Serial - Crouch Blake. Страница 28

Joe: I also liked those who said that “free was too much money” and “I wish I could rate this lower than 1 star.” I’d love to watch some of those haters read this uncut version. And then go to therapy to unread it.

Blake: SERIAL UNCUT was your idea. How’d it come about?

Joe: I’d been wanting to do this uncut version of SERIAL ever since I wrote TRUCK STOP. With TRUCK STOP, my goal was to unite the Jack Daniels series with the Jack Kilborn books. But then we got so many bad reviews saying how graphic SERIAL was, when in reality most of the violence is understated and off the page, that I started wondering what would happen if we really did pull out all the stops. If we added TRUCK STOP to SERIAL, and then put even more material tying it in with your novels, this would actually be a short book. A short book about six horrible yet very different serial killers, that linked together the majority of both of our work.

Blake: From the first time you mentioned expanding SERIAL, I knew I wanted to do it, because I thought it would be fun to write some more about Lucy. And what you did with TRUCK STOP and bringing in characters from AFRAID and your Jack Daniels series seemed like so much fun. If you’ll recall, my pre-SERIAL Lucy story was actually conceived in the Hyatt hot tub in Indianapolis at Bouchercon 2009 (the world mystery convention). You and I were talking about expanding SERIAL and what I could do with Lucy, and I came up with the idea of bringing in Orson, Luther, and Andy Thomas. Since we were at a mystery convention, and since Andrew Thomas is essentially a dark mystery writer, it made sense to set my pre-SERIAL Lucy story at a Bouchercon-type of convention.

Joe: From my end, putting this together was really easy. The opening section, where we learn how Donaldson got his start, practically wrote itself. Part of the fun of writing the original SERIAL was having two killers playing cat and mouse. With TRUCK STOP, I decided to see if killers could actually play well together. The opening scene, with Donaldson and Mr. K, was a nice precursor to those two scenes. Readers interested in the further adventures of Mr. K can find him as the main villain in the next Jack Daniels novel, called SHAKEN. Do you think it’s more fun to write for the bad guys than the good guys?

Blake: Bad guys are without a doubt so much more fun to write. And I don’t know what this says about me, but I definitely find them easier to write. The idea of killers playing well together certainly was the foundation of my Lucy/Orson/Luther section as well. We think of serial killers as these loners, societal outcasts who can’t connect to other human beings. I think it’s fascinating to consider two such outcasts (or three in my case) finding each other and comparing notes.

My next novel coming up is called SNOWBOUND. It’s a thriller about the search for a missing girl, and the horrifying place the search leads. What’s up next for you?

Joe: Besides SHAKEN, I’ve written two books in the TIMECASTER science fiction series under the pen name Joe Kimball. They take place in 2056, and the hero is Jack Daniels’s grandson. I’ve also written two more Jack Kilborn horror novels that should be coming out soon. The working titles for them are TRAPPED and ENDURANCE, but titles change all the time, and I don’t know what they’ll eventually wind up being called. TRAPPED is sort of a semi-sequel to AFRAID, but it’s a lot more visceral. ENDURANCE is also pretty intense. I also have a ton of ebooks available, including a lot of thriller and horror books and stories. What’s up with you on the ebook front?

Blake: I just uploaded a short story collection to Kindle called FOUR LIVE ROUNDS. I’m going to be putting a horror novella up soon called PERFECT LITTLE TOWN, and possibly an early novel. Jeroen ten Berge, the genius behind the SERIAL graphic design and illustrations (and my website) is designing amazing covers for these eBooks. He has a great website at www.jeroentenberge.com.

Joe: Jeroen rocks.

Blake: There’s a bibliography after this interview, along with some excerpts of AFRAID, SHAKEN, and SNOWBOUND. So what’s next? Are we going to do a Jack Daniels/Luther story?

Joe: Hell yeah, we are. And I’m not sure we’re entirely done with SERIAL yet. Careful readers will notice that we never say Donaldson and Lucy are dead. I think we have a few more tales to tell about these horrible characters…

J.A. Konrath’s Works Available on Nook

Whiskey Sour

Bloody Mary

Rusty Nail

Fuzzy Navel

Cherry Bomb

Click here for more J.A. Konrath ebooks on Nook

Blake Crouch’s Works Available on Nook

Andrew Z. Thomas thrillers

Desert Places

Locked Doors

Other works

Abandon

Snowbound

Luminous Blue

Perfect Little Town (horror novella)

Four Live Rounds (collected stories)

Shining Rock (short story)

*69 (short story)

On the Good, Red Road (short story)

Remaking (short story)

The following is an excerpt of Desert Places by Blake Crouch, now available for $2.99 as a nookbook…

On a lovely May evening, I sat on my deck, watching the sun descend upon Lake Norman. So far, it had been a perfect day. I’d risen at 5:00 A.M. as I always do, put on a pot of French roast, and prepared my usual breakfast of scrambled eggs and a bowl of fresh pineapple. By six o’clock, I was writing, and I didn’t stop until noon. I fried two white crappies I’d caught the night before, and the moment I sat down for lunch, my agent called. Cynthia fields my messages when I’m close to finishing a book, and she had several for me, the only one of real importance being that the movie deal for my latest novel, Blue Murder, had closed. It was good news of course, but two other movies had been made from my books, so I was used to it by now.

I worked in my study for the remainder of the afternoon and quit at 6:30. My final edits of the new as yet untitled manuscript would be finished tomorrow. I was tired, but my new thriller, The Scorcher, would be on bookshelves within the week. I savored the exhaustion that followed a full day of work. My hands sore from typing, eyes dry and strained, I shut down the computer and rolled back from the desk in my swivel chair.

I went outside and walked up the long gravel drive toward the mailbox. It was the first time I’d been out all day, and the sharp sunlight burned my eyes as it squeezed through the tall rows of loblollies that bordered both sides of the drive. It was so quiet here. Fifteen miles south, Charlotte was still gridlocked in rush-hour traffic, and I was grateful not to be a part of that madness. As the tiny rocks crunched beneath my feet, I pictured my best friend, Walter Lancing, fuming in his Cadillac. He’d be cursing the drone of horns and the profusion of taillights as he inched away from his suite in uptown Charlotte, leaving the quarterly nature magazine Hiker to return home to his wife and children. Not me, I thought, the solitary one.

For once, my mailbox wasn’t overflowing. Two envelopes lay inside, one a bill, the other blank except for my address typed on the outside. Fan mail.

Back inside, I mixed myself a Jack Daniel’s and Sun-Drop and took my mail and a book on criminal pathology out onto the deck. Settling into a rocking chair, I set everything but my drink on a small glass table and gazed down to the water. My backyard is narrow, and the woods flourish a quarter mile on either side, keeping my home of ten years in isolation from my closest neighbors. Spring had not come this year until mid-April, so the last of the pink and white dogwood blossoms still specked the variably green interior of the surrounding forest. Bright grass ran down to a weathered gray pier at the water’s edge, where an ancient weeping willow sagged over the bank, the tips of its branches dabbling in the surface of the water.