me off cold turkey, and I went through protracted withdrawal syndrome, the symptoms of which inform Maya’s experience in the book. Writing about benzodiazepine withdrawal—albeit from her perspective—helped me through it. - from the Book Club Kit

The inspiration was mostly subconscious. I was living alone in a new city, cut off from any place I’d call home, when I wrote the first draft. This lonely feeling inspired one of the book’s major themes, which is the universal yearning to return to a place and time of belonging. That theme shaped the story and helped me build the titular house in the pines. - from the Book Club Kit

Maya’s father’s book points to an important truth about the danger she’s in. For me this was a metaphor for inherited trauma. Like so many people with roots in colonized places, the violence of the past has a way of showing up in the present in unexpected and highly personal ways. This is true for Maya in a very literal sense. To save herself, she must understand a story written before she was born. - from the Book Club Kit

The image is both comforting and really sinister at the same time once we learn more about it.
Exactly. That's definitely what I was going for, that dark side of nostalgia. - from the Salon interview

I raped a woman in a car. It’s near Tiarp Farm. A brief silence followed. Then: I’m going to do it again. Bye.

I raped a woman in a car. It’s near Tiarp Farm. A brief silence followed. Then: I’m going to do it again. Bye.

Monstrousness was always sleeping right beneath the surface, just out of sight.

Even heroes can make mistakes. The dream of a spotless past is, after all, only a dream. No one makes it through unmarked. We have to learn to live with it. If we can.

When the prime minister was shot and the shooter was never more than a shadow heading up the stairs into the dim light of David Bagares Gata, it unleashed something. Distaste. A rage that no one could quite control.
From opinion pages and kitchen tables came an indignant clamor over police and politics, criminality and immigrants, the wretched creature that had become Sweden and one’s own reflection in the mirror. It was clear now. The country could have come through anything unscathed—anything but this. The youthful boy with his smiling eyes, a mother-in-law’s dream who turned out to be a murdering monster up there in the north: Maybe that’s us.
Of course this sort of thing leaves its mark on you. Of course it marks a country. How could it not?

As spring arrived, the village came to life. Everything seemed to shimmer, and the colors grew so vivid. Sweet days awaited.
The first white wagtail sighting also brought a moment of uncertainty. We learned to be very cautious. If you saw the bird from the back, which you almost always did, it meant happiness and good fortune. But on those rare instances in which you first happened to catch sight of it from the front, and got a good look at the black spot on its tiny breast, it was a bad omen: Misfortune and sorrow lay ahead.

Criminology taught me the rough brutal truths about crime: it’s dirty, bloody, messy, painful, raw, costs a lot, and, sometimes, it’s beyond meaning in any reasonable sense of that term. - From Crimereads article

The one she asks for light is also the one who will bring darkness. Like the face of Janus.

Could the worst of crimes be devoid of meaning? Strange things happen all the time, every day, and we don’t think too much of them because they don’t affect us that deeply. They are just “coincidences” or something else, depending on what you believe in. Criminology taught me the rough brutal truths about crime: it’s dirty, bloody, messy, painful, raw, costs a lot, and, sometimes, it’s beyond meaning in any reasonable sense of that term.

As the bus disappears in a trail of black exhaust, Jenna notices a woman across the street who seems to be staring at her. She’s not one of the usu

As the bus disappears in a trail of black exhaust, Jenna notices a woman across the street who seems to be staring at her. She’s not one of the usual bus-stop parents. She has a pretty heart-shaped face, high cheekbones. Someone new in the neighborhood maybe. Too young to be a mom. An au pair? Jenna raises her hand to wave, but the woman turns away. Not even fellow outcasts want to be friends. Jenna watches a long moment as the woman crosses the street to avoid the other parents chatting on the sidewalk.

No matter how bad the person, we all cling to the days of innocence we remember from our youth.

I love exploring how people deal with, and overcome, trauma. I’d read somewhere about how many people with childhood trauma somehow later channel that into highly successful careers. That was the spark for the idea of a group of teenagers in an abusive foster home growing up and having accomplished lives, but also a secret that will come back to haunt them 25 years later. - from 2023 The Big Thrill interview

For Donnie, I’ve long wanted to create an aging rocker as a character. In fact, seven years ago I interviewed the members of a popular 80s band knowing that someday I’d use it for a character. That day came when I wrote my first Donnie chapter for WHAT HAVE WE DONE.
For Nico, I have a friend who’s an executive producer of hit reality TV shows, so I had access to someone with a unique job. And the great fictional characters of others—Jason Bourne, Nikita, and Orphan X to name a few—inspired Jenna.

he’s startled by a memory: the four of them at the bank of the river, on their knees, the gun barrel put to the back of Donnie’s head.
Ben’s voice echoes in his head. You don’t have to be scared anymore, Donnie.
A tear rolls down Donnie’s cheek.
I’m not so sure about that, Benny. I’m not so sure.

Anthony Franze is a critically acclaimed novelist with St. Martin’s Press, and a lawyer in the Appellate & Supreme Court practice of a prominent Washington, D.C. law firm.
For more than a decade, Anthony was an adjunct professor of law teaching courses in Federal Courts, Legal Rhetoric, and Appellate Practice, and he currently participates in a European faculty exchange program where he teaches at law schools abroad.
He writes legal thrillers under his own name, including THE LAST JUSTICE (2012), THE ADVOCATE’S DAUGHTER (2016), and THE OUTSIDER (2017He writes commercial fiction under a pen name, [Alex Haley] and his 2021 novel was an Indie Next pick, a LibraryReads selection, an Amazon Editor’s Best Thriller, as well as a CNN, Newsweek, E!, BuzzFeed, Business Week, Goodreads, Parade, PopSugar, and Reader’s Digest best or most anticipated thriller of the year. His work has been translated into more than a dozen languages and optioned for television and film.

Today an image slips through the carefully constructed peace . . .
Pale sand beneath my feet, a blue-green ocean, foam nibbling at my bare toes. Be

Today an image slips through the carefully constructed peace . . .
Pale sand beneath my feet, a blue-green ocean, foam nibbling at my bare toes. Behind me, a castle—ornate turrets dotted with pale pink shells, a drawbridge made from delicately curved driftwood, beneath it, a moat where tiny paper boats rock in the breeze. A wave gathers on the horizon. It grows taller and white horses gallop across its face. When the wall of salt water strikes, the castle will be destroyed and with it a treasure, something precious . . .
The vision disintegrates. Ghostly lips brush my cheek. I know what’s coming next. A whisper I’ve heard intermittently my entire life.

“It’s important you understand that I don’t have a clear definition for what I do. Psychics use their intuition or spiritual guides to gain information about the past, present, or future. Mediums are channels that deliver messages from those who have passed over. I’ve been called a psychic-medium, and that’s as good a definition as any. But the truth is that I’m not sure why I hear voices, see images, sing at times, or scribble notes—it just happens and I can’t tell you how because I truly don’t understand it.”

One of the seeds that started this novel with my fascination with imposter syndrome—the inability to believe one’s success has been legitimately achieved or deserved. I wanted to create a character, Sylvie, on the cusp of achieving great success but who doesn’t quite believe she deserves it. I made Sylvie a psychic as that gift is controversial—the perfect job for someone doubting her abilities due to all the critics! - from Hey It’s Carly Rae interview

the stories we tell from childhood that have shaped who we are – are based on old and sometimes faulty memories. It’s up to each of us to decide what to accept or discard from our origin stories and to decide who we ultimately want to be in life. - from the Jean Book Nerd interview

What surprised me most about writing Some Of It Was Real was that I thought my research would lead me to a conclusion about what I believe. I watched documentaries, movies, and TV shows about psychics, clairvoyants and mediums and read studies and articles written by individuals whose goals are to prove the supernatural is a hoax. But in the end, the only real conclusion I drew was that some of it might be real. - from Thoughts From a Page Podcast

Nan Fischer is the author of Some Of It Was Real (July 2022, Berkley Publishing), and the young adult novels, When Elephants Fly and The Speed of Falling Objects. Additional author credits include Junior Jedi Knights, a middle grade Star Wars trilogy for LucasFilm, and co-authored sport autobiographies for elite athletes including #1 ranked tennis superstar Monica Seles, Triple Crown race winning jockey Julie Krone, Olympic gold medal speed skater Apolo Anton Ohno, legendary gymnastics coach Bela Karolyi, and Olympic gold medal gymnasts Nadia Comaneci and Shannon Miller.

“Where did you put it?”
“Put what?”
“The knife,” he hisses. “What did you do with the damn knife, Liv? You took the goddamn knife when I was in the

“Where did you put it?”
“Put what?”
“The knife,” he hisses. “What did you do with the damn knife, Liv? You took the goddamn knife when I was in the bathroom, and you walked off with it.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. This must be a wrong number.” I resist the urge to hang up the phone. I feel compelled to know more.
“Don’t tell me you fell asleep and forgot everything again?” he says.
He frightens me with the accuracy of his comment. “How do you know I woke up with no memory?”
“Because you lose your goddamn memory every time you fall asleep. Listen, here’s what I want you to do…”

“Lack of sleep does horrible things to a person’s mind,” said the social worker. “It can make some people psychotic.”

The white, as yet unpainted, part of the wall, is graffitied with an array of random sentences. Most are written in pen. A couple are in marker. One appears to be written by a finger dipped in black coffee.

Memories lie.
Don’t trust anyone.
He’s coming for me.

For every girl child, there seemed to lurk a dead-eyed man, hair receding prematurely, with a car and the offer of a lift and a plan and a knife an

For every girl child, there seemed to lurk a dead-eyed man, hair receding prematurely, with a car and the offer of a lift and a plan and a knife and a shovel. Did we create the man by imagining him or was he idling there in his car regardless?

None of us can escape who we are when others aren’t looking; we can’t guess what we’re capable of until it’s too late.

I started a PhD in creative writing in 2016. It can be dangerous to ask me about collective narration because my research project looked at novels that had Greek chorus-like narration, and I can go on a bit. But I do have a clear sense of where Dirt Town the novel started. I sat down to write a short story from the point of view of the children of a small town, kind of like the one where I had grown up. What I wrote was largely just these kids coming home from school, but there was an energy in it that made me think it could be a novel. That writing is still in the book, pretty much as it was written. It occurred to me that if I was in these kids’ heads, then I needed something for them all to be looking at, thinking about: an experience that was as big as the town. One of the next flashes I had was that a girl had died, and the story grew from there. - from the Books and Publishing interview

We are not sure if it was our childhood or just childhood in general that has made us the way we are.

Hayley Scrivenor is a former Director of Wollongong Writers Festival. Originally from a small country town, Hayley now lives and writes on Dharawal country and has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Wollongong on the south coast of New South Wales. Dirt Town (our Book of the Month for June!) is her first novel. An earlier version of the book was shortlisted for the Penguin Literary Prize and won the Kill Your Darlings Unpublished Manuscript Award.

The simple answer to the setting question is that the character of Ronnie is twelve in 2001, and so was I - so it helped me keep my timeline straight!

I spent quite a bit of time thinking about the names of characters. Some have been the same almost since the start: Veronica, the missing girl’s best friend, goes by ‘Ronnie’, and that always felt absolutely right for her character. The character of Lewis, a young boy who sees Esther after she’s supposed to have gone missing, gets called ‘Louise’ by his classmates, I had to reverse-engineer a name that kids could play with in that way. Sometimes, names can become a little in-joke with yourself, too. There is a character named ‘Constance’, who is the mother of the missing girl. I called her Constance because she changes her mind a lot, over the course of the story.

…my childhood was one long nightmare, really. But this is different. Unfinished business—a time bomb ticking quietly like a second heart in my ches

…my childhood was one long nightmare, really. But this is different. Unfinished business—a time bomb ticking quietly like a second heart in my chest.

He’s been up to his old tricks again.

Elise knew that Ebbing wasn’t like its neighbors, Bosham or West Wittering. It didn’t feature in the Bayeux Tapestry or have thousands of visitors surging in like a spring tide on a nice day. An old fish factory with a corrugated roof squatted in the armpit of the curved sea wall guarding the harbor, and the ten thousand inhabitants lived mostly in prefabs, housing estate boxes, and salt-stained bungalows rather than thatched cottages but Elise didn’t mind. It felt a bit more real—and it was all she could afford on her own if she wanted to be by the sea. She’d never really considered it until recently—she was a city girl, through and through—but she’d worked up this fantasy that the sea would be company.

We moved here three years ago and it was lovely because we’d never lived by the sea before. So I had all this new material when we moved here. Lots of new people to watch and y’know, take notes about and so I decided that I would set my next book in Ebbing. Fictitious town. Did not want to get weighed down by a real location. And “I’ve had a lot of fun. Um, you know, sort of describing this small rundown seaside town…It is not one of the chi-chi ones that everybody wants to buy a property in, but it’s full of characters. - from The Poisoned Pen Bookstore interview

“You have to remember that monsters don’t look the part, Ronnie,” she said. “They’re not marked out in any way. If only . . . They live among us in plain sight. In their cardigans and sensible shoes. They have library cards, buy a poppy for Remembrance Day. They’re the man or woman next door who picks up a pint of milk for you, asks after your parents, or takes in parcels from deliverymen.” All the while planning their next act of depravity.

My parents owned dozens of paintings by local artists, but the one in the foyer was the only one that depicted night. And it’s the only painting I

My parents owned dozens of paintings by local artists, but the one in the foyer was the only one that depicted night. And it’s the only painting I remembered from my childhood. It showed the dark marsh in heavy brushstrokes. A sprawling oak in the foreground framed an expanse of reeds. A tidal creek snaked through the reeds. The tide was out, and the creek’s muddy bottom reflected the moonlight. A clump of more oaks in the distance lay dark under the full moon shining above them. And behind those oaks, the dark shadow of an immense home, no light in the windows except for one on the second floor. The marsh is beautiful during the day, changing colors with the angle of the sun. But it’s eerie at night. Too many secrets hiding in its vastness and in its crevices. The sea comes in and the sea goes out. Only it knows what’s hidden in the marsh.

My mother sat down next to me and said, “It’s like when a person loses their sight, their hearing improves. Except with Dad, he’s lost his short-term memory, and his long-term memory has improved. He tells stories I’ve never heard before.”

“Aw, Joey. You were always a good fisherman. Even when you were tiny you were fascinated by what you couldn’t see below the surface. That’s what fishing is all about. Curiosity and the patience to learn.”

Those Hammonds are nasty sons a bitches. Every one of ’em. Stole that island from the blacks. When the Union Army came through, they gave black people their own land. Gave ’em a chance. And it worked, too. The people prospered. Until the goddamn Klan took over and redistributed the land.” My father had venom in his voice. “Redistributed the land with guns and knives and ropes and trees. I wouldn’t live on Hammond Island if you paid me a million dollars. Hope a hurricane wipes it off the face of the earth.”

I was single in my mid 40’s like Joey, and people in my parents’ generation, including my parents, would often mention single women they knew of. I think some people in that generation are less comfortable with a younger person being single, so they try to play matchmaker. I also wanted Joey to have a partner in his informal investigation—someone in whom he could confide—and adding a romantic element to that felt not only fun but true in that life presents beautiful magic and brutal reality at the same time. And finally, I recently experienced a Joey/Leela like courtship. I met my wife in February of 2018 and we married that same year in October. I wanted to show how a combination of chemistry and life-experience can lead to that kind of relationship in a grounded way. - DAB interview

as teenagers, girls grow more complicated and difficult and boys more stoic. That is a generalization. A stereotype. But having been a boy who fit the stereotype, I believe stoicism is a mischaracterization of our behavior. We are not more stoic than girls. We are more ashamed. Of our boy-thoughts and risky deeds, mostly revolving around or inspired by sex or at least the idea of sex. That seemingly unattainable nirvana ignited by blossoming bodies and invisible pheromones. That shame sends us underground. Quiets us. Our vortex of shame is so powerful all our thoughts and deeds get sucked into it, so we share nothing.

A friend once told me women have face-to-face relationships and men have shoulder-to-shoulder relationships. Men do things like watch football and go fishing.

From where I’m sitting, Thomas Hammond’s motto must have been Think Globally, Destroy Locally.

The devil again, perched upon his shoulder. He knew. The past was something Michael carried with him, even when he forgot it was there. His mind fl

The devil again, perched upon his shoulder. He knew. The past was something Michael carried with him, even when he forgot it was there. His mind flashed on an image sourced from memory, one of blood and gruesome cuts to a body, of eyes open wide but seeing nothing. It wasn’t over. It would never be over.

He couldn’t be in any picture that risked going viral, and certainly couldn’t tell his in-laws why.