Ron turns away from him and walks across the heat-browned grass, trying to remember what the mountains looked like without all the glass and steel.
The janitor calls after him, “So do we, Mr. Stahl, and now there’s nothing to remind us.”
-42-
We are spread across the country now, old and dying or dead already, and we have mostly acclimatized to the absurdity of daily life in the fourth decade of the twenty-first century, although occasionally we regress and rant.
To journals.
Our fellow dinosaurs.
To our children who bring their children to visit us in nursing homes.
We go on about how it used to be—the extinct and glorious slowness of life and other artifacts:
The pleasure of eating real food, seeded and grown out of ground proximate to your own doorstep.
Decency.
Community.
Respect for the old traditions.
We tell all who will listen, but mostly ourselves, that we once lived in a perfect little town in a perfect little valley, where life was vivid, rich, and slow.
And once in a while, someone will ask why it can’t be that way again, and we tell them sacrifice. There’s no sacrifice anymore. And they nod with enlightened agreement, that special condescension reserved solely for the old, without the faintest idea of what we really mean.
Read on for an interview with Blake Crouch, excerpts from all four of his books, Desert Places, Locked Doors, Abandon, and Snowbound, and a bonus excerpt of Serial Uncut by Crouch, Kilborn, and Konrath…
Interview with Blake Crouch by Hank Wagner
Originally Published in Crimespree, July 2009
According to his website, Blake Crouch grew up in Statesville, a small town in the piedmont of North Carolina. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2000, where he studied literature and creative writing. He currently resides in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado. Crouch’s first book, Desert Places, was published in 2003. Pat Conroy called it “Harrowing, terrific, a whacked-out combination of Stephen King and Cormac McCarthy.” Val McDermid described it as “An ingenious, diabolical debut that calls into question all our easy moral assumptions. Desert Places is a genuine thriller that pulses with adrenaline from start to finish.” His second novel, Locked Doors, was published in July 2005. A sequel to Desert Places, it created a similar buzz. His third novel, Abandon, was published on July 7, 2009.
HANK WAGNER: Your writing career began in college?
BLAKE CROUCH: I started writing seriously in college. I had tinkered before, but the summer after my freshman year, I decided that I wanted to try to make a living at being a writer. Spring semester of 1999, I was in an intro creative writing class and I wrote the short story (called “Ginsu Tony”) that would grow into Desert Places. Once I started my first novel, it became an obsession.
HW: Where did the original premise for Desert Places come from?
BC: The idea for Desert Places arose when two ideas crossed. I had the opening chapter already in my head... suspense writer receives an anonymous letter telling him there’s a body buried on his property, covered in his blood. I didn’t know where my protagonist was going to be taken though. Around the same time, I happened to be glancing through a scrapbook that had photographs of this backpacking trip I took in Wyoming in the mid 90’s. One of those photographs was of a road running off into the horizon in the midst of a vast desert. My brain starting working. What if my protagonist is taken to a cabin out in the middle of nowhere, by a psychopath? What if this cabin is in this vast desert, and he has no hope of escape? That photograph broke the whole story open for me.
HW: Why a sequel for your second book? Affection for the characters?
BC: It was actually my editor’s idea. I was perfectly happy walking away from the first book. But once she mentioned it during the editing of Desert Places, I really started to think about where the story could go, wondered how Andy might have changed after seven years in hiding, and I got excited about doing it. And I’m very glad I did, because I would’ve missed those characters. Even my psychopaths are family in some strange, twisted way.
HW: Of all the reviews and comments about your books, what was the strangest? The meanest? The nicest? The most perceptive?
BC: The strangest: This was a comment about me and the reviewer wrote something to the effect that I was either a super-talented writer with an immense imagination or one sick puppy. I think that’s open to debate. The meanest: From those [expletive deleted] at Kirkus. Now, keep in mind, this is my first taste of reviews and the reviewer absolutely savaged my book. It was so mean it was funny... although I didn’t see the humor for some time. The review ended, “Sadly, a sequel is in the works.” The nicest: That’s hard to choose from. I particularly loved the review for Locked Doors that appeared in the Winston-Salem Journal. The reviewer wrote, and this is my favorite quote thus far, “If you don’t think you’ll enjoy seeing how Crouch makes the torture and disembowelment of innocent women, children and even lax store employees into a thing of poetic beauty, maybe you should go watch Sponge Bob.” The most perceptive: The reviews that recognize that I’m trying to make a serious exploration of the human psyche, the nature of evil, and man’s depravity are the ones that please me the most.
HW: Do you strive for realism in your writing, or do you try more to entertain?
BC: First and foremost, I want to entertain. I want the reader to close the book thinking, “that was a helluva story.” Beyond that, I do strive for realism. I want the reader to identify with my characters’ emotions, whether it’s fear, sadness, or happiness. The places I write about, from the Yukon to the Outer Banks to the Colorado mountains are rendered accurately, and that’s very important to me, because I want the reader to have the benefit of visiting these beautiful places in my books.
HW: The villain in Locked Doors seems almost a force of nature, cunning, instinctively brilliant when it comes to creating mayhem. Do you worry that readers might write him off as unrealistic?
BC: I decided to approach Luther Kite a little differently than my bad guy, Orson Thomas, in
