The past months have been as disorienting as any in contemporary history. A pandemic ravages the land, fueled in part by a sizable portion of the citizenry who, in the name of freedom, refuse to take preventative measures to slow its spread. A narcissistic sociopath refuses to acknowledge that he just lost a presidential election and instead calls out a dead Venezuelan for hacking American voting machines. Hundreds if not thousands of the narcissistic sociopath’s supporters, angered that dead Venezuelans and maybe a few Coastal Elites are stealing their votes, dress up like Visigoths and stage an Insurrection on Capitol Hill.
 
Today, impeachment proceedings are set to begin against that narcissistic sociopath.
 
Against this backdrop, I delved into Christopher Brown’s latest dystopian novel, Failed State. Brown’s novel, which takes place perhaps ten or twenty years after a Civil War has splintered our once-great nation into many warring less-than-great city states, totally pulled me in. I felt as if I were reading a realistic vision of what could become of us.
 
As the novel begins, Danny Kimoe, a down-and-out attorney with close ties to revolutionaries who have largely lost trust in him, enters a Dallas courtroom and makes incendiary allegations about official misconduct at the resettlement camps. The resettlement camps, Kimoe alleges, “were used as a cover for a secret program to disappear opponents of the regime.”
 
Kimoe’s motives in making these allegations may not be ideologically pure. Should he win his case, he stands to pocket a third of whatever financial settlement he’s able to finagle on behalf of his client.
 
There’s one problem though: opposing counsel claims he lacks standing because his client is dead. Which is news to Kimoe. But then again, Kimoe hasn’t been able to communicate with his client, who may have died in a firefight while attempting to kidnap an heiress, for months. Unless he can produce evidence that his client is still alive, the judge will throw out Kimoe’s case. Depriving Kimoe the chance at a big payday.
 
While what follows is a wild chase for evidence and/or bodies that takes us through a noirish vision of authoritarian Dallas and a wild romp through the anarchy of a liberated New Orleans.  I reveled in the gritty, realistic details Brown provides along the way. Regime change widening economic inequality creates an unstable future. The environmental “Utopia” that insurgents attempt to create in a climate change-ravaged New Orleans breeds a wacky legal system where trees are given legal standing while state prisoners are hung from cages above the city square to face the wrath of the citizenry. There is no calm middle ground, no sense of economic security or even the comfort in knowing that there will always be a tomorrow.
 
And each time I lifted my head from the novel to take in the day’s headlines, I shuddered. Our powder keg nation is but a few sparks away from plunging into its own dystopia. In ten or fifteen years, we could very easily find ourselves in the pages of a Christopher Brown novel.
 
 
 
 
                                                                  *****
 
In the past, I’ve been lucky to interview several writers (including Mary Kubica, Lisa Jewell, and Anna Snoestra, Kaira Rouda, and James Lasdun). Christopher Brown has kindly consented to answer a few questions via email about his novel, FAILED STATE.
 
 
Question: Elsewhere, in a different context, you identified yourself as “a believer in practicing a kind of speculative realism that’s drawing up your imaginary worlds from the material of the observed world.”
 
Reading FAILED STATE, I was struck by your credible near-term portrayals of what might become of New Orleans and Dallas in the tumultuous aftermath of a second American Civil War. Everything was believable. There’s financial collapse, a crumbling infrastructure, contorted legal structures, and the continued effects of systematic injustice, climate change and environmental trauma. A large part of New Orleans is underwater and/or reclaimed by the swamps. Your vision is very disciplined. There was never a moment where I thought, “Oh man, this is so far-fetched that I can’t believe what I’m reading.”
 
As a writer, was that difficult? Were there moments when, drafting the novel, you had to rein in imaginative excesses for fear of believability issues? Times when you found yourself pulling back on an image or idea because it wasn’t “real” enough?
 
Christopher Brown: Striking the right balance between imaginative exuberance and realist restraint was the biggest challenge writing Failed State. I felt I had really hit the sweet spot with my prior book in this series, Rule of Capture, but that was easier because the settings were more familiar—authoritarian courtrooms and noir night haunts drawn from real life, their dark aspects highlighted to draw out the dystopia.
 
Failed State envisions a different society trying to be born from the ruins of the old one, with its central set piece a drowned New Orleans occupied by utopian separatists undertaking a radical rewilding. I tried to build it from things I had actually seen or found in history, while at the same time riffing on the aesthetic language of post-apocalyptic stories, so I found myself seesawing as I revised. Indeed, I initially developed the whole Dallas section that opens the book as a more mundane warm-up for Donny’s journey into the craziness of post-revolutionary New Orleans. So I’m delighted to hear those settings and scenarios still worked the same way for you and many other readers. 
 
 
 
Question: I read this novel while the aftermath of the 2020 Presidential election played out. A deadly pandemic ravages the land. We have states literally suing each other because they don’t like how the citizens of those states voted. A popular conservative radio personality suggested that the nation is “trending toward secession.” Insurrectionists stormed Capitol Hill, killed at least one police officer and temporarily forced Congress to abandon its Constitutional requirements in certifying the election results. Forgive me for being alarmist, but one can be forgiven for thinking that, right now, IRL, we’re living through the opening pages of a dystopian novel.
 
Given our current situation, of what value is dystopian fiction? Do you worry that your dystopian vision of our future may not be as dystopian as our present reality?
 
 
Christopher Brown:  I think dystopian framing continues to have tremendous value if done with fidelity to the idea of truth telling—looking at the world through a fun-house mirror in an effort to tell truths about the real world that conventional modes of realism cannot. And if you want to write a novel that also grapples with big ideas, the speculative laboratory of SF is hard to beat. My aim is not to envision a world that’s worse than the one we live in, but to more closely examine the things that are unjust or out of balance in the real one, in order to find paths to a plausibly better world we could have. Failed State is more utopian than dystopian in intent, trying to get closer to that more hopeful future the characters in the prior two books were fighting for.
 
 
 
Question: Last month also marked the fortieth anniversary of John Lennon’s death. Growing up, I was drawn to Lennon’s idea that, if we want a better future, we needed to imagine it first.
 
Lately, I’ve been wondering if the reason we find ourselves in our real-life present-day dystopia is because we haven’t created enough compelling visions of what a, realistically, a “good” society might look like.
 
Is it possible that realistic artistic visions of what a mismanaged future society might look like can, in effect, create an expectation that we’re slouching, societally, toward dystopia? Has dystopian fiction, and movies, helped to normalize horrendous political and governmental actions?
 
Christopher Brown: Well first I should note that, as readers of Tropic of Kansas know, one feature of the dystopian world of these books is that John Lennon is still alive, and annoying some of the cynical characters with his naïve utopian anthems. A provocative Easter egg that is not important to the plot, but signals an attitude about what the realistic path to an authentically better society would really take.
 
I do think the tropes of dystopian fiction are increasingly abused and misused in ways that disserve us, especially as they have been borrowed with greater frequency by journalists to describe the world we live in. I wrote an essay on just that point in connection with the launch of Failed State, suggesting that dystopian framing makes the news headlines work like chumbox ads—a form of sensationalism that distorts the truth to feed the doomscrolling clickbait machine, avoiding the hard work of looking at our real problems through something more honest than the reflexive partisan lenses we default to.
 
Watching the live footage as an angry mob ransacked the hallways and chambers of the Capitol where I once worked, I couldn’t help but think it looked like a set piece from one of my books. Indeed, there’s a scene much like that at the end of Tropic of Kansas, except that the place being ransacked is The White House, by a left-leaning people’s army seeking to install a more democratic government after they have evicted a dictator president. I like to think of speculative fiction as a safe laboratory to explore scenarios like that without real people getting hurt. But I increasingly wonder whether our fictions have a bigger impact on reality than we assume, in a society where we are trained to think of our lives like the movies we consume. As J.G. Ballard incisively remarked: “We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.”  It’s a sobering reminder to me of the moral implications of the work.
 
 
 
Question: The second half of FAILED STATE examines a fledgling Utopian experiment centered around a radical environmental and egalitarian ethos. This Utopia, growing out of the ruins of New Orleans, is not without its problems. One senses that, in real life, such a radical experiment is likely to fail. Still, I enjoyed your willingness to explore what a Utopia might look like. What are the challenges to exploring Utopias through your lens of “speculative realism”?
 
Christopher Brown: Utopia means nowhere. It’s a Platonic ideal that can’t be achieved in real life. But that ideal plays an important role, providing an aspirational dipole to our pragmatic acceptance of the often ugly truths about how the world really works. As the material of fiction, utopian communities are fertile territory, especially if you accept how inherently doomed any effort to build a perfect society is. A Utopia grounded in realism is a tragedy. I don’t think I realized that when I set out to write Failed State, but that’s what I learned. And part of the dramatic power comes from showing the commitment of the characters to the struggle to build a more just society even when faced with the inevitability of failure—a kernel of persistent hope that runs through all three of these books.
 
 
Question: FAILED STATE, to me, is a dystopian legal thriller, and yet it’s often been labeled as “science fiction.” While the plot touches on, among other things, the development and distribution of genetically modified crops, the novel seems much more interested in exploring legal, political, and economic issues. How do you feel about the “science fiction” label that often gets attached to your work?
 
Which other contemporary writers do you consider “in your tribe”?  Which, frankly, is another way of asking which other writers I should read!
 
Christopher Brown: I have always embraced the fantastic’s imaginative riffing as a core engine of my writing, and while I have never felt like a native to science fiction, the genre provided a literary community that was the closest thing to one where I fit in when I was getting started. SF workshops like Turkey City and Sycamore Hill were especially important in helping me develop my craft, as someone with a background in journalism but no academic training in creative writing.
 
The genre writers who had the most profound influences on me early on were pioneers of the New Wave like J. G. Ballard, Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany and Pamela Zoline who saw the potential of science fiction to do a better job of depicting contemporary life than literary realism, and the cyberpunks who saw the potential of science fiction to be cool—all of them writers for whom the undertaking started with an appreciation of the capacity of SF to liberate language in the way jazz liberates musical expression. But I’m equally influenced by non-genre writers, especially pioneering journalists of the same era like Hunter S. Thompson and Joan Didion, who wrote what you might call true dystopia.
 
I don’t think I really have a “tribe,” but peers cranking out new genre work today that I feel a kinship with in diverse ways include people like Tim Maughan, Malka Older, Nisi Shawl, Fernando Flores, Maria Dhavana Headley, Brendan Byrne and Robert G. Penner, along with writers from a generation before like William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Eileen Gunn and M. John Harrison. I also gravitate to work by literary writers who play at the edges of genre, and lately have been binging on works by Latin American women writers like Samanta Schweblin and Fernanda Melchor.
 
 
Question: Danny Kimoe, FAILED STATE’s protagonist, reminded me a lot of the kind of character Humphrey Bogart would play in a 1940s film noir. He bills himself as an “ethically flexible” loner seemingly at war against everyone. We sense that his heart is in the right place yet we also sense, at times, that what he really wants is a pay-out. For all the “right reasons,” of course. At times, his quest seems quixotic. He’s literally trying to unearth people who are believed to be dead. He might as well be trying to unearth the Maltese Falcon. Unlike the typical Bogart character, he can be a bit of a self-medicating bumbler. I sense you had fun exploring his character and occupying his mindspace while writing this novel. Did you?
 
Conversely, were there characters you found difficult to enter into? Characters that, for whatever reason, you had to revisit several times before you got them “right”?
 
Christopher Brown: Donny came very easily to me, for a lot of different reasons. He has the qualities of many lawyers I have worked with, and he embodies both the heroic and antiheroic extremes of the archetypal lawyers in American fiction—the paladin of the underdog who speaks truth to power, and the self-interested shyster whose personal life is an even bigger mess than his practice. In a way, he expresses all the compromises we all (or at least most of us) make trying to pay the bills while convincing ourselves we are doing the right thing.
 
The hardest “characters” for me to write were the trees, animals and ecosystems who were the real clients being advocated for in the story. Science fiction is uniquely well-equipped to deal with non-human characters, but I found that approach to writing the alien didn’t really suit my story. There are great literary writers who manage to express the character of the non-human world through our experience of it, as Richard Powers so profoundly does with trees in The Overstory. I tried to bushwhack my own path, integrating something more like nature writing into a lawyer story, and making all that work in some semblance of narrative harmony was hard.
 
Question: You’re a lawyer by trade who cut his teeth working in the US Senate Judiciary Committee during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. You’ve worked with tech start-ups and now devote your time working with “mission-oriented startups [and] a lot of nonprofits.”
 
FAILED STATE examines, among other things, how legal systems facilitate ideologies. Our current legal system was built to protect and justify capitalistic behavior. The radicals behind the novel’s New Orleans Utopia create a radically different legal system built to protect and justify the environment.
 
Can there be such a thing as an ideology-free or ideology-neutral legal system?
 
Christopher Brown: I take a pretty materialist approach to that question. I think all legal systems mostly express power and property interests more than ideas, through the mechanism of the inherited customs and norms of the community or society. Rule of Capture aims to show how the penumbra of reason that characterizes modern American law really just dresses up a raw exercise of extractive dominion over conquered land. Failed State tries to imagine what a better system could look like, mostly by grounding it in a different conception of what our interests really are, and a more inclusive conception of community. I think human ideologies are mostly manifestations of the insanity and delusion enabled by language. In the end, the only law I really believe in are the laws of nature. 
 
 
Question: Do you ever get disgusted with how close current events are slouching towards what only ten or twenty years ago might've been characterized as "dystopia"? Personally, I'm having a really hard time squaring my modest expectations for a "civil" society with what's happening in reality.
 
 
Christopher Brown: Absolutely. I get disgusted, sickened, saddened, and shocked, but at the same time I’m not really surprised. Maybe because in my fiction I have tried to imagine the circumstances in which events like these could happen here, after seeing similar events—coups, revolutions, dictatorships, extreme political changes, and campaigns of genocide, expulsion or internment—happen throughout the world over the course of my lifetime. And what I found working on these books is that the US has already been much more dystopian for much of its history than most of us tend to acknowledge—at least those of us who are the beneficiaries of the reality bubble of middle class privilege. Working on these books I read the Supreme Court cases validating the theft of Indian lands, legal histories of the First Red Scare, and political histories of 1968, and every one of them seemed more genuinely dystopian than what was going on in contemporary life. At least until last week. Having working on Capitol Hill for five years before and after college, to see dudes dressed like extras from a Conan the Barbarian movie occupy the Senate floor was beyond anything I could have imagined.   
 
(I wrote about it in today’s installment of my weekly newsletter, if you’re interested:
https://edgelands.substack.com/p/midwinter-in-the-tropic-of-kansas )
 
I hold out hope that, in real life as in fiction, the amplification of the dystopian aspects of the society helps to show the way to a better path. Events like we have seen during this presidential interregnum highlight the importance of being engaged in the political life of your community, of working to build real connections with your neighbors, of being invested in the work of building a future you would want to live in. Storytelling has an important role to play in that, by imagining how things could be.

THE FALL GUY, James Lasdun’s 2016 novel, is the kind of book I wish everyone would read. It’s a brilliant psychological thriller but, in its thoughtful examination of place and time, class and culture, it’s so much more than that. It’s the kind of novel that gets under your skin, provokes you to think about larger questions like the role of money in society, and bedazzles you with its lush sentences.
 
And did I mention it’s got a great, gripping plot?
 
Last week, I read it for the third time since its publication. And it still held my attention.

Matthew, a struggling chef who hasn't had a regular job in a couple of years, is invited to spend Summer 2012 at the guest house of his cousin Charlie's summer home in the Catskills. When they were younger, after Charlie's father died, Charlie had moved into Matthew's family home in London. They went to a posh private school together, lived as brothers. But now the tables are reversed. Matthew is the down-and-out hanger-oner. Charles is a wealthy banker, the type of guy who keeps $1.5 million in cash in his home safe.
 
Almost immediately, we sense a simmering animosity between Charlie and Matthew. And almost immediately, we sense Matthew’s attraction to Chloe, Charlie’s wife.
 
One night, owing to a strange sense of circumstances, Matthew’s sleeping in the bedroom of Charlie and Chloe’s vacant house.
 
“As [Matthew] laid his head on the pillow, he caught the smell of Chloe’s perfume. He breathed it in deeply. As always, it stirred a very specific emotion inside him; unnameable, but powerfully evocative of it’s wearer. A short, sheer nightdress with thin shoulder straps lay crumpled on the carpet below the mattress. He picked it up and held it against the light. A strand of Chloe’s dark hair glinted on the cream-colored silk. He let the garment slide down softly against his cheek, and filled his lungs again with the delicately scented fragrance.”
 
Ultimately, this is a novel about betrayal... and yet, it's not the obvious betrayal that fuels this novel's tension. Matthew spends his days cooking up fantastic meals for Charlie & Chloe, all the while working up the gumption to ask Charlie for $50,000 to start a gourmet food truck business. Chloe spends her days swimming and going to yoga classes. And Charlie meditates, adopts leftsy yearnings (he's sympathetic to then-current Occupy Wall Street movement) and plots a new microfinancing business venture.

The problems really begin when a fourth character enters the narrative about fifty pages into this novel. From there on out, the tension's fantastic. Each of the characters is caught in their own obsession. 

One of the things I really liked about this novel is the writing-- it's superb. 

And I also relished how the main story arc emerges slowly but then becomes all-consuming. This is not a typical mass-market psychological thriller. Yes, there are twists and double-crosses that I never saw coming, but I sense that Lasdun had more than just an entertaining twist or two when he began writing this novel. He pays particularly close attention to the political currents that infused the summer of 2012. All the characters, to some degree, are ostensibly trying to break out of their socioeconomic stereotype. And yet, as much as they'd like to be freed of their predicaments, none of them wholly succeed in becoming something other than the person they were at the beginning of the novel.
 
                                                                    *****
 
In the past, I’ve been lucky to interview several psychological thriller writers (including Mary Kubica, Lisa Jewell, and Anna Snoestra, and Kaira Rouda). James Lasdun has kindly consented to answer a few questions via email about his novel, THE FALL GUY.
 
Question: Typically, in what might be called ‘commercial’ psychological thrillers, there’s an emphasis on plot elements. However, THE FALL GUY also features an intense focus on character, place, socioeconomic zeitgeist, language, and, of course, its sizzling plot. How do you balance these many elements? Do you find that, at times, prioritizing on or another of these non-plot elements can detract from readers’ immersion in the plot?
 
James Lasdun:
I have huge respect for plot, regardless of genre, and I do think that, ideally, everything that happens in a novel ought to advance the plot in some way. Of course you want to make the characters and places as rich and vivid as possible, and maybe even give yourself room to explore some ideas, but – for me – if those things aren’t subordinated to the story, then you’re in trouble. That said, I think my idea of what constitutes ‘story’ may not be typical for a thriller writer. I find I need to chart characters’ states of mind in some detail as the psychological pressures mount, and this can sometimes involve fuller explorations of the worlds they inhabit than other thriller writers would allow themselves. For me, part of the pleasure of writing (and reading) this kind of book is finding believable situations that can express the different phases of a deepening crisis, while simultaneously developing a realistic portrait of a particular world. 
 
 
 
Question: Unlike a lot of psychological thrillers—which open with a death, a confrontation, or crucial revelation—THE FALL GOES doesn’t start in a stressful place but slowly eases into the story.
 
Two cousins, Matthew and Charlie, meet and drive upstate “late so as to avoid the traffic.”
 
There’s a disparity between Charlie and Matthew. Charlie’s an incredibly wealthy banker. Matthew however, is only marginally employed and hemmed in by dwindling financial resources. One senses quickly that grudges animate Matthew.
 
The opening pages do an excellent job in establishing the relationship between the principle characters. We get to know the town where, along with Charlie’s wife Chloe, the three will be summering. And we get to understand the novel’s themes and ideas (more about this later) but in positioning THE FALL GUY as a psychological thriller, was there a moment when you and/or your editors were tempted to start the novel with a sensational event that would immediately activate the plot’s forward momentum?
 
James Lasdun:
This may just be a matter of personal taste. I like simple, low-key openings that bring the world of the book calmly to life, and set its basic psychological conflicts in motion in a very natural and plausible way. Of course you have to cast a spell in some way from the first page, but I don’t think that has to involve some big sensational event (I don’t much like being grabbed by the throat). For me it was enough just to travel for a bit with these two cousins whose relationship has a serious power imbalance in it that is clearly (I hope!) going to lead to some kind of catastrophe, especially when we learn of Matthew’s very specific feelings about Charlie’s wife.
 
Question: A similar question: about 50 pages into the novel, Matthew witnesses an incident. A secret is revealed will unravel the cozy if carefully-boundaried relationships between the characters.
 
My question has to do with pacing. This is the moment the plot engine kicks fully into gear. For me, the timing of this moment seemed perfect. And yet this is exactly the kind of “sensational moment” that other writers might wish to craft as into an opening chapter. Were you tempted to do so?
 
James Lasdun:
My hope was that there was enough tension inherent in the Matthew/Charlie/Chloe situation, along with the money story, to keep things interesting and build a genuine sense of suspense. It was important to me to create the sense of a desirable, even blissful existence making itself available to Matthew. He can’t have it, but it exists around him as a tantalizing possibility, which – to me – gives meaning to his destructive, self-destructive unraveling. But I take your point about pacing – it was risky to hold back on some of the key disclosures for as long as I did. 
 
[Nick Kocz Addendum: In this case, the risk was well worth it! I’ve been re-reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels and short stories over the last week in anticipation of writing an essay about why I never want my 17-year-old son to be as steeped in Fitzgerald’s work as I was at his age. One of the things that drew me in to both THE FALLL GUY and THE GREAT GATSBY is the relative slow build that Lasdun and Fitzgerald employ. Absent of heavy-handed sensational plot moves, the slow build forces readers to “lean in” more, and pay greater attention to non-plot elements.]
 

Question: THE FALL GUY is a cauldron of opposing forces and churning, burbling ideas all in conflict with one another. When tasked to select music for their drive upstate, programs, Matthew programs the Lexus’s iPod to play Debussy’s piano compositions-- a choice Charlie vetoes in favor of Plan B’s “hard beats and aggressive voices” hip hop.
 
Charlie, the banker whose favorite beverage is watermelon juice, studies the Occupy Wall Street protesters of the early 2010s, searching their faces for signs of “authenticity.” Although his past isn’t squeaky clean, he now seeks to set himself up as a financial ethics consultant.
 
Aurelia, the Woodstock, NY-like town where the novel is set, began as a 19th century artists colony and is now home to “an unusual combination of ragged drifters and well-heeled New York weekenders who mingled together in a curious symbiosis of mutual flattery.” One of the characters aims to write “a more cultural-historical sort of book I’m thinking of calling The Last Taboo, about money—how it affects the consciousness of people who have it, or work with it.”
Deadheads and hippie counter-culture nomads bivouac in the surrounding woods and lay among the flat rocks of the town’s stream, where their leaders break apart baguettes to share among their followers.
 
THE FALL GUY contains one of the most perfect images I’ve read in ages, something that stuck to me in each of my repeated readings of the novel:
 
“The small trees flanking the path, sentinel-like presences in last night’s darkness, turned out to be dwarf pear trees, laden with small green fruit. A faux-bronze Buddha, Aurelia’s ubiquitous totem, sat in the shade of a maple, smiling. The peacefulness of the place was a little uncanny.”
 
The peace is, indeed, uncanny.
 
And yet, as logical readers, we sense unease. Conflicting interests can not peacefully co-exist for long before something explodes.
 
What I’m getting at is that, as much as THE FALL GUY rightly qualifies as a “psychological thriller,” it could also be labeled as a “sociological thriller” or a “socioeconomic thriller.” How important was this overarching aspect of the novel to you compared to the personal dramas affecting each of the individual characters?
 
 
James Lasdun:
Well, place and politics are both important to me. I don’t think I could write a book that didn’t explore both in some way. Certainly both were integral to the story from the beginning. I like your term “socioeconomic thriller” though I hope the book has an equally prominent psychological/emotional aspect too. The banking collapse was very much in my mind when I was first thinking about the story. I wanted a banker to be one of the main characters partly in order to connect the story directly to that subject. The idea of a remorseful banker trying to atone for the sins of his profession, while being still completely in the grip of the mindset underlying those sins, interested me. I hope the question of culpability (and the evasion thereof), which is really the driving idea of the book, gets some resonance from this political context. Of course it needs to work on the personal level first, so the human relationships have to be believable…
 
 
Question: Often, when reading commercial psychological thrillers, I get the feeling they’re written with the assumption that readers demand each scene/page/paragraph/line in some way directly services the plot. You don’t seem to be under any such assumption.  Why?
 
My take on THE FALL GUY is that it’s an intelligent corrective for what, at times, feels like a lazy commercial genre trafficking in tropes and quick plot moves rather than intelligent observation. THE FALL GUY takes risks. Not all the scenes are in direct service to the plot. There’s a long dinner party scene about one-third through the novel, for example, that serves thematic rather than plot needs. Matthew, a foodie who’d rather “go to bed hungry than eat poorly” introduces readers to an abundance of mouth-watering food observations during his numerous marketing trips.
 
In your estimation, what are the advantages to your strategy? And what, if any, disadvantages might there be?
 
James Lasdun:
Nice of you to say, though in fact, as per question#1, I do think every scene should serve some plot need – it’s just that the ‘plot’ sometimes goes inward or underground, in the sense of being more about shifts in a character’s psyche or perception of things, than concrete action. In my mind that dinner party scene, while of course offering an opportunity to bring in more characters and air some of the book’s themes in the form of direct conversation (and with luck provide some light relief!), is primarily geared around a critical shift in the way Matthew views his relationship with Charlie. It’s the first time he senses direct, unequivocal antagonism from Charlie, and it also sets up a scene that gets replayed from a very different perspective when he hears Chloe describing it to Wade. It becomes (if it works) a way of expressing the extreme subjectivity of Matthew’s view of his own behavior. I wanted him to seem both more oppressed and more dangerous as the story evolves. A lot of the more seemingly low-key moments and scenes represent my attempts to get inside his mental processes sufficiently clearly that I could really believe he would commit an act of violence when the moment came. The food descriptions, which get more elaborate (and less appetizing) as the story progresses, are also a part of this attempt to find ways of charting Matthew’s darkening state of mind. (I wanted them to be fun too, though).
 
 
Question: How did the THE FALL GUY develop in your mind? Did the plot come to you first? Or did you begin with a character sketch or scene? Or the atmospherics and social dynamics? How long did it take before all the elements finally came together in your mind?
 
 
James Lasdun:
I think three things came together. First, the configuration of characters; basically a triangle that gets unexpectedly turned into a foursome. I hadn’t seen this particular dynamic of desires and resentments before, and it intrigued me. Then all the politics around Occupy, etcetera, that was still so much in the air when I started writing. And then just my own longstanding wish to capture the feel of summer in the Catskills, where I live. Somehow this dark story seemed to go well with that bucolic setting. The writing was pretty quick by my standards – about a year for most of it, then several more months trying to get an ending that satisfied me and my (very exacting!) editors.
 
Question: Which contemporary writers of psychological thrillers interest you most nowadays? What recent novels have you found especially noteworthy?
 
James Lasdun:
I enjoyed Leila Slimani’s “The Nanny”, though maybe more for its subtler moments of human observation in the first half, than the build-up to its gory climax. I also very much admire Lawrence Osborne’s novels, which use place and atmosphere brilliantly, as well as being just highly intelligent about the world we all inhabit.
 
 
 
Question: Weeks ago, I read through the Amazon reviews for my first novel (I WILL NEVER LEAVE YOU), which had just been published. This was an eye-opening experience. I expected readers to comment on  style and tone, imagery and themes, and the quality of writing at the sentence-level. In short, I expected them to comment on the qualities that I admire in THE FALL GUY. Instead, readers focused on plot, pacing, and character likability issues. What do you hope or expect your readers to walk away with after reading one of your novels?
 
James Lasdun:
I think it’s dangerous for writers to try to tailor their books toward some sense of what ‘the reader’ might want. Also dangerous to read Amazon reviews! You can’t write a good book by second-guessing reader responses, though I suppose if you’re clever at it you might write a successful one. I write to please myself, and hope in doing to give pleasure to other people. I try to make my sentences as clear and expressive as I can, but I don’t particularly care if anyone notices. It’s nice if they do, but that isn’t the reason why most people (other than writers of course!) read thrillers. They want to be saturated in anxiety and terror and then released from it. For that to happen (for me) the writing has to be alive, intelligent, attentive to reality, otherwise I get bored and stop suspending disbelief. But at the same time I don’t like to be too conscious of an author’s style, imagery, etcetera. It’s a difficult balance to strike… At any rate I’d rather my novels left readers with a sense of having been on a rich, strange, deep, dark journey, than filled with aesthetic admiration for the prose.
 
 
Addendum: I WILL NEVER LEAVE YOU, written under the pen name of S. M. Thayer, actually continues to perform very well. For several days, it was actually the best-selling novel of any kind at Amazon. A couple of weeks ago, it was #12 on the Washington Post’s National Fiction Best-Seller’s list. Although it’s been available since August 1 as part of Amazon’s First Reads program, its technical publication date is September 1. It’s been strange a strange experience for me. Several readers have reached out to me out of the blue, telling me how much they enjoyed the novel. As you might gather, until this moment I’ve had little to no experience responding to fan mail. But I can’t tell you how grateful I am to everyone who’s chosen to read my novel. Thank you!
 

So… as you may know, I WILL NEVER LEAVE YOU (Thomas & Mercer, 2018) my pseudonymously-published psychological thriller launched a couple of days ago. Throughout August, it’ll be available at a substantial discount on Amazon. Amazon Prime members can download an eBook version of my novel for free as part of their First Reads program perks.
 
Sales are very encouraging. Amazon charts “best seller” lists on an hourly basis. For most of the first two days, the eBook version has been the #1 Best Seller at the Kindle Store. And, yesterday, my editors informed me that the hardcover version was actually the #1 Best Seller among all psychological thrillers. For this, dear readers, I sincerely thank you!
 
So yesterday I looked at my Amazon reviews. The main thing that jumped out at me was that absolutely no one was talking about the quality of my prose. Nor, for that matter, did people say the novel was badly written. None of that mattered to my readers. Which struck me as funny because most writers I know (including myself) are super invested in the word- and sentence-level quality of our writing.
 
I used to ask writers if they’d rather write a “a great novel that was horribly written” or a “poor novel that was beautifully written.” The results were mixed—a lot of us would rather be known for writing great sentences even if this meant our novels were otherwise fatally flawed.
 
Our sentences matter—to us, at least. And yet, for the majority of readers, my guess is that beautifully-written sentences aren’t foremost on their minds when evaluating a novel. Nor, for that matter, are readers terribly interested in style or tone, imagery or themes. Instead, other fictive elements—namely, plot, pacing, and characters— are what they’re after.
 
The other thing that struck me is that I WILL NEVER LEAVE YOU is definitely not the novel to read if you can’t stomach unlikeable characters.
 
For me, there’s two distinct streams of psychological thrillers.
 
On one hand, some novels center on the efforts of a likeable wife who struggles to escape from a manipulative/abusive husband. B.A. Paris’s BEHIND CLOSED DOORS, S.J. Watson’s BEFORE I GO TO SLEEP, Kaira Rouda’s excellent BEST DAY EVER, and Emma Chapman’s HOW TO BE A GOOD WIFE fit into this category.
 
And the other kind of psychological thriller?
 
Well, that’s the crazycakes variety where all characters are unlikeable (if not psychologically unhinged), and all relationships are dysfunctional. Think Gillian Flynn’s GONE GIRL, Paula Hawkins’s THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN, and Mary Kubica’s EVERY LAST LIE.
 
I’ll make no bones about it—my novel definitely falls into the crazycakes variety. My agent and editors and everyone heavily invested in my commercial success might not like me to say this, but people looking for “likeable characters” really should spend their money on one of the novels with likeable characters that I mentioned above rather than buy my novel. Similarly, if you’re looking for a baseball book, civil war saga, or a historical novel  set during the Great Depression, look elsewhere. Readers deserve to be happy. If you’re like me, you don’t have a lot of extra money or a lot of free time to invest in something that’s bound to give you no joy.
 
However, if you’re fascinated by “unlikeable characters” and their crazycakes twisted twisty drama, may I humbly suggest you give I WILL NEVER LEAVE YOU a look?
 
 
Addendum #1: What’s weird is that those who didn’t like my novel because of the unlikeable characters usually wrote very short 1-star reviews. And, like I said above, I can’t blame them for their dissatisfaction. However, those who really liked unlikeable characters really liked my novel, leaving long cogent reviews so glowing that I almost wanted to cry. These readers really got what I was trying to accomplish.
 
As readers of this blog know, I’m a big John Lennon fan. There’s a line in “Strawberry Fields Forever” in which Lennon sings about his fear “no one I think is in my tree.” As a previously- unpublished writer, I never knew if I’d ever connect with readers. I honestly thought I was nothing but a voice braying to his lonesome, much to the consternation of everyone around me.
 
But after reading some of these reviews, I realized I’d made a connection. I wasn’t braying to myself any longer. There were others in my tree!
 
So yesterday, I emailed my agent, Rick Pascocello of Glass Literary Management, my impression that readers’ willingness to accept unlikeable characters was the chief indicator of whether they’d like my novel.
 
Rick wrote back the most remarkable insight:
 
“You hit the nail on the head. Unlikable characters are like cilantro. Some people love it (it’s the world’s most used herb); but some can’t stand it. The reviews reflect people’s ability to embrace these flavors. That’s why the good reviews are so effusive; others spit it out immediately.”
 
Addendum #2: The question I get most when talking to people about my novel is why I chose to publish it under a pen name. Earlier this week, I wrote a guest blog piece at Missdemeanors.com in which I talked about this.
 
Addendum #3: And, lastly, one other excellent thing happened this past week. For the first time ever, I’ve been asked to blurb a novel! And the neat thing is, the person who asked me is a legitimate best-selling novelist, someone whose work I’ve admired for quite some time. This feels like such an honor!

Five pages into BEST DAY EVER, Kaira Rouda’s propulsive psychological thriller, the novel’s first-person narrator (Paul Strom) discusses the first time he and the woman who’d become his wife made love. Paul’s an advertising executive, and Mia is a much-younger woman working at his Columbus, OH firm.
 
“I had reserved a suite in the finest hotel in downtown Columbus, with views of the river sparkling below. We’d been dating a couple of months by then and I’d waited as long as any man could be expected to. Mia was nervous, uncomfortably sitting on the edge of the red-and-white-striped upholstered chair, gripping her champagne flute like a weapon she’d use for protection. She wore a light blue dress that matched her eyes. The dress slipped easily over her head once I’d pulled her to me, asked her to dance. The memories of that night are vivid. It took me until the sun was coming up to convince her to go all the way. She worried about the promise she’d made to her mother. I told her if a tree falls in the forest but no one is around to hear it, then did it really fall? She laughed and I slid on top of her, pinning her arms gently above her head, pressing my mouth firmly against hers. And, she fell.”
 
Doesn’t that paragraph make your skin crawl? Though there’s the trappings of romance (the champagne, the luxurious hotel suite, “the light blue dress that matched her eyes”), this is an Aziz Ansari horror show. Paul must have wheedled for hours, begging, imploring, daring Mia to “go all the way” until he finally “slid on top of her, pinning her arms.”
 
Throughout BEST DAY EVER, Rouda displays a refreshing amount of trust in her readers. The curious thing about the passage above (and the rest of the Rouda’s novel, for that matter) is that we never get to see this scene from Mia’s point of view—which one imagines would paint a much-different picture of that evening. Though dueling narratives (think: GONE GIRL) have become de rigueur nowadays in psychological thrillers, BEST DAY EVER is told almost entirely from Paul’s point-of-view. There’s just enough detail there for readers to intuit how exasperating the encounter was for Mia—and yet, not so much detail to make readers throw down the book in horror.
 
I could easily imagine another, less trusting, writer putting together an over-the-top ham-fisted depiction of that scene. A scene that would read with the same level of detail as found in babe’s initial Aziz Ansari report. While such a depiction would certainly shock every reader, I’d have a hard time imagining it succeeding in the novel that Rouda has constructed.
 
Despite Paul’s boorish, belittling behavior, there are still moments where one suspects that he is genuine in his desire to reconcile with Mia. He’s planned the entire trip to be “the best day ever.” Several times, he alludes to a special gift that he intends to give Mia. And one feels sorry for the two of them, Paul and Mia, because, as Paul says, “We haven’t had a weekend together, just the two of us alone, for more than a year.”
 
Because there’s no early, over-the-top effort to depict Paul as an absolute monster, readers are willing to embrace the set-up.
 
Lest you think BEST DAY EVER is a somber novel about sexual assault, or a #MeToo polemic, it’s not. Paul’s no woke dude, and his treatment of women is only part of his problem.
 
And yet, as Kathyrn Craft blurbs, BEST DAY EVER “may well be the most entertaining read of the year.”
 
Watching Paul operate—and he’s one helluva player—is intoxicating. Self-aggrandizing and belittling towards others, he’s a prevaricator and manipulator of near-Trumpian proportions. He’s so petty that he takes personal satisfaction that Columbus (where he lives) is the only Ohio city shown on international weather maps—“Our weather matters more than Cleveland’s or Cincinnati’s does.” He’s vindictive. And unconcerned about others’ thoughts and emotions. Back when he owned a sports car, he evaluated women by whether they’d look “fabulous” sitting beside him in that car. He’s the proverbial elephant in a china shop, charging over everyone to get what he wants.
 
We sympathize with Mia, Paul’s disgruntled, brow-beaten wife. Not only does she have to put up with Paul, but she’s also suffering from an undefined ailment that no doctor can cure. She’s given up her job at Paul’s request to be a stay-at-home mom to their children.
 
The novel begins with Paul and Mia about to go on a much-needed getaway weekend to their lakeside cottage. All is not right with their marriage. The weekend is meant to be a reconciliation of sorts, a chance for them to reconnect.
 
BEST DAY EVER works, in part, because Mia seems so oblivious to Paul’s faults. But how much she knows is  a delicate question. As readers, we’re conscious that we only see her through Paul’s eyes. He’s incapable of picking up on the subtle and not-so-subtle clues people give off that they find him offensive. And because he routinely under-reports whatever does not paint him in the best possible light, he’s an unreliable narrator; the world that Paul relays to us is not necessarily an unvarnished picture of that world.
 
As they drive, it becomes increasingly obvious that Mia’s caught on to at least some of Paul’s deceits, and yet, we’re taken by Paul’s brash confidence, his belief that he can wriggle out of any jam by sheer chutzpah. He flashes Mia “my biggest rectangular grin, adding signature wink... It’s the smile that launched a thousand new accounts for the advertising agency—until it didn’t.”
 
Until it didn’t?
 
Yep, things are falling apart in Paul’s world. His bad choices appear to be catching up on him. Mia pesters him about their overdrawn credit cards. Their babysitter phones, saying the credit card she was given to buy food for their two little boys while the Stroms are away has been declined at the local market. Paul swears he’ll transfer money immediately into their credit card account—but he never does.
 
Money worries are just one of the driving tensions. Mia announces she’s accepted an offer to go back to work, part time, for the man who Paul back-stabbed to earn a recent promotion.
 
Out of nowhere, Mia asks about a young woman in Paul’s office. “So how is Caroline these days? Still flirting with you?”
 
This mention of another woman immediately piques our interest. Paul’s just the kind of paunchy middle-aged married man we can imagine hitting the women he supervises.
 
“‘No, not anymore,” [Paul says], speaking slowly to find the right words. ‘She’s young. It’s her first job. She just didn’t know what is appropriate and what isn’t, that’s all.’”
 
The background worries and money problems heat up as we weave through the pages, becoming a slow boil in this cauldron of a novel. Paul’s almost out of cash. Former friends and family members now regard him as pond scum. Paul thinks their babysitter is on drugs. Paul and Mia go to dinner at a fancy restaurant, where the waiter tenses up at the sight of Paul.
 
A delicious anticipation swept over me as I read the last half of the novel. Who doesn’t relish the possibility of a prick getting the comeuppance he deserves? There can only be two possible outcomes to this novel: either Paul’s past misdeeds will finally catch up to him, destroying him. Or will he somehow weasel out of his jam? Either way, I knew the results would be entertaining.
 
As Kate Moretti, author of the best-selling THE VANISHING YEAR (which, co-incidentally, is next up on my to-read list) blurbs, “Kaira Rouda’s BEST DAY EVER is a breath of fresh air. Paul Strom’s narrative voice is irreverent, arrogant, and yet, utterly addicting. You’ll whip through the pages. Highly entertaining and truly surprising!”
 
I, for one, couldn’t agree more.
 
                                                                          ***
In the past, I’ve been lucky to interview several psychological thriller writers (including Mary Kubica, Lisa Jewell, and Anna Snoestra). Kaira Rouda has kindly consented to answer a few questions via email about her novel, BEST DAY EVER.
 
Question: BEST DAY EVER works in large part because it’s told through the unreliable eyes of Paul Strom, a narcissistic egotist. From the opening pages, we sense he’s a slimy charmer, a snake oil salesmen. He is, shall we say, unlikeable.
 
My question is, did you ever worry he’d be too unlikeable? That he’d repel readers to such an extent that they’d abandon the book, unable to stomach him? Were there times you had to dial back his most egregious thoughts, his nastiest actions?
 
KAIRA ROUDA:
Ha! That’s a great question. No, I didn’t worry about that because Paul is who he is. That said, he does trigger some readers and they do abandon the story, often leaving a bad review. It’s unfortunate because from the blurbs to the synopsis, it’s pretty clear what you’re going to get with Paul. If you’re uncomfortable reading from a narcissists POV, this probably isn’t the book for you.
 
 
Question: Ages ago, in some beginning writers workshop, I was cautioned not to let my characters be too good or too bad, that every character should be “complex,” filled with a combination of redeeming and reprehensible qualities. I’ve now read BEST DAY EVER twice. During my second reading, I tried my darnedest to find shades of good in Paul Strom, some redeeming quality that might open him to my sympathy. Perhaps I’m not a good enough reader, but I couldn’t find any. He’s selfish, egotistical, and vain, cruel and vindictive. Were you ever tempted to place some small degree of goodness in Paul Strom’s heart?
 
KAIRA ROUDA:
I hope you feel a little sorry for Paul because of his upbringing. But you can’t blame the parents for the monster he’s become. He has a good sense of humor, but that’s about the only redeeming quality. When you create a reprehensible character he does need to be balanced by the good characters in the story, in my opinion, so the reader can find redemption somewhere. Hopefully, that’s what works with BEST DAY EVER. Thank you for reading it twice, by the way!
 
 
Question: Years ago, a writer told me about one of his failed novels. He had made the critical mistake of allowing his first-person narrator to be too stupid to really understand much of what was going on around him, thus limiting the depth of observation the writer could credibly make through that narrator.
 
Paul Strom is not exactly stupid. However, his emotional intelligence is limited and his ability to empathize with others’ plights is non-existent. He’s observant—but his observations all reflect back on him.
 
How challenging was it to set Paul Strom up as the readers’ eye into the world of your novel? Were you were tempted to allow other characters narrate a chapter or two? Besides the use of direct dialogue to explain their thoughts, what other means did you employ to give readers a more credible understanding of scenes and situations than Paul was able to provide?
 
KAIRA ROUDA:
Paul came into my subconscious fully formed and would never allow another character to have a say in what was his story. Besides direct dialog, I hope Mia’s actions, although subtle, revealed a woman who was far stronger than she appeared to her husband. I also liked the use of the zodiac signs.
 
 
Question: This is along the same lines as the previous question-- after about 75 pages, Paul and Mia step into Sloopy’s, a pizza joint in their vacation community. Their high school-aged waitress has “hot-pink stripes streak[ing] through her long brown hair.. a tattoo circling her right wrist and a shiny round nose ring in her left nostril.” Paul, whose fossilized notions of feminine comportment and permissible dress seem drawn from a 1950s sitcom, recoils at the sight of her, pronouncing her “scary.”
 
Once the waitress leaves their table, Mia says,
 
“I don’t think she’s scary, Paul. [She’s j]ust finding her identity. She’s portraying her individualism through outward expressions, like tattoos and unique hair color. I wish I had been bold enough to do that in high school, or, well, ever.”
 
For me, this moment of personal introspection and revelation provided the first real insight or connection in to Mia’s character. Up until this point, we’d seen her solely through Paul’s eyes; though she previously questioned him about his dietary choices and their overdrawn credit cards, and seemed capable of holding a grudge, she’d previously not really indicated much of a personality. Although my sympathies were already tilted towards her (how could they not? Anyone married to a sociopath like Paul deserves all our sympathies!), I went into overdrive thinking about her from that moment on.
 
Was it hard keeping Mia in the background for so long? Did you ever, as a writer, feel her crying out for more attention on the page? Did editors or beta readers ever suggest expanding earlier about her wants and desires?
 
KAIRA ROUDA:
Mia knew she had too much to lose by revealing herself. It was tricky trying to allow her to have small victories, like the one you noticed at Sloopy’s, but still keeping Paul in the dark about her true intentions. It was flipping the psychological suspense story a bit on its head. Typically we hear mostly from the “victim”, don’t we?
 
 
Question: BEST DAY EVER builds in a slow boil. The novel ostensibly begins with Paul and Mia’s preparations to spend a weekend at their lakeside cottage for a much-needed weekend of relaxation and reconciliation. We sense that all is not entirely right within their marriage, but there’s no dead bodies to alarm us, no tear-filled admissions of infidelities, no hint of criminal neglect. And yet, as the dust jacket suggests, BEST DAY EVER is a “gripping, tautly suspenseful tale of deception and betrayal.”
 
I loved how your novel unspooled slowly, letting us see and suspect Paul’s deceptions and betrayals rather than have them pushed in our faces. There’s nothing subtle about Paul, yet, in many ways, this is a subtle novel.
 
Was it hard to maintain a subtle narrative with such an egregiously over-the-top narrator like Paul?
 
KAIRA ROUDA:
I really had fun writing this story, probably the most fun I’ve ever had. Thanks for noticing! The fun was balancing the pace of the story with his over the top behavior and opinions. I loved forcing the two of them to be in the car together for the drive to the lake. Hopefully you could sense the tension even as he is distracting you, or trying to, with his wit and opinion of himself.
 
Keeping the characters uncomfortably close helped me. In the car. At the restaurants. In the cottage. Close quarters breeds tension if your characters are at war. Even if it’s a subtle, domestic war. I mean, Mia is trapped with a monster.
 
 
Question: No one, of course, wants to saddle a narrative with tons of back story, which can slow down whatever narrative momentum you’ve managed to establish in a novel. And yet, back story is necessary in order to provide context to the story.
 
One thing that really struck me about BEST DAY EVER is how effortlessly you wove the back story into the narrative. Although the novel is portrays a single continuous day (each chapter is headed with a time-stamp), there’s really a lot of back story crammed into the forward momentum.
 
Often, it’s just a single sentence that boomerangs us back into back story. For example, at the end of a paragraph about childcare, Paul adds,
 
“This is what we talked about, what we agreed to, even on our very first date.”
 
And then we’re jettisoned into a great 3-page description of that “very first date” before being brought back into the present. It’s really quite masterful.
 
What guidance or suggestions can you offer about the use of back story in a novel?
 
KAIRA ROUDA:
Thank you! Weaving backstory in has been something I’ve worked on. Thank you for noticing. I think the key is it has to have a point and action, even though it’s backstory it needs to be its own scene.
 
 
Question: Late in the novel, a third principle character emerges, who confronts Paul with a fairly concise appraisal of Paul’s mental health. “[You’re a] classic malignant narcissist, possible psychopath... You have no conscience, have a psychological need for power and control and you think you are more important than anyone else.”
 
Did you read a lot of background literature and articles about these disorders and conditions before feeling you could write about Paul? Over the last couple of years, there’s been a fair amount of public discussion about these conditions and disorders. Some writers tend to over-research medical and psychological aspects like this. For you, how much research is enough? Do you worry that, say, a clinically-trained psychologist might take exception to the way you write about Paul’s condition?
 
KAIRA ROUDA:
I have a great friend who is a psychologist and she loved how I wrote Paul. Otherwise, in life, I’ve had a string of really bad male bosses. I like to thank them for my real-life research.
 
 
Question: My last question is something that I’ve asked other writers as well-- Beyond providing a gripping and electrifying read, what else do you wish your readers walk away with when they finish one of your novels?


KAIRA ROUDA: The desire to read another one of my novels. Ha. Seriously, that they learned something about the world or themselves and found at least one sentence to make them smile.
 
 
Addendum #1:
There’s a lot packed into this interview about character formation, and I particularly enjoyed Rouda’s observation on how keeping characters in confined spaces helps to ratchet up a novel’s tension.
 
She’s also astute in observing that  most psychological thrillers are tilted toward the victim’s point of view. BEST DAY EVER runs against the grain, which is one of the many reasons it excites.
 
Thank you, Kaira!
 
Addendum #2:
While putting together this interview, I learned that Kaira Rouda’s husband, Harley Rouda, is running for Congress against Dana Rohrabacher, the longstanding GOP Congressman who’s often accused of being inappropriately friendly to the Russian Kremlin. If you wish to learn more about Harley Rouda’s campaign, please click here.

​We were in the third grade. She was the new girl and I couldn’t take my eyes off her. One day, our teacher made everyone change seats in the classroom. For my new seat, I chose the seat the new girl had just vacated. This caught her attention. She approached me as we gathered our jackets to go home that afternoon and asked if I had a crush on her. It was the boldest, most wonderful question anyone ever asked me.
 
For the next weeks, we ate lunch together, swung next to each other on playgrounds. Even now, from a distance of 40+ years, this strikes me as the most remarkable time of my life.
 
West Falls, the small town where I grew up, is about 20 miles southeast of Buffalo, NY.
 
During winter, boys played hockey at recess. I was a goalkeeper on the losing side of almost every game we played. About the only thing I could do right was take out my aggression on opponents, slashing the wide wooden blade of my goalie stick at whoever came near my goal. Anger management was not a skill I possessed back then, okay?
 
One day, I must have slashed someone a bit too hard, a bit too wildly, and I was sent back to our classroom as punishment. I was crying my eyes out, bawling, so mad and disappointed and embarrassed was I at my behavior and punishment. She and another girl had chosen to stay inside during that recess period. As soon as I stepped inside the classroom, still bawling uncontrollably, the other girl started mocking me mercilessly—“Ha Ha! Nicky’s crying! Nicky’s crying!” But she, my first crush, hushed her friend and explained that I wasn’t crying, explained that a boy as brave as I would never cry, explained that what appeared to be tears was only the moisture of snow melting on my cheeks.
 
As flimsy as this face-saving gesture was, it silenced her friend and calmed me from my anger and tears. The mercy. The grace. That’s what I remember most from my first true love. How does one repay a debt like that?

Addendum: My parents moved away from West Falls sometime in the early 1990s. As a consequence, I haven't visited West Falls in several decades, sadly, because I have lots of fond memories about the area. When I was trying to find a picture of my old school (see above), I found out that the building now houses The Aurora Waldorf School, the only independent, co-educational, non-sectarian school in its region. Looking at pictures of the school now, and of the wooded trails around the school, brought back loads of memories.

It's funny, but third grade was such an emotionally pivotal year for me. This was way back in the early 1970s. Up until the third grade, I was the school bully. And then a school psychologist diagnosed me as having ADD. Which was quite extraordinary for the time. I was among the first generation of Ritalin kids... and Ritalin, for me, was a godsend. I became calmer (not that you'd be able to tell from the anecdote above) and suddenly was able to focus and do well in school. I went from being a marginal student to an A-level student. But, sadly, I was never able to develop into a decent goaltender. 

​A young woman is apprehended by a supermarket security officer after shoplifting bread, cheese, and an apple. She cries, begs, insinuates a willingness to perform sexual favors if he releases her but, as she tells herself, “[i]t wasn’t my best performance; I couldn’t stop looking at the bread. My stomach was beginning to cramp. I’ve never felt hunger like this before.”
 
When police arrive to arrest her, she lies, telling them she had been innocently standing in line at the store’s register, waiting to pay for the merchandise, when the store security officer “grabbed me. That man has a problem with women.”
 
The police, however, aren’t buying the woman’s lies. They look at her with “a mix of pity and disgust.”
 
Desperate to avoid arrest, the woman plays what she thinks will be her trump card. When the police ask her name, she tells them, “My name is Rebecca Winter. Eleven years ago, I was abducted.”
 
So begins Anna Snoekstra’s new psychological thriller, ONLY DAUGHTER. Like other novels in its genre, it plays with unsavory situations, less-than-scrupulous protagonists who take audaciously ill-advised risks, and a twisty, chilling plot that keeps readers in suspense up to the end.
 
A couple months ago, I read Amy Gentry’s GOOD AS GONE, which also concerns the seeming reappearance of a young woman who’s gone missing. The focal question of Gentry’s novel is whether the woman who returns is really the missing woman. Snoekstra’s takes a different approach. Within the first ten pages, we discover the woman is NOT Rebecca Winter, a sixteen-year-old girl who disappeared eleven years earlier and is now presumed dead. After seeing a television report about the presumed abduction, the woman realized she bears an incredible resemblance to the missing girl. She fakes out the police, who send her to the missing girl’s home. 
 
And then things become strange.
 
The fake Rebecca (“Bec”) tries to convince the girl’s family and friends that she’s really Rebecca. People look at her funny, tilting their heads, trying to reconcile the bruised young woman in front of them with what they remember about the real Rebecca. Eleven years is a long time. Bec would now be twenty-seven if she were alive.
 
Half the fun of Snoekstra’s novel lies in seeing how long the fake Bec can pretend to be the missing girl. She feigns memory loss, buying herself time to suss out ways of convincing everyone that she really is Bec. But surely, sooner or later, someone—the police, the missing girl’s seemingly over-medicated mother, her alcoholic father, her rambunctious twin brothers, or the missing girl’s former friends—will figure out that the new Bec’s an imposter. Right?
 
The other half of the novel’s fun?
 
Snoekstra tells her novel through alternating chapters: the present-tense 2014 sections follow the imposter Bec’s story, while the past-tense 2003 sections detail the events that lead up to the real Bec’s disappearance. As a writer, I’m amazed at how well Snoekstra does this. The past- and present-tense sections play off each other so well, heightening tension and informing each other.
 
One thing becomes immediately apparent in the past-tense sections: the real Bec’s life was far from idyllic. Yes, she hangs out with her friends and flirts with her McDonalds’ co-workers, yet there’s a dark presence in her life. She wakes at night, convinced specters haunt her room. Going out, she senses people following her. Her best friend’s father is a pervert and the next door neighbor sits on the stoop all day, staring off into the middle distance and muttering to himself. She reaches for door handles and finds them soaked with blood. Her brothers are a pair of holy terrors whom her parents are afraid to reprimand. One night, she awakens and finds drops of blood speckling her carpet.
 
Because we know that the real Bec apparently meets a bad end, we read through
the 2003 sections with a sense of foreboding.
 
Taking up residence in the Winter household, it gradually dawns on the imposter that all was not well with the real Rebecca’s life. Police had suspected that Rebecca had been familiar with her abductor. Anyone around her—her friends and family—could have done it. The house itself evil, and haunted by Rebecca’s disappearance.
 
~~~
 
Over the past year, I’ve looked under the hoods of a lot of psychological thrillers, studying their craft and trying to figure out what makes them tick. I’ve interviewed Mary Kubica and Lisa Jewell. Today, Anna Snoekstra has kindly consented to answer some questions via email about her novel, ONLY DAUGHTER.
 
Question: ONLY DAUGHTER is your debut novel. What prompted you to write it?
 
Anna Snoekstra: 
The idea for this novel lurked in the back of my mind for a long time before I sat down to write it. I was working a job that wasn’t going anywhere, and was making a fringe theatre show on the side. The thought of dedicating myself to writing a novel was incredibly daunting. There was so many things that I knew I should be doing first, like trying to get a more serious job and making enough money to make rent. But, the story just wouldn’t go away. It kept buzzing away in my head until eventually I had the characters and plot already mapped out.
 
Eventually, I gave in. I started working nights and writing during the day. Finally giving myself the time and space to do it was fantastic. I had no idea if anyone apart from my mum would end up reading it, but it didn’t matter. It was so great to just get the story out of me and onto the page.
 
 
Question: Psychological thrillers fascinate me because, in most of them, the protagonists are not remotely “likeable” (at least in the traditional sense of the word). The fake Bec is a manipulative, vindictive liar who’s made a lot of morally troubling decisions in her personal life. She has a very high opinion of her abilities to deceive, and a very low opinion about everyone she deceives. She is delicious in her own conniving way, but she is not someone most people would seek to befriend.
 
My question is, in crafting the fake Bec’s character, did you worry about making her too unlikeable?
 
Anna Snoekstra: 
In the first draft, she was a lot less manipulative. I think part of that was because I personally didn’t have any idea how to manipulate. It became clear that the story just didn’t work unless she was very conniving.
I did some (slightly troubling) research online about how to manipulate people. At this stage, I was worried about making her likeable. As I went on, I realized that writing someone wholly unlikeable, at least initially, was a lot more fun and I hoped the reader would experience her this way as well.
 
 
Question: We never learn the real name of the fake Bec. This is one of the most daring choices you’ve made in crafting ONLY DAUGHTER. For me, this was remarkably effective. Readers only know her as an imposter, and as the novel progresses and the past/present narratives begin to triangulate upon each other, we get the sense that the fake Bec is sliding into the same pitfalls that doomed the real Bec.
 
Can you tell us more about why you chose not to give the fake Bec an actual name of her own? Did Beta readers and editors offer any resistance to this choice when reading your work in manuscript form?
 
Anna Snoekstra:  
It felt natural for the pretender character to never reveal her name. She plays tourist in other identities and has no sense of self. She worries that there is nothing underneath the characters she plays.
 
Only Daughter pays homage to Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca, one of my favorite books. In that novel the main character marries a rich man and becomes known only as ‘the new Mrs. DeWinter’. She becomes infatuated with Rebecca DeWinter, her husbands first wife. My novel departs from Rebecca in a lot of ways, but I loved the idea of two women’s playing the same role, and their stories being intertwined across a decade
 
Although there was no resistance to not giving the main character a name, it does make talking about the book a little tricky! Of course, she does have a name, but the only person I ever told was my editor.
 
 
Question: As I mentioned earlier, I absolutely loved ONLY DAUGHTER’s structure. The way the chapters alternated between the past and the present worked very well. This strikes me as something very hard to pull off as a writer. I sense you labored quite hard at this—both in figuring out how much to reveal in any particular point, and in coming to suitably jarring end points in each chapter.
 
How did you go about writing this novel? Did you write out both complete storylines and then fracture them into individual chapters and then work out how to interweave them? Or did you naturally sequence the storylines and chapters as you went about writing the first draft?
 
Anna Snoekstra:
Thank you!
 
Initially, I tried to write the two storylines concurrently. I found this didn’t really work, as I’d loose the thread and the voice of the character if I kept alternating. So I decided to write the whole of Bec’s storyline first, with a rough idea of what would happen in the intervening chapters. It was then really fun to go back to the beginning and insert the imposter’s chapters.
 
The main issue I encountered was making sure that the rise and fall of tension was concurrent through the two story lines. It all got a bit confusing, so I ended up making some large-scale diagrams to map the story. I think in a very visual way, so that really helped!
 
 
Question: This kinda piggybacks off the previous question, but did you find it easier to write the real Bec or the fake Bec sections? Which character did you have more fun writing?
 
Anna Snoekstra:
Although both narratives come together to make one story, they were so different to write Writing Bec’s chapters was great because it felt so natural. I grew up in Canberra, and was around the same age as Bec in 2003. Although she is a very different teenager to what I was, it was a wonderful experience to write about that time and place through a young person’s eyes. Her sections were barely edited, what ended up in the book was basically my first draft.
 
The imposter’s chapters were much harder to write. Making her decisions believable was difficult, and the stakes were so much higher. The fun part of writing her chapters was the fact that Bec’s chapters were already there. I really like playing with knowledge in writing. What the main characters know that other characters don’t, what the reader knows that the main character doesn’t, what the character knows but the reader doesn’t. I think that is so important to writing suspense. Interweaving the chapters from different periods of time in the same household gave me so much to play with in terms of knowledge, and I found that so much fun.
Question: Bizarre things happen in the real Bec’s life. There’s the specters she sees at night. She awakes one morning to find her carpet speckled with drops of blood. At times, she questions whether she might be imagining all this. And at times, as readers, we also begin to wonder if she’s imagining it, too. And yet, evil lurks around her. Convinced that something supernatural is troubling her, she invites her friends to hold a séance to ward off the spirits. As a reader, these events riveted me. I read these sections with such fear was that we knew something bad was going to happen to the real Bec.
 
I wonder if, at times, you worried that readers (and editors) wouldn’t accept so much supernatural speculation in an otherwise realistic psychological thriller?
 
 
Anna Snoekstra:  
You’re right, that was something I worried about. I needed to make it really clear to the reader that there was nothing paranormal going on, even if Bec was convincing herself that there was. This was really tricky, because Bec seems like a reliable narrator at first, even though she is completely the opposite. It was difficult, because Bec was so far in denial and constantly lying to herself but she presents herself as upfront and honest. The imposter character is the opposite. She lies to everyone in the story, but she is entirely honest with the reader.
 
The change ended up being a small one, which I hoped made all the difference. My editor pointed out that Bec’s best friend Lizzie acts as a sort of proxy for the reader in the story. Initially I made it seem like Lizzie believed Bec about her specter story. I changed it so that, although Bec doesn’t realize it, it’s clear that Lizzie doesn’t believe her at all therefore signposting that the reader shouldn’t either.
 
Question: So, befitting a psychological thriller, mean things happen to people in your novel. And yet, the most vicious incident depicted involves animal cruelty. I cringed when I read it, and I marveled at your abilities as a writer to deliver the event on the page. It’s said that animal cruelty elicits more outrage from people than child abuse. Was it particularly hard to write that scene?
 
Anna Snoekstra: 
I had noticed that people seemed more distraught about animals being hurt in films than children. When I was a teenager I remember watching The Ring with a group of friends at a sleepover. I remember the utter silence in the room when the horse jumps off the side of the boat into the water.
 
This scene you mention was something I’d worried about for a while before writing. I knew that it would illicit strong responses, but I knew it was really integral to the story, as well as something that is usually avoided, even in thrillers. The scene really had to be horrible, in order for the way it effects Bec to make sense. I become even more worried after a family member read the manuscript and got so upset she stopped talking to me, and my mum who had given to her, for a whole month.
 
What happens in the scene was based on a rumour about what a boy in my highschool had done. Looking back, I doubt it was true, but it made me feel sick whenever I thought about it for the next ten years. In some ways writing about it felt cathartic.
 
 
Question: Lastly, this is a question I’ve asked other writers of psychological thrillers: Beyond providing a gripping and electrifying story, what else do you wish to impart on  your readers? After readers race to the conclusion of ONLY DAUGHTER, what do you hope they’re thinking about?
 
Anna Snoekstra:
Only Daughter is about fear and paranoia. In the novel, the characters look outward for danger: a man in a black van, the refugee crisis, an angry ghost, where the real threat lies in places a lot more personal and familiar. This is something I was thinking about a lot when writing the book.
 
ADDENDUM: As interesting as ONLY DAUGHTER is, I’m also looking forward to Snoekstra’s next novel. Here’s a description of it taken from Publishers’s Marketplace:
 
Anna Snoekstra's DOLLS, in which a young, desperate reporter thrusts herself into the mysterious and unnerving case of the appearance of porcelain dolls that bear an uncanny resemblance to the small town's children, and the lengths she'll go to stay ahead of her story.

This morning, my wife Alison gave our middle child, Sebastian (15), a ride to school. Unlike most mornings, Sebastian was especially talkative. He had a lot on his mind-- dismay that he doesn't find science interesting any more. He's been debating whether to go to "The Governors' School" this summer-- it's an advanced educational program here in Virginia for gifted rising high school juniors & seniors. Sebastian's been invited into these kind of programs before. Sometimes, he's liked them a lot-- and sometimes they've induced anxiety in him.
 
Sebastian’s also worried about his older brother, Stephen (17), for all the things Stephen's been going through. I’ve written sparingly about Stephen in the past (most notable, here and here). Sparingly, because, frankly, it’s painful. Stephen’s on the autistic spectrum. But he also has an intellectual disability and mental health issues. So much of my day is spent worrying about him. And trying to calm him down. And praying for him. And trying to find glimmers of accomplishment in what he does because, let’s face it, all parents yearn to be proud of their children.
 
Although Sebastian and Stephen are in different classes, they share the same gym period-- Stephen's in the Advanced PE and Sebastian's in the normal PE class. But during gym period, Sebastian sees Stephen walk around the gym by himself. Most of the kids in the Advanced PE class are athletes-- football players, etc. We've had Stephen do Advanced PE because of the greater emphasis on weight training. Even though Stephen's not a weight lifter, they've usually let him do the elliptical machines during Advanced PE. But now, lately at least, he's just been walking laps around the gym by himself. Which is disheartening, at least from Sebastian’s perspective, who sees Stephen all by himself when he (Sebastian) is usually hanging out with his friends.
 
The other day, during dinner, Stephen really bared his soul for the first time in a long time. A few weeks ago, Stephen hit his only true friend. They had gotten into an argument about something. The friend was here at our house and, for some reason, Stephen was bothering Sebastian about something. Stephen's friend told Stephen to quite bothering Sebastian. Seeing his friend take Sebastian's side in the argument triggered something in Stephen. Jealousy. He started yelling and, after a few moments, Stephen hit his friend in the back.
 
Since then, the boy hasn't wanted to be Stephen's friend anymore. Stephen's tried to apologize, but the friend doesn't want to hear anything about it.
 
So, over dinner the other night, it dawned on Stephen that he's really lost his best friend. He doesn't have other friends his age. My impression is that most kids at school don’t talk to him. At school, he’s fairly isolated from many of his peers. Some of that, unfortunately, is Stephen's own fault-- he's had behavioral issues. Plus, he's said some mean things to other people who've been his friends in the past. Or, in some cases, his over-active attempts to foster friendships have not gone over well-- he's been accused of pestering kids. He can't understand any of this. Stephen's intellectually disabled, saddled with ADHD, Autism, memory retention issues, and an IQ in the 50s. Plus his mental health issues.
 
During dinner, Stephen was mumbling about this to himself. And telling us about it. He kept saying he shouldn't have hit his friend. At seventeen, the realization that actions have consequences has finally hit him. Saying all this, he wasn't mad or angry... but you could tell he was distraught. I offered to take Stephen out for a walk—lately, now that the temperatures have turned colder, we’ve been doing a lot of mall walking—and Stephen jumped readily at the chance. During our walk, Stephen seemed happy. He didn’t want to talk anymore about what had happened with him and his friend, but we talked. Silly stuff. Kid stuff. So much of what amuses Stephen amounts to silly jokes, stuff that most kids his age would probably roll their eyes at. But Stephen eats it up. More than anything though, I got the feeling that Stephen just liked me being there with him, listening.
 
But anyways, this morning, Sebastian gave Stephen a hug. Told him that he wished Stephen had a good day today. And then Stephen bounded onto the bus, and Sebastian bounded into Alison’s car and told her about all he’d been going through lately.
 

Last Friday night found me and my family standing with a couple thousand people along Blacksburg’s Main Street, awaiting the Christmas Parade. The temperature was in the thirties. My daughter, Ellie, would be in one of the floats, but I was not adequately bundled for the cold. Before the parade, to keep warm, we wandered in and out of the shops along the parade route. We had already devoured a fair-sized bag of caramel popcorn, but my quest for a mug of hot chocolate went unfulfilled.
 
In one of the shops, a Christmas-themed glass cookie platter caught my wife’s eye. It was pretty, and superfluous. But, as I say, it caught Alison’s eye, and it’s price ($29) didn’t seem outrageously expensive. People in the shop were buying more expensive things—silver knickknacks and glass ornaments that would likely be packed up into boxes and stuffed into attics all around town in another month. Twenty-nine dollars is twenty-nine dollars. Not an insignificant amount, but also not large enough to land me in debtors’ prison.  But still, a seasonal platter has limitations. For a moment, I thought, Bah! Humbug! Why spend twenty-nine dollars for something we’re only going to use a few times each year?
 
Years ago, I saw an interview with Tip O’Neill, who was the Democratic Speaker of the House of Representatives during the Reagan years. He was asked why so many blue-collar Democrats supported the Reagan tax cuts, which clearly were intended to benefit the wealthier classes. Were these blue-collar Democrats bamboozled?
 
No, O’Neill said. The blue-collar Democrats were smart enough to know that Reagan’s tax cuts would not help them. But, America being America, each of these blue-collar Democrats wanted to  believe that they would one day be wealthy enough to personally take advantage of Reagan’s tax cuts. It was a powerful lesson. People could willingly vote against their present interests if you bedazzled them with aspirational longings and long-term greed.
 
Okay. So I’m not wealthy enough for a weekly splurge on twenty-nine dollar cookie platters. But, plonking down my credit card at that cashier’s register, I wanted to believe that I could be like every other American and enjoy a small luxury once every Crimble. I wanted to believe that more small luxuries lay in my future. Signing the sales receipt, I wasn’t just buying a superfluous cookie platter—I was buying the illusion of financial well-being. Consumerism is such an integral part of American culture. Those with limited incomes and unable to take part in frivolous purchases can feel as if they’re excluded and isolated from our natural cultural, their natural identity. But it felt good, knowing that at least for a moment, I was an American, someone capable of buying a Made-In-China platter decorated with holy leaves and mistletoe.
 
Stepping out of the shop, I talked to the people standing around us, waiting for the parade to begin. A woman commiserated with us over the lack of hot chocolate vendors.
 
“My son owns a beverage cart,” the woman said. She was wearing a red and green Christmas stocking cap, the kind that should’ve had a brass sleigh bell jingling at its end. “My son could have made a million dollars today if he was out here, selling hot chocolate.”
 
Well, maybe not a million dollars. Blacksburg is a small town. Perhaps a few thousand people lined the streets, waiting for the parade. But we all had the appetite for small luxuries. A cup of hot chocolate, a bag of caramel popcorn, a painted glass cookie platter, and whatever else we could afford.
 
Addendum: Winter might be the season when my thoughts swing most to food and cooking. Last winter, I wrote a couple of food-related essays for Entropy (here and here). By happenstance, within the last week I’ve read two foodie books: James Lasdun’s THE FALL GUY and Stephanie Danler’s SWEETBITTER. Both are superb. Danler’s protagonist in her coming-of-age novel is a back waiter in a swanky New York restaurant modeled after the Union Square Cafe. Lasdun’s protagonist in his psychological thriller is a down-and-out chef who becomes the personal chef for a wealthy friend at his summer home. Both authors explore the role of food in our society, but in remarkably different ways. Hopefully, I’ll write more about this over the coming days

​After Thanksgiving dinner last Thursday, we went to the movies. Midway through the film, my daughter, Ellie (11), jumped into my lap. Ellie’s getting older and is no longer so quick to jump into our laps, so I cherished the moment. We were watching Fantastical Beasts and Where to Find Them, the new JK Rowling-inspired film, and during the scary scenes, she’d lean back into me and cover her eyes. She’d squirm. I’d wrap my arms around her, give her a squeeze, and when the scary scenes were over, she’d bat my arms away and give a shake of her head, lashing me with her long hair.
 
Together, as a family, we’d eaten the better part of a 15-pound turkey and all the trimmings. For the second year running, the giblet gravy I made turned out very well—a matter of no small amount of pride for me. Later that night, we’d play board games together and scarf down the cinnamon-laced pumpkin pie my wife, Alison, had baked. But for me, the best part of the day was having Ellie in my lap.
 
I thought of this again last night when reading Lisa Jewell’s The Third Wife. The novel’s about a man who’s grieving the sudden death of his third wife while re-acquainting himself with the children he had with his first two wives. As one might imagine, the novel’s filled with regret. Repeatedly, he finds himself wondering how he’s become so estranged from his children. Though he’s tried to remain connected to them, he’s missed many of the milestones in their young lives.
 
In particular, I found myself thinking about this passage:
 
“He thought of Beau’s cheek under his hand half an hour ago and wondered when he’d last stroked Luke’s face. He was aware that there would always be the last time for these intimate nuances of his relationships with his children and that often that time would pass unnoticed. When, for example, had Cat sat on his lap for the last time? When had he last kissed Otis on the lips, picked Pearl up in his arms, called Luke one of his childhood nicknames, held Beau up on his shoulders? He had no idea. He thought of crying at the leavers’ ceremony of his oldest children, knowing that he would never again see them in their primary [school] uniforms, that they would never again be little. But there were no ceremonies for these other ‘lasts,’ no realization or acknowledgement that something precious was about to end.”
 
 
Last week, when the movie was over, Ellie hopped off my lap, zipped up her coat and walked up the aisle and out of the theater. Driving home, I asked her why she went onto my lap during the film.
 
Ellie shrugged. “The theater was cold.”
 
So it was just a matter of her personal comfort, of warmth, that drove her into my lap. I hope this wasn’t the last time she’d do so. And I hope it won’t take a cold movie theater or fantastical beasts for her to jump into my lap again.
 
Addendum: Last Sunday, our middle child, Sebastian (15) got baptized. I hadn’t been prepared for how good this would make me feel. He’s turned into a really fine young man—tall, intelligent, sensitive, caring, and good looking. It was a good feeling, coming to this realization.
 
If you care to watch his baptism, it starts at about the 9:20 mark of this video.

Addendum #2: A good friend from my MFA years, Jeremy Griffin, just published a great story in Green Briar Review. It's called "Oceanography," and you should really give it a read!
 

​Until I picked up UNTETHERED, Julie Lawson Timmer’s suspenseful and heartfelt second novel, I hadn’t been prepared for how unsettling the subject of family can be. One needn’t be a demographer to realize the shape and function of family in America has undergone radical changes over the last few decades. More than 40% of American children live in households headed by people other than their two married biological parents. As someone who grew up in a household headed by both my biological parents, and as someone who lives in a household with my wife and our three biological children, I hadn’t truly ever considered the stresses and fluctuating relationships within alternate family structures.
 
In UNTETHERED, Timmer presents two families that are about to be disrupted something bad.
 
Char Hawthorn’s husband (Bradley) has died in a car accident, leaving her to care for her husband’s high school-aged daughter, Allie. In the aftermath of the death, questions loom, primarily in the form of Lindy, Allie’s biological mother, who swoops in from California and threatens to take Allie home with her. Though Char never formally adopted Allie, they’ve grown attached to each other. Now though, they realize how precarious their relationship has become. They walk on eggshells around each other, both seemingly afraid that the other will use Lindy’s sudden arrival as an excuse to flee the relationship they’ve forged in the four years that they’ve lived together in the same household.
 
Morgan Crew is a ten-year-old girl whom Allie tutors on Monday afternoons. Adopted by Sarah and Dave Crew after years of living in foster care situations, she still dreams of living again with her biological mother— a substance abuser who might have abandoned her and who may still be incarcerated. Morgan, blessed with a profoundly overactive imagination, makes up stories about her past and repeatedly suggests that Sarah and Dave view her with disdain. She also self-harms— bruising and cutting herself as a means of ameliorate the pains of having been abandoned by her natural mother.
 
Besides Morgan, Sarah and Dave have another child—a very sweet but developmentally delayed young boy named Stevie, whom they’ve put into a rigorous speech and occupational therapy  program to get him ready for kindergarten. Morgan, too, is in therapy to address her self-harm issues. To pay for these treatments, Dave works incredible overtime hours as an auto mechanic. Sarah seems to be the most fastidious of mothers—constantly cleaning and preening, and one can only imagine the stresses inherent in raising these two children with such demanding needs.  
 
In one of the novel’s most touching scenes, Timmer shows us a flashback moment before Bradley’s death when the Hawthorns invited Morgan to spend the night at their house so Sarah and Dave could take Stevie to an all-day medical assessment. Morgan arrives on the Hawthorn’s doorstep clutching her “Lifebook,” a scrapbook stuffed with pictures of all the foster families she’s shuffled through. Eighteen months have passed since Dave and Sarah legally adopted her, yet she still asks “on a regular basis if they were going to keep her.”
 
One particular picture in her Lifebook captivates Morgan’s attention:
 
“The photograph, wrinkled and small, showed a young woman reclining in a lawn chair, a cigarette in one hand and a glass in the other. She wore a come-hither expression and a sleeveless dress with a hemline that reached only inches below her hips. Her long, dark hair was twisted into a high, haphazard ponytail. In the bottom right corner was a child of about two, standing, naked except for a diaper.”
 
The woman in the photograph is Morgan’s mother, and the near-naked child is Morgan.
 
The two girls—Allie and Morgan—become close friends. Allie, too, is fascinated by her biological mother. Lindy is erratic, dismissive, and self-centered, hardly the person most suited towards raising a teenager.
 
As Char and Bradley observe in that flashback scene, “no wonder Allie and Morgan bonded so tightly, so quickly—both of them had been abandoned by their birth mothers.”
 
Because the protagonist in Timmer’s 2014 debut novel, FIVE DAYS LEFT, suffered from Huntington’s Disease, I wrongly assumed Timmer was charting out a Lisa Genova-like writing career for herself whereby each successive novel would examine a different medical condition. Instead, Timmer’s true domain in family. Specifically, adoptive families.
 
Here, in UNTETHERED, Timmer branches out. When Morgan disappears, Allie sets out to find her, and what follows verges into gripping thriller-esque territory. The writing is tension-packed and the action unpredictable.
 
Lately, I’ve been reading a lot of psychological thrillers, where the antagonists AND protagonists can be downright slimy. One the things which drew me to UNTETHERED is how genuinely sympathetic I felt towards Char, Allie, and Morgan. Mind you, each of these characters are prone to lapses in judgment and, at various times, offer profound misrepresentations of the truth—and yet I still largely trusted them and rooted for them.
 
Yet UNTETHERED also contains a couple of “wildcard” characters: Lindy and Dave. We’re never quite sure how they’ll respond to the stresses of the novel’s increasingly complicated situations. They’re erratic and—at least in my reading— deliciously untrustworthy. Looking back, I’m struck that they’re the least examined of the major characters in your novel. Which made me think, as a writer, that some correlation exists between the amount of information readers are given about certain characters and the amount of surprise and disappointment these characters are then capable of providing.
 
Great novels are comprised of characters that don’t do exactly what they’re supposed to do. Right smack in the middle of Allie’s most mischievous act, Lindy calls Char to ask what’s up with her daughter. It’s a moment when, truly, any responsible adult should be truthful, and yet Char concocts a fantastical story to explain why Lindy will be unable to talk to her daughter for many hours.
 
This was truly a delicious moment. The dramatic consequences of Char’s lie would be far greater than whatever might happen if she told the truth. I’ve tried to pay attention to in the months since I’ve read this novel. To heighten tension, characters need to misbehave. For this lesson alone, I’m grateful for Julie Lawson Timmer. UNTETHERED packs a powerful, heart-wrenching punch, and I’ll be sure to read whatever else Julie Lawson Timmer writes.