I’ll never forget my Sunday school teacher telling us that little girls are born into more sin than little boys. I was probably seven or eight. I raised my hand and asked if it was true, and the teacher nodded slowly and sadly, citing Eve, and the Fall. Eve was both Adam’s prize and his ruin, and we needed to remember. Her eyes raked over all of us, but lingered on the girls. I worked on American Rapture–a horror novel about a good Catholic girl named Sophie navigating her own burgeoning sexuality at the same time as America explodes with a violent sexually-propagating viral epidemic–for a decade. I knew it was a story I wanted to tell of the impossibility of growing up between these contradictions, of being someone who wants to ask that dangerous why, who can’t accept the stories we’re handed down, but is affected by them deeply. The book is obviously set against a much more extreme backdrop than our own. But not in all ways. Much like Sophie’s own internal battle between what she was taught and what she believes, I’m in my thirties, and I still struggle with the guilt and shame taught to us in church. This is America, so we’re all familiar with the daily double-billboard assault of a LUST DRAGS YOU DOWN TO HELL over the top of a XXX STORE THIS EXIT. Hooters, Viagra ads, Ashley Madison, cellulite removal, surgical med spas. Books banned in schools with the slightest mention of sex or sexual orientation in them. Without fail, someone on tv, or in our lives is discussing acts of sexual violence and implying or even outright saying, Maybe she was dressing too provocatively. Maybe she had it coming. Our country founded by puritans and now fueled by beauty and sex-obsessed capitalism. This impossible tension that fills everything. We tell young girls that their entire value lies in their bodies and ability to attract a partner and procreate, and we also tell them it’s their greatest sin and shame. My first novel, Maeve Fly (a bit of a wild silly romp with a little sex in it), has been in the world for over a year now. I was out one night, and a friend’s date asked me three times which of the sex scenes in my book were written from personal experience. I’ve received DM’s with insane images (use your imaginations—or don’t) and insinuations of disturbing or mundane sexual acts performed on me in response to the book. And none of this makes me special. None of it is anything compared to what women deal with every day. But the Catholic girl part of me always says in a little voice, But you did talk about sex. Maybe you did bring this on yourself. Maybe you did have it coming. In Stephen King’s beloved Carrie—a book primarily centered on sexual shame and repression—Carrie is effectively locked down at home and held in an ignorance that leaves her vastly unprepared for the world and thus wildly vulnerable to it. A young woman coming into her true power around the same time as her body takes on its mature form, and yet still fully at the mercy of those who tell her that same body and power should only be a source of shame. (Will we ever forget the phrase dirty pillows)? I don’t know what younger generations call each other now, but there was no greater insult when I was young than slut or whore. And at the same time, if we weren’t thought of as the most beautiful, the most appealing, that led to its own despair, its own deep shame that we weren’t desirable enough to be insulted. Always this tension, always this impossibility of existing between desire and purity. The idea that desire is inherently impure. I sat down here to write an essay on religion and repression in horror. I wanted to talk about religious horror films and books and how women’s roles in them are largely relegated to possession by demons, or as mother vessels to demons or saviors, or as cast-outs or examples for not primarily acting as vessels. I planned to touch on the beauty and ritual of a gothic church, the nostalgic comfort or fear that incense and organ music incite in us. There’s so much to say, and so many sides to all of it, and I don’t have enough space allotted here to get even a fraction of my thoughts out. But as I’m writing this (during banned books week, and in a time in which our bodily autonomy is a political talking point), and as I’m considering all the ways that we as a society fail young people—all types of folks, certainly not just young girls—, I’m thinking that maybe it’s less about repression in horror, and more about repression as horror. A profoundly important and terrifying truth we put in our books because we are grappling with it, still. All the time. The idea that a woman dressed up on a night out with her friends, or a woman who writes novels with sex in them, or a young girl just trying to understand her changing body could be seen as asking for unsolicited advances or even violence, could be seen as flaunting something shameful and encouraging an action in response. We build sex up to be something unobtainable or that we’re entitled to or that’s sinful and shameful but also a prize. We fan every flame of desire and want and curiosity, and simultaneously instill a belief that it is dark and base and that there is something wrong with us for wanting it. This most natural of things. In American Rapture, my protagonist Sophie is as equally unprepared for the world as Carrie, equally sheltered and instilled with shame and a guilt so heavy she will carry it forever, and she stands at the same turning point moment in life. But the antagonists are raised in the same world that Sophie is. The boys who feel they’re entitled to something from her because they too have formed their selves and identities in this hypersexual and simultaneously ultra-repressed tumult, because they too have been taught on some level that the supreme vocation of a woman is to act as a vessel for something else. When I ask myself why I wrote American Rapture, why I read religious horror or watch it on the screen, when I really stop and think, what do I wish more than anything I had known when I was a young girl trying to step into herself? It’s this: Repression—religious or otherwise—is the horror. Ignorance is what we should fear. What makes us all ill-equipped for moving through life as humans in natural human bodies. And maybe little girls aren’t born into more sin than little boys. Maybe sin is just an idea we’ve created for control. A powerful little beast that preys on all of us every day, in and outside of fiction. And maybe it’s one we just don’t need to feed anymore. *** View the full article

Beach reads—we usually associate them with the summer. A steamy romance, a cozy seaside mystery, a horror story of beach parties and blood. Those are a great time, but right now in the northern hemisphere, summer is waning. Depending on where you are in the world, it might already be dead in more ways than a date on the calendar, with the trees losing their green, the sun feeling fainter in the sky, and a stiff breeze chilling your skin, and it may or may not be tinged with pumpkin spice. But even as the season dims and cools, the beach lingers right where you left it. Maybe you don’t feel up for visiting in the cold weather. In fact, it might not even want you there. I have a soft spot for the beach outside the thrills of summertime. There’s something exquisitely morbid, even gothic, about gray skies over dark blue waves, and I’m enthralled by uneasy stories that capture this feeling, even when set in the summertime, as if the season is only a mask the beach wears before returning to its true grim nature. I’m so in love with that atmosphere, I’ve written it into multiple stories, including my upcoming modern coastal gothic All the Hearts You Eat, and I devour them when I find them. Here are a few books that will coil you in that delicious dismal atmosphere and never let go. They Drown Our Daughters by Katrina Monroe What better way to begin than with a book taking place at a haunted locale by the name of Cape Disappointment? We arrive outside the tourist season, where Meredith Strand has left her wife, taking their daughter back to her family’s home to stay with Meredith’s ailing mother. But family can be a curse, and as we discover early on (helped by a handy family tree!), Meredith’s family has endured a fate of being hunted by the sea for generations. If she isn’t careful, her daughter might be next. From the desolate lighthouse to the troublesome water to the secrets waiting in the depths, there’s a doomed nature to Cape Disappointment’s dread, but each clue into the past makes you eager to endure the next wave. Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth I almost started the list with this one, but I realized how difficult a book Plain Bad Heroines can be to describe on a plot level, let alone characters, and didn’t want vague-talk out the gate. It’s the story of a tragic love between two students at a school for girls overlooking a dreary coast, and it’s the story of Audrey, Harper, and Merritt, and the events surrounding a movie being made about those two students, and it’s also a story about all the forbidden loves the school has seen over time. The coiling sapphic narratives both nourish and consume each other. It’s never dizzying, instead consistently immersive. Brookhants School for Girls is a primary character here, if not the main one, and its heavy personality makes the finding and losing of love to its horrific secrets all the more entrancing. “Inventory” by Carmen Maria Machado This one isn’t a book, but you’ll have to bear with me on that, partly because it’s my list, partly because you should be reading Her Body and Other Parties anyway, and partly because the atmosphere in this story is the perfect somber pitch. It tells of the end of the world, in which a lethal disease passes from person to person by touch, told through the lens of a woman cataloging the people she’s had sex with over the course of her life. The disease spreading by touch is key to this beautiful story’s focus on the people we meet, and the ones we lose, whether it be to time, illness, or a need to move on. Part of that migration brings our protagonist to the seaside, where for a while it seems she might be free of the apocalypse. But connection is wired into our species. Yellow Jessamine by Caitlin Starling I’m realizing now that setting as character can’t help being a defining quality when you’re looking at atmosphere—Yellow Jessamine fits the bill, too, both with the port city of Delphinium and the soon-to-be-overgrown manor of Evelyn Perdanu, filled with secrets, science, and the pall of death. Decay rules this world, a unifying factor of land, sea, and people, and no amount of loyalty from Evelyn’s attendant Violetta or betrayal from other merchants and nobles can deter what’s to come. This is a brisk, engrossing novella by the sea, and for me, Starling at her gothic best. Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward Like Plain Bad Heroines, this is another where it’s hard to describe the plot and characters due to the twining narratives, not only across time and perspective, but into what we know and don’t know is happening at Whistler Bay. Though this book begins one summer and captures a level of Stephen King charm in its early coming-of-age narrative, don’t let the sunshine fool you. There’s a chill to Whistler Bay, between hints of a vicious presence lurking the coast and the way death looms over the young characters. The memoir approach gives the entire setting a sense of constant loss, its brilliance slipping through your fingers as you read it. The book only gets more brazen, taking wild turns through time, perspective, and reality, but all the while, the wind keeps howling through the stones along the beach. Red Skies in the Morning by Nadia Bulkin Bulkin’s debut novella is maximally dour, telling of a world plagued by paracontagions that infect you via video, giving you seven haunted, nightmare-touched days to show the same video to someone else before the invading specter destroys you on its way out. To make matters worse, an unknown murderer dubbed Video Man has taken to purposely infecting people. Think The Ring, spreading and spreading, and with a serial killer on top. Set in a coastal city and following two sisters, the younger mostly raised by the elder, Red Skies in the Morning is a fascinating look at inevitability and tragedy while also creative and heartrending. This book has a limited release and may be tough to find at the time of this writing, but it deserves a wide release. Without spoiling anything, the final scene looking out on the water is both magnetic and utterly excruciating. *** View the full article

When he was young, bestselling thriller author J.D. Barker never thought he could make a living as a writer, so he instead studied business while unaware of his special gift. It would create barriers in his life and career that he would struggle to surmount. Yet it would help him soar to a resounding success. It wasn’t an easy journey and it’s not over. It never will be. But Barker has become rich and famous in large part thanks to his uncommon capability. While in college at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, he worked part-time for BMG Music babysitting and chauffeuring musicians on promotional tours to southern Florida radio stations and publicity events. He spent days with the likes of Madonna, Bon Jovi, Guns N’ Roses, Mötley Crüe, Tiffany, Poison, Skid Row, New Kids on the Block, and Debbie Gibson. “If I got Guns N’ Roses in and out of south Florida for three or four days without anyone getting hurt, that was a win,” he says. It was also a learning experience. He escorted his share of one-hit-wonders and watched them quickly blow through their bulging bank rolls. “I would see their expensive car disappear, then the house disappear, then the apartment, and finally they’d disappear…It stuck with me for a long time…That was a crash course in money management.” Paul Gallotta, reporter and later senior editor at Circus magazine, read one of Barker’s college writing assignments and offered him a job with lifestyle magazine 25th Parallel. For a while Barker worked out of the same newsroom as Brian Warner, who would later merge the names of Marilyn Monroe and Charles Manson to become rocker Marilyn Manson. Barker also freelanced for several publications including Seventeen and TeenBeat. At age twenty, he syndicated a column on supernatural occurrences and haunted places – an early sign of his literary interest and the publishing business acumen he would later develop. After Barker earned his business degree and observed the chaotic financial world of the music business from the front-row, he found a steady job as a compliance officer at a Florida brokerage firm. His role was to assure stockbrokers behaved ethically with their clients and followed the rules and regs of the business. It didn’t make him the most popular guy at the office, but his bosses were impressed with his drive and productivity. But Barker began to irritate his colleagues and even got into a shouting match with his boss, who should have fired him for the altercation, Barker says. But to his credit, his boss sent him to a therapist to deal with anger management. Barker didn’t know it at the time, but part of the therapist’s practice included working with Autistic children. About twenty minutes into their first session, she recognized his lack of eye contact and general demeanor as traits of Autism. He was twenty-two and had no idea. “Back in school you were just the weird guy in the corner,” he says. After months of testing, he was diagnosed with Aspergers’ syndrome, which is on the Autism neuro-divergent spectrum. He then spent years in therapy learning how to deal with it and to improve his interactions with other people. He began to understand why he liked to be alone and didn’t like to be touched. Why he could read at age three. He learned why others’ jokes didn’t make him laugh. But best of all, he learned why and how he was different and how to embrace it and find normalcy. Today he still wonders what would have happened to him had he not visited the therapist that day. She changed his life. “Outside of seeing the movie ‘Rain Man,’” he says, “I’d never researched it.” What he didn’t realize at the time, but came to appreciate later, was his Autism would become what his wife Dayna later termed his “superpower.” Autism would give him a leg up on other writers and enable him to create an extraordinarily successful career as an author in barely a decade. “It allows me to do what I do,” he says. After twenty years he hated his brokerage job and wanted to write fulltime, but he was boxed in. The brokerage business afforded Dayna and him a big house, a boat and all the trappings of the good life in southern Florida. To feed his desire to write, he’d become a ghostwriter and book doctor. “That’s what made me a good writer,” he says. But it also stemmed from his childhood. “I’ve always wanted to write,” he says. “I grew up without a TV in the house. My mother took us to the library all the time.” During his tenure at the brokerage firm, six of his ghostwritten books became New York Times bestsellers, however none of them had his name on the cover. Watching others receive accolades from his words on the page was starting to get old. After nearly two decades and having recently turned forty, he’d had enough. He and Dayna decided to downsize and give his writing ambitions a go. His brokerage firm felt his loss immediately. They hired three people to replace him. “I’m very good with structure and being organized,” Barker says. The couple sold everything and bought a duplex in Pittsburgh near her family. They lived in one half and rented out the other to cover living expenses. Investment banking, he says, “paid really well, but I think I got a little complacent. I could have started this back in my twenties…But it all came together.” To begin his new career, “I knew I wanted to write a book about a witch.” His first novel, which he called Forsaken, would meld the stories of a historical character with a modern-day witch. Barker, a great admirer of Stephen King, wanted to use King’s recurring character, Leland Gaunt, in his own novel, but he needed King’s permission. He knew King wintered on an island near Sarasota along the Florida Gulf Coast. But not knowing the world-famous novelist, Barker thought it best if he tried to visit him and seek his permission in person. He drove to Sarasota and to Casey Island. After crossing a narrow bridge, he turned onto King’s long driveway, ignoring the “No Trespassing” signs along the way. Finally, he came to a gate across the road making it clear strangers were not welcome. Barker thought better of it and turned around, never reaching his destination. Instead, he called a friend who knew King and told him of his effort. “It’s a good thing you turned around,” his friend said. “King hates that.” The friend eventually got through to King who granted Barker permission to use his character. Barker finished his manuscript in nine months and then faced the next obstacle, finding an agent. He sent out a pile of query letters and sat back to await replies. None came. None, like not even one rejection. He was so naïve about the process, he said, “I had no idea what I’d done wrong.” What he’d gotten wrong was a whopper. Barker mailed each agent a form letter beginning with “To Whom It May Concern.” He soon realized the only person concerned was himself. Yet, in the end his error actually worked in his favor. Not finding interest in Forsaken, he decided to self-publish. He didn’t want to look like he was self-published, so he created his own imprint, Hampton Creek Press. “I put Forsaken on every website I could, including Smashwords.” Because he didn’t know any better, he’d failed to send advance reader copies to reviewers ahead of publication. “This was a big learning curve for me,” he says. The reviews he finally received were positive, but not plentiful. “Ultimately, I didn’t get as many reviews as I would have.” Still, book sales were not bad, but they wouldn’t make him rich. It was no breakout novel, so after several months he hired a publicist. During their conversation, he mentioned his effort to reach out to King. She told him that was the publicity angle she needed. She contacted Publisher’s Weekly, and they soon ran a feature describing his somewhat comical but earnest failed attempt and his ultimate success. Thanks to that article, sales took off, and Forsaken went on to sell more than 250,000 copies. Today, his life is much different. He’s learned the ropes of the publishing business. He writes in the morning and later in the day tends to marketing and business issues. “Ultimately,” he says, “this is a business.” Spoken like a man who knows. He has created his own imprint and now distributes his books though Simon & Schuster. He has cowritten books with James Patterson and created a hybrid publishing empire. He built his own business because he didn’t like the low royalties publishers paid, especially after experiencing the fat share of gross sales he received being self-published. And his key to success? “Being autistic, I’m sure, is part of it.” He’s known for his complex plots and attention to detail in his stories, yet there are no signs of sticky notes or white board scribbles anywhere in his office attempting to piece together plot ideas. Yes, you’ll find bookcases crammed with books, but his desk looks as clean as any corporate CEO’s––bare except for a single laptop computer. So where does he keep his files on his next book? “It’s all up here,” he says, pointing to his head. His superpower. Indeed. ___________________________________ Forsaken ___________________________________ Start to Finish: 11 months I want to be a writer: I’ve known my whole life. Decided to write a novel: 42 years old Experience: Compliance officer for Nobel Financial Group, journalist, ghostwriter, book doctor. Agents Contacted: A lot. Agent Rejections: Technically zero, because no one responded. First Novel Agent: None First Novel Editor: Self First Novel Publisher: Self Inspiration: The books themselves. Website: JDBarker.com Advice to Writers: Write every day. It’s like going to the gym. It’s like working a muscle. If I don’t write every day, it’s a struggle to come back to where I was before. Your voice stays consistent if you write every day. Like this? Read the chapters on Lee Child, Michael Connelly, Tess Gerritsen, Steve Berry, David Morrell, Gayle Lynds, Scott Turow, Lawrence Block, Randy Wayne White, Walter Mosley, Tom Straw. Michael Koryta, Harlan Coben, Jenny Milchman, James Grady, David Corbett. Robert Dugoni, David Baldacci, Steven James, Laura Lippman, Karen Dionne, Jon Land, S.A. Cosby, Diana Gabaldon, Tosca Lee, D.P. Lyle, James Patterson, Jeneva Rose, Jeffery Deaver, Joseph Finder, Patricia Cornwell, Lisa Gardner, Mary Kubica, Hank Phillippi Ryan, I.S. Berry, Heather Graham, and John Gilstrap. View the full article

Hello chaps! It’s high time we put out another quiz. Why? Because they’re fun, I don’t know. Like the quizes that came before it, this one is part quiz, part trivia. Under “questions” I have listed many famous opening lines from crime, mystery, and thriller novels. And you have to guess which book each line comes from. I call these “classic” books. They aren’t all necessarily old, but they are definitely some of the better-known, well-respected books in their genre. The answer key is way down at the bottom. As you take the quiz, I’d write down your answers next to the corresponding questions’ numbers (on a sheet of paper or in your notes app) and then grade yourself in one swoop when you’re done, so that you’re not constantly scrolling down and up again as you go, thereby risking seeing some of the other answers. If you can get the author/character but can’t get the name of the exact book, then give yourself half a point. Obviously, people, this list contains spoilers. I mean, come on! Here we go! __________________________________ Questions: 1. “But you, O my brothers, remember sometimes thy little Alex that was. Amen. And all that cal.” 2. “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” 3. “‘It isn’t fair, it isn’t right,’ Mrs Hutchinson screamed, and then they were upon her.” 4. “‘I wish you all a long and happy life.’” 5. “And I only am escaped alone to tell thee.” 6. “Everything had gone right with me since he had died, but how I wished there existed someone to whom I could say that I was sorry.” 7. “I think this is the best we can hope for right now.” 8. “What did it matter where you lay once you were dead?” 9. “But that is the story for another time.” 10. “I wish you all good luck.” 11. “In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.” 12. “And the ashes blew towards us with the salt wind from the sea.” 13. “I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.” 14. “Maybe I will go to Paris. Who knows? But I’ll sure as hell never go back to Texas again.” 15. “That might be the subject of a new story, but our present story is ended.” 16. “He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.” 17. “I never saw any of them again—except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them.” __________________________________ . . . . . . . Answers down below. . . . . . . . Keep scrolling! . . . . . . . Answer Key: 1. Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange 2. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby 3. Shirley Jackson, “The Lottery” 4. Alice Sebold, The Lucky Bones 5. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick 6. Graham Greene, The Quiet American 7. Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl 8. Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep 9. Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles 10. Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd 11. Cormac McCarthy, The Road 12. Daphne du Maurier, Rebecca 13. Donna Tartt, The Secret History 14. James Crumley, The Final Country 15. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment (1866; trans. Constance Garnett) 16. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian 17. Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye View the full article

The writers’ arsenal may come similarly equipped for most authors, but Jenny Milchman has a secret weapon that can’t be equalized: Joy. It’s the thing that sustained her through eleven years and seven unpublished manuscripts before Cover of Snow debuted in 2013. That book won the coveted Mary Higgins Clark Award. It also introduced readers to what would become the hallmarks of Milchman’s fictional landscape: character driven suspense featuring (perhaps unknowingly) strong female protagonists who are made to confront the internal and external threats that afflict them, all set against the backdrop of a fictional town in the Adirondack mountains named Wedeskyull. It may come as no surprise, then, that Milchman’s sixth novel, The Usual Silence (Thomas & Mercer: October 1, 2024)—the first in a series, connected by community and character—takes those elements and spins them into familiar yet fertile new territory. Psychologist Arles Shepherd, traumatized by the secrets of her own shadowy past, has devoted her professional life to helping troubled children (even as her personal life is in a state of crisis)—a mission she intends to continue with the opening her own treatment center in the wilds of upstate New York. It’s here that Arles manufactures the opportunity to treat twelve-year-old Geary Monroe, whose harried (and unsuspecting) mother, Louise, has dominated her thoughts for a quarter century, ever since Arles encountered her picture as a child. Little does she know that their reunion will come to intertwine with a current missing persons case in which a young girl’s desperate father has enlisted the help of two true crime podcasters to do what the police cannot: find his daughter and bring her home. Drawing on the author’s own background—Jenny Milchman holds a degree in clinical psychology and spent a decade in practice—The Usual Silence introduces a dynamic heroine who may yet find her own joy if she can first learn to make peace with the lingering remnants of her haunted history. John B. Valeri: The Usual Silence is your first true series book (whereas your earlier books shared a common place but with singular protagonists). What was the conceptualization process like for developing a character and circumstances that would carry over – and how did that impact your approach to writing the story itself? Jenny Milchman: I had no idea, I mean really no clue, how much I would love writing a series. You’re right, my first five novels share the same setting, the fictional Adirondack town of Wedeskyull, and The Usual Silence takes place there too. Arles Shepherd is a local who’s grown up in Wedeskyull and after graduate school—she’s a psychologist—comes back to live. The way Arles came into existence is one of those stories writers dream of, and if we’re very lucky, get to have every once in a while. My new publisher at Thomas and Mercer reached out to my agent and invited me to breakfast. Naturally, I was so excited I could barely eat, though the publisher graciously plied me with pastries. She also asked if I’d ever thought about writing a series, especially one that might take into account my first career as a psychotherapist, which the publisher said readers are fascinated by, but don’t get to see as frequently in fiction as, say, police and legal procedurals (a subgenre I love—Tana French! Robert Dugoni!) With that suggestion, the idea of a psychological procedural, and Arles Shepherd, were both born. As I wrote The Usual Silence, I felt Arles’s world unfolding in ways that will take many books—should I be so lucky—to flesh out. For instance, at thirty-seven years of age, she’s never had a love interest before, but she meets someone she holds at arm’s length in this first book. She also has a vicious stepfather who needs dealing with, but that doesn’t happen until the second novel, due out next September. JBV: Arles Shepherd epitomizes the notion of the “complex character,” complete with a mysterious past and self-sabotaging tendencies. How did you endeavor to balance her darker qualities with more relatable or sympathetic ones? Also, what degree of her backstory did you need to know before committing her character to paper? JM: You’re the second person to talk about Arles’s less “likeable” character traits, and given how depthful your literary analysis always is, I now know this to be a thing! But it’s funny because in writing Arles, I didn’t see those dark qualities in the same way. She does have a mysterious past, which severely damaged her, giving rise to self-sabotage and dissociation and things that threaten to derail her life. In many ways, her life already is derailed—at thirty-seven years of age, she meets her very first love interest in this book. The Usual Silence is about trauma and the long shadow it casts. The less lovely traits and behaviors and thought processes trauma gives rise to. A trauma survivor never fully gets out of that shadow. But if the trauma is faced and dealt with, which is what Arles helps other people do, and tries to varying degrees of success to do for herself, there can also be days spent in the sun. And trauma survivors are tough! They know how to fight, for themselves and sometimes others. I admire Arles so much because she will literally kill if someone needs her to. In terms of how much I knew before I began writing—almost nothing. Arles sat down in that chair in her office in chapter one, and then revealed what she’d been through. JBV: Arles is a psychologist who treats troubled children with traumatized pasts. You hold a degree in clinical psychology and spent a decade in practice at a community health center and your mother holds a PhD in the subject. Please talk about your approach to drawing on your own knowledge and the expert insights of others to achieve an authentic and sensitive portrayal of the work (and the resultant ethical and moral dilemmas that sometimes result). JM: So, here’s how that happened. The whole family business thing. When I was in my second year of college, my parents asked me if I had any thoughts about my major and future career possibilities and life after graduation. How I was going to earn a living, you might say. This was a fine thing to ask because I had a plan, a great plan. I was going to major in literature and become a poet and live in the woods in a cabin. I might’ve planned to build the cabin myself—is that how Thoreau did it?—I’m not sure. Because I had never wielded a hammer, and also because I loved people and had taken abnormal psych and loved it, my mother ventured to ask whether I wanted to consider a double major, lit and psychology? But the siren’s call of writing never ceased. And while doing my internship at the community mental health clinic you reference, I was assigned this very scary case. Content warning here for violence against an animal. A mother brought in her tiny, five-year-old daughter to see me because the child had just killed a bird. It was the family pet. And as I raced to figure out what had made the girl commit this act, how to make sure she didn’t do anything like that or worse again—violent acts often escalate—it was almost as if life were a suspense novel. I sat down and wrote my very first (never to be published) psychological thriller. So in many ways, my career as an author was born, Athena-like, from the Zeus’s head of psychology. Till then I had wanted to be a poet. I had no idea how compelling crime and suspense and even horror fiction could be—even though I read it! In terms of ethical or moral dilemmas, there’s a reason that first novel never got published. Though I didn’t include any identifying details, it followed my real life as an intern much too closely. My first career now informs my writing, but everything else is made up, or talked over with experts, as you say—which include my mother! JBV: One of the story’s young characters, Geary, is neurodivergent (Autistic). How did you tap into Geary’s inner-self and unique abilities to render a nuanced portrayal of his being (rather than allowing him to become a convenient plot device). Also, tell us about the importance of capturing the dichotomous feelings of hope and frustration that parents or loved ones feel in their desire to relate to, or understand, such a child as Geary. JM: I’m really happy you read Geary that way because that was my intent and I love that kid. That said, if a much earlier draft than the final one—and this novel went through full rewrites in the close to double digits—you would have encountered a different, lesser version of him. I knew that I owed Autistic individuals a complex portrait, which put on the page how someone with a mind that works in unique and different ways lives and experiences the world. But Geary evolved over those nine drafts, and one big way he did so was when my publisher and I decided to enlist a culture reader. That person—whom I thank in my acknowledgements—helped me see the ways I had inadvertently fallen into patterns of projecting my own lens and not fully making room for Geary’s. I also very intentionally chose not to make Geary a point of view character. Although I deeply hope Autistic people and their loved ones will find representation in this book—and the full range of love and also frustration you mention—I recognized the limits of my ability to enter a vastly different type of perceiving and experiencing. We authors are always doing that, to some extent, and I love deep POV—another of the characters in The Usual Silence is a forty-something male Maine old timer! Which is not me clearly. But I personally feel there are limits. The reader sees how Geary’s mother—who is not neurodivergent—and his psychologist perceive and relate to him, but not how Geary perceives and internally engages, and for me that’s a crucial distinction. JBV: Much of the book plays out against the backdrop of the remote Adirondack Mountains. Tell us about the importance of this setting – both in terms of its thematic resonance and the realistic distancing from modern technology and surveillance. JM: A fictional town in the Adirondacks called Wedeskyull has been the setting of all five—soon to be six—of my published books. (And a lot of unpublished ones besides). Wedeskyull is my Castle Rock. My Yoknapatawpha County. It’s the movie camera that pulls back to an aerial view such that the viewer sees thousands of points of light, each one a lit-up home or a campfire; a person or a group of them. There’s a story to each and every one of those. And they all interact, layer upon layer, in the way of small towns. I also love—and fear—nature. And within that awe is the potential for an awful lot of drama. Three of my prior books have been wilderness thrillers, and in some ways The Usual Silence is one too. The remote location compels the characters to confront forces—both within themselves and without—that couldn’t exist in another kind of setting. The isolation that surrounds every one of us—even in a crowd—is a theme in this book and reflected by its sense of place. In terms of the fact that this also means there’s often no Wi-Fi or cell signal—well, that definitely contributes an ominous overtone! But I am careful not to make crucial plot points rely on this lack, even though it is true to the region. Because of how remote the setting is, even if a call were able to be placed, help would not arrive quickly. JBV: In the book’s acknowledgments, you note the exhilaration of working with a new agent and editor. In what ways did the collaborative process benefit the final manuscript – and how did you find this particular experience to be creatively (and maybe even spiritually) fulfilling in ways that others hadn’t? JM: This book came to be because a publisher reached out to my new agent and asked if I would have breakfast with her. This is a thrilling event for an author. And an intimidating one! At that breakfast my soon-to-be publisher planted the seed for a series. Meanwhile, back at the ranch—which is Thomas and Mercer—my soon-to-be editor was preparing to give me free rein (ranch, rein, get it?) with the book I was about to write. It was an exhilarating experience. I sat down and penned a tale, and then nine drafts later, amid some bleeding (hopefully only on my part), the book you read was ready. Many more people, brilliant and attentive minds, entered into this creative process than I’d ever had with any of my prior works. It was hard, but deeply soul-satisfying. So I guess spiritual isn’t the wrong word. One of the most unexpected aspects loops back to what you asked initially—that this is a series and I was able to create not just the onion of Wedeskyull, with all its layers to be peeled, but the onion of my series character. There are so many places she can go to, and things she will have to do there, that I can only hope I get the chance to write them. JBV: You have been refreshingly candid about the challenges of sustaining a career as an author given the publishing industry’s ever-changing landscape. In retrospect, what do you credit with the fortitude to stay the course despite setbacks and uncertainty – and what words of caution or guidance would you offer others who are considering pursuing this devotion? JM: Devotion is a great word for it. Another is joy—and that’s what enabled me to get through eleven years and seven unpublished manuscripts before I broke through, and then some pretty hair-raising twists and turns after. The sheer joy of writing a new story, getting to know the characters and seeing how everything plays out, is what keeps me going. While I pay for this when editing and revising, which is nowhere near as much fun for me, little compares to the joy of sitting down and writing a new book. It helps if there are people out there cheering us along. I always had a strong agent in my corner—validation from the industry—even when finding the love connection with an editor, or having a career that makes publishers come calling, was challenging. But I wouldn’t want emerging writers to feel that if they don’t have industry validation, that’s reason to stop. Find it in other sources—a critique group, a batch of trusty readers, your friend or partner or even your mother. A pet can offer the means to go on sometimes. Just turn outward for support, and whatever you do, don’t stop. At the same time, understand that this is both an art and an industry. The business side is real. And if you want a long-lasting career as an author, then you don’t just want any agent, you want the right agent for you. One who really gets your work and where you hope to go with it. And you don’t just want any editor and publisher, you want ones who envision you where you long to be—because they’re going to be the ones who get you there, both via making your book into one that’s good and smooth and polished enough to achieve your dream, and via allocating the budget and marketing to make that happen. They need to be committed to providing enough of a runway that you can take off. Which is a very tall order. You may only find it in fits and starts and stages—amid setbacks as you say, John. That’s how it went for me. JBV: Leave us with a teaser: What comes next? JM: I just turned in the second in the Arles Shepherd series. In it, Arles does something that’s needed doing for over thirty years. I couldn’t believe that it happened. And I wrote it. View the full article

Since I was little, I’ve been raised on stories of my parents’ history and the controversial romance between my mother, the daughter of South Indian immigrants, and an Irish-German nobody from the green ridges of Tennessee. You might say there was friction on both sides of the family tree over an unlikely union that nobody expected or wanted, except for the couple themselves. It was a marriage for love that—thirty-six years later—is one of the proudest things in my life. But my parents were always about something bigger than society’s norms, and both of them encouraged me from an early age to take both what you see and hear with a huge grain of salt, and to go the extra mile to find out the truth of a matter regardless what the popular opinion is. When I came up with the idea of a South Indian detective-of-sorts in nineteenth-century New York, I thought at first it was surely too improbable to be tolerated. But “truth is stranger than fiction,” as the maxim goes, and what I discovered in researching the time period surprised me as much as my parents’ experiences. It’s certainly no secret that North America is a hotspot for immigration. Perhaps you’ve heard the heartbreaking stories of those early immigrants from all over the world, the Chinese and the Irish among the largest communities to suffer prejudice in the country they hoped to call home. But according to an article by the Migration Policy Institute, there were Indians as well among these early 19th century immigrants. A look at Indian immigration to the United States reveals a dark thread in the rich tapestry of their history. Many of the immigrants were from the Punjab region, which had been annexed by the British in 1849, forcing many in the midst of political strife to seek a better, more stable life in Canada. At first, the condition of these immigrants was peaceful and profitable as they worked in the rising lumber industry. However, the peace did not last. An article I found on the KQED Asian Education Initiative website, described the rising tension between the Indian immigrants and the European settlers in Canada. Tensions rose so high that finally, any ships with Indian passengers were barred from docking at Vancouver. And the Indians already on Canadian land were once more placed in the position of seeking a new home, a new way of life, this time in the United States. It’s fascinating to imagine all this—turbaned Sikhs working alongside other immigrants to build up a sustainable infrastructure for their growing communities. But the thing is, it’s not just imagination. As inspiring as the thought may be, although the Indians did indeed prove themselves to be tireless and skillful workers and an intrinsic part of society, even marrying into Mexican Californian families, the discrimination did not end. The number of Indian immigrants was relatively small compared to others—about three thousand arrived at Angel Island by the time the 1917 law restricting immigration was passed. It was as late as 1946 when Indian immigrants were recognized for the first time as American citizens. This victory was a huge landmark in ensuring the rights of a people that had placed their hope in a country that denied them naturalization for over a hundred years. All this aside—did you even know that Indians were immigrants to the United States in the nineteenth century? I certainly didn’t. My mother, an Indian immigrant herself who arrived in New York when she was six years old, had no idea that her people had helped form the roots of this nation. There are very few artistic explorations of this fascinating history, either in movies or books, and it isn’t mentioned in history at school. Why the silence? Is it really just because so many people like myself simply don’t know how diverse immigration to America truly was and continues to be? I’m encouraged by emerging writers like Brinda Charry, whose historical novel The East Indian explores Indian immigration to Jamestown, Virginia, long before the United States even became a nation. The complex issues of racism and the desire for belonging are themes that may be a familiar part of the historical record, but are as important to us now as they were then. Too many of us continue to struggle to belong in the very neighborhood we were born in. My own book may be fantasy—a historical mystery with a vampire accused of murder, for goodness’ sake! But the themes I explore in it are very real. It’s the artificial division between peoples based on race or social status that continue to be the cause of so much friction. Radhika Dhingra, the heroine of , is looking to establish herself as a working woman in a society prejudiced against both her sex and the color of her skin. She finds unlikely comradeship in her undead client, likewise shunned by greater society. It’s the kind of story that I most enjoy—two unlikely people from different backgrounds, suffering similar hardships, learning to respect and value each other not based on their differences but on the obstacles they can and do overcome together. These are the stories history is often silent about, a story that belongs to my parents and to many others. It’s a story that will always be worth telling, because it’s a story of tremendous courage, and friendship that overcomes every prejudice. *** View the full article

There weren’t many of us growing up in small town England in the 1980s who wore a fedora hat. Even fewer, who affected a slight lisp and wore an oversized trench coat with the collars turned up. In fact, certainly in our small town, there was just one. Me. Humphrey Bogart made a huge impression on me. He may have been long dead by the time I came along, but that didn’t matter, cool is cool, and Bogart literally had it in Spades. One of the threads that seemed to run through nearly all his films was the DA, the District Attorney. He was either fighting the DA, working for the DA, running from the DA, or actually the DA and again, the glamour of that title was a completely different world. According to the movies, the US District Attorney is either crusading, righteous and empathetic, or heartless, ambitious and corruptible and it was all so different from what I knew of the English system. I’m not saying none of those qualities exist in the English system, but no one role, or one individual, had such power that they could affect not just the outcome of an investigation but the sentencing as well. It was always fascinating to me, and when I moved to France and began writing crime fiction, I found another, entirely different system again. Firstly, the English police-judicial system is different from the US. In England the police investigate independently of the judiciary and present their case to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) who will then decide whether there are sufficient grounds for prosecution. The US system has the police more answerable to the DA’s office as an investigation continues, but for ‘wire-taps’ and other warrants, they must still go higher for permission, to a judge. The French system has all of these various offices in the one role, the juge d’instruction, or investigating magistrate. In the US, the DA represents the state, in the UK, the CPS represents the state, in France, the ‘independent’ juge d’instruction is appointed by the state, but represents the ‘truth’. This juge controls the police investigation and the judicial process right up until court. In France, they are known as ‘supercops’. Imagine being a crime writer and stumbling on that particular gem! The famous French novelist Honoré de Balzac described these investigating magistrates as the ‘most powerful men in the world.’ Now, given that Balzac was also known to drink up to fifty cups of coffee a day, it’s possible that he was given to frenzied exaggeration, but they are powerful, and they are feared. It was no accident that a former President of the Republic of France tried his best to reduce their influence and standing while he was in office, and then was subsequently convicted of corruption. The French juge d’instruction, for this writer, casts a romantic figure, up there with the great cinematic district attorneys of US folklore. Like the US, many of these figures seek political office, so does that affect their independence, their search for the truth? It shouldn’t obviously but writing crime fiction isn’t about the good guys, it’s about flaws. Flaws in the villains and flaws in the heroes. My first book featuring Juge Matthieu Lombard, is called The Man Who Didn’t Burn, and we join Lombard just as he’s thinking of leaving the judiciary. His wife has died a year before from a terminal illness and he is on suspension by the state under suspicion of tampering with evidence in a domestic murder. It’s time to move on, he concludes, friendless. When an Englishmen is found crucified in a French nearby village however, only Lombard can investigate, because Lombard himself is half-English. So begins an investigation where he must seek the truth from the local French villagers and a small English community who live with them. Being half-French, the English don’t trust him; being half-English, the French don’t trust him. And being an investigating magistrate who doesn’t like to just sit behind his desk as most do, the police don’t trust him either. What this situation gave me as a writer was the opportunity to throw in some great DA tropes of classic Hollywood. Is Lombard corrupt? Does he care enough about the job to do it properly? Is he prepared to risk his position to get to the truth? All of those questions arise, but in a rural France setting surrounded by chateaux, a medieval city and countryside and families that have barely changed in centuries. It’s such a fun mix to write. I may not have put Lombard in a trench coat and fedora but read closely and you’ll see that they’re there. There have been many depictions of the DA in movies and on television. Law and Order, the hit US drama, had some fantastic actors like Sam Waterson and Dianne Wiest showing the moral and personal difficulties of holding the position. Kevin Costner played DA Jim Garrison in Oliver Stone’s JFK, a powerful man trying to fight the system. Batman’s arch enemy ‘Two-Face’ was a former district attorney whose disfigurement meant he was shunned by society, so he turned to crime, exacting his own sense of ‘justice’. Here are a few favorite classic District Attorneys: Johnny Eager (1941) Lana Turner falls in love with Robert Taylor’s no good hood who was sent down by her step-father district attorney. Knock on Any Door (1949) Crusading, born in the slums lawyer, Humphrey Bogart goes up against the DA to show that a case of murder was a product of a poor upbringing, asking the jury for leniency. Alias Nick Beal (1949) Incorruptible DA, Thomas Mitchell, vows to rid the city of crooks and help youth find a better way. He promises nothing will stand in his way, but has he made a pact with Ray Milland’s devil? Illegal (1955) Edward G Robinson’s overly aggressive district attorney sends the wrong man to the chair. He resigns, becomes an alcoholic and a magnet for the wrong type of client. The Enforcer (1951) Humphrey Bogart is a crusading district attorney with a chance to finally nail the mob boss and founder of Murder inc. The People Against O’Hara (1951) Spencer Tracy plays a former successful prosecutor who’s a recovering alcoholic. He makes a comeback as a defence attorney defending a neighbour’s son on a charge of homicide. Anatomy of a Murder (1959) Former DA, James Stewart, defends a lieutenant accused of the murder of a bartender. Why is he a former DA? Because he was voted out! Who would vote against Jimmy Stewart? *** View the full article

Few stories survive for millennia—but The Odyssey, the ancient Greek tale of a winning if embattled warrior’s long and difficult journey home after the war, is one of them. The 12,109-line poem—some 140,000 words—dates from around 750- 650 BCE. Attributed to Homer by most scholars, it’s considered one of the most influential works of literature of all time. Given that intimidatingly august pedigree, no one was more surprised than I was when I found myself calling upon The Odyssey when writing my new Mercy Carr mystery, The Night Woods. It happened by what turned out to be serendipitous coincidence. (Or was it coincidence? How much did my subconscious—every writer’s best friend—play a part in this? You be the judge.) I’d been asked to write a few blurbs summing up ideas for the next few books in the series for a new contract, and I just made something up, as we writers are wont to do. One of the blurbs went something like this: A very bored, very pregnant Mercy Carr befriends a Scrabble-loving, shotgun-toting hermit named Homer Grant living deep in the woods with his dog Argos. But when she and her loyal Malinois Elvis arrive at the remote cabin for their weekly game, they find a dead man with an axe in his chest—and no Homer…. I named the erudite hermit Homer because Homer is a great name. (I keep a list of great character names and I hadn’t used this one yet). And I gave him a dog named Argos, because dogs play key roles in my books and Argos is Odysseus’s dog, straight out of The Odyssey. Now What, Homer? I thought no more about it until about a year later when it was time to write the book—and I realized rather belatedly that by choosing the names Homer and Argos I had set myself up for a story steeped in the themes of The Odyssey. War, peace, homecoming, and the transition to the civilian world that so many warriors find so problematic. My heroine Mercy Carr is a former MP who fought in Afghanistan, and Elvis is a retired bomb-sniffing dog who served in that same conflict. I’d written about their homecoming and transition to the civilian world before. So I could definitely make that work. But I hadn’t read the epic poem since that compulsory class on Greek and Roman Lit back in college. I revisited The Odyssey, reading and listening to several of the best translations, including those translated by Robert Fitzgerald, Samuel Butler, and Robert Fagles. For what it’s worth, my favorite is the translation by Emily Wilson; it’s written in very accessible language that nonetheless reads as plainspoken poetry. (Claire Danes beautifully narrates the audiobook. I’m just saying.) Odysseus, Poster Child for PTSD I also did a deep dive on The Odyssey, reading around the subject to find that The Odyssey was often given to soldiers leaving the battlefield and arriving home. The story resonated with returning warriors, and could prove a therapeutic tool for such conditions as PTSD. In discussing this with experts, friends, and colleagues (thank you, Sarah Stewart Taylor), I came to the work of Jonathan Shay MD, PhD, a psychiatrist who’d worked extensively with veterans and written a landmark study called ODYSSEUS IN AMERICA: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming. All of this research—my favorite part of writing a novel—eventually informed The Night Woods. Odysseus’s very name comes from the Greek verb odussomai, usually translated as “wrathful.” That is, to hate, to feel aggrieved, to be angry with. In The Odyssey, that same verb frequently means to cause pain or hold a grudge. The majority of translators agree that Odysseus means “he who causes pain or angers others.” Or, as translator Emily Wilson describes him, “a complicated man.” Odysseus is also a man of contradictions, who can’t wait to go home but manages to delay it a decade—and when he gets there, it’s a place he barely recognizes. And apart from the dog Argos, they don’t recognize him, either. Complications, Contradictions, and More Complications and contradictions are the stuff of crime fiction. The more complicated the characters and the plot, the better. The same is true for contradictions. I embraced both when writing THE NIGHT WOODS—and had great fun developing the characters and building the plot of the story with The Odyssey in mind. (Did I resort to stabbing a character in the eye, à la the Cyclops? Let’s just say I was tempted.) Write Your Own Odyssey As worried as I was when I realized that like it or not I was stuck with Homer and Argos of the aforementioned blurb, it was all okay in the end. Just like in The Odyssey. (Well, sort of.) Writing my humble homage to the ancient Greek epic turned out to be one of the most rewarding creative experiences of my life. I am forever grateful to literature’s favorite No Man. I even got the T-shirt. Part of the fun was noting all the books and films and TV shows also informed by The Odyssey. When you’re writing a book, everything you see and hear and read and watch—even the most random encounter—takes on a sort of inevitable pertinence. Here are some of the ones I enjoyed most: Kate Atkinson, When Will There Be Good News? I love Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series, and this entry is one of the very best. And its aspects inspired by The Odyssey are only part of the reason why. O Brother, Where Art Thou? This wonderful film is The Odyssey reimagined by the incomparable Coen Brothers. Set in Depression-era Mississippi, the film stars George Clooney as Ulysses Everett McGill (Ulysses being the Roman version of the Greek Odysseus). It’s hilarious and inventive and I can’t help but believe that Homer himself would get a kick out of it. James Joyce, Ulysses Speaking of Ulysses, writing The Night Woods was an excuse to reread James Joyce’s magnificent retelling of the epic. I hadn’t read his Ulysses since college, and at the time I found it maddeningly obtuse. But reading it all these years later was an altogether different experience, one that I relished so much I started listening to the Friends of Shakespeare and Company’s podcasts of the unabridged text of Ulysses, made in celebration of the book’s 100th anniversary. It’s narrated by more than a hundred writers, artists, comedians, and musicians from all over the world, including Sally Rooney, Margaret Atwood, Stephen Fry, Pete Buttigieg, Kae Tempest, Ali Smith, and Joanna Lumley. In truth, I’m still listening. But what fun. Tales from the Public Domain The Simpsons, Season 13, Episode 14 In which the Simpson family reads a long overdue library book, and casts Homer as Odysseus, Lisa as Joan of Arc, and Bart as Hamlet. Enough said. Scott Huler, No Man’s Land: One Man’s Odyssey Through The Odyssey Scott Huler’s entertaining and surprisingly moving travelogue details the six-month journey in which he retraces Odysseus’s steps from beginning to end, from the ruins of Troy to the hero’s homeland of Ithaca. I loved this book. The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood, Circe by Madeline Miller, Ithaka by Adele Geras A trio of retellings of The Odyssey retold from the perspective of other people in Odysseus’s life: his long-suffering and resourceful wife Penelope; his lover and captor, sorcerer and minor goddess Circe; and his family waiting back home in Ithaca. All are creative and compelling stories in their own right. *** View the full article

Historically, to be a cook, to prepare food for others, was always to identify oneself with the degraded and the debauched. As far back as ancient Rome, and as recently as pre-Civil War America, cooks were slaves. Untrustworthy, unpleasant, and more often than not, unhealthy, cooks in early twentieth-century Europe and America worked in hot, unventilated spaces for long hours. They were underpaid, underfed, and underappreciated — and their cruel masters despotic, megalomaniacal tyrants, parsimonious desk-jockeys, and brutish warders. Cooks tended —as they still do— to drink. And they died, usually at a young age, with their livers bloated by booze, their feet flattened, hands gnarled, faces ravaged, their lungs coated with the sediment of years of inhaling smoke, airborne grease, and bad air. Their brains were fried by the heat and the pressure and the difficulty of suppressing mammoth surges of rage and frustration, their nervous systems frazzled by mood swings which peaked and crashed with each incoming rush of business. They sweated and toiled in obscurity, cursed their customers, one another, their underlings, and their evil overlords. They cursed the world outside their kitchen doors for making them work like animals, for making them bend always to another’s will. For existing. And yet they were almost always proud. Cooks knew then, as they know now, that the people ‘out there,’ — the ones who lived outside those swinging kitchen doors, the ones who owned homes, who went out to dinner or to the theater on weekend nights, the ones who had holidays off and who saw their loved ones for more than a few fleeting hours a week, were different. The world of the nine-to-five worker, the property owner, the regular restaurant goer, the boss, is completely and maddeningly incomprehensible to those who’ve spent most of their lives bent over a hot range. For a cook, the well-ordered safety and certainty of the kitchen, however hot, cramped, and occasionally crazed, is a place of absolutes. The chef is the Absolute Leader. Food is always served on time. Cold food is served cold. Hot food is served hot. No one is late. No one calls in sick. Let me repeat that: No one calls in sick. The world outside the kitchen doors, to the mind of the cook, is imperfect — a constant source of disappointment, a place of thousands of tiny betrayals which threatens at all times to intrude into their own territory. Mary Mallon, the woman who came (to her everlasting displeasure) to be known as Typhoid Mary, was a cook. Much has been written about Ms. Mallon over the years. There have been sensational newspaper accounts, plays, works of fiction, the predictable feminist reevaluations depicting her as the sad victim of an unfeeling, racist, sexist society bent on bringing a good woman down—her persecution and incarceration the result of some gender-insensitive Neanderthals looking for a quick fix to an embarrassing public health problem. And there is an element of truth in almost all these characterizations. She was a woman. She was Irish. She was poor. None of these, listed on a resume in 1906, was going to put you on the fast track to the White House or a corporate boardroom or even a box seat at the opera. Because, first and foremost, Mary Mallon was a cook. And her story, first and foremost, is the story of a cook. While that may not explain everything about some of the troubling aspects of her life, it explains a hell of a lot. Her tale has not yet, to my knowledge, been told from that point of view. Little historical record of Mary’s life can be depended on —and there are few recorded words or utterances from her own mouth. The accounts of the time, from others involved, directly or indirectly, with her case, are all too often self-serving, incomplete, sensationalistic, or plain wrong. Few, if any, take into account the worldview of the career cook. I’m a chef, and what interests me is the story of a proud cook —a reasonably capable one by all accounts—who at the outset, at least, found herself utterly screwed by forces she neither understood nor had the ability to control. I’m interested in a tormented loner, a woman in a male world, in hostile territory, frequently on the run. And I’m interested in denial —the ways that Mary, and many of us, find to avoid the obvious, the lies we tell ourselves to get through the day, the things we do and say so that we can go on, drag our aching carcasses out of bed each day, climb into our clothes and once again set out for work, often in kitchens where the smell, the surroundings, the ruling regime oppress us. Going in, I knew only that she was a cook with a problem. Few, it seemed, knew her real name. `Typhoid Mary’, the moniker she’s come to be remembered by, is now an all-purpose pejorative, an epithet implying evil intent, willful contagion; shorthand for a woman so foul, so unpleasant, so infectious as to destroy all she touches. If you were to ask a passerby who Typhoid Mary was, you might hear that she was a plague carrier, someone responsible for infecting and killing thousands. In fact, as I soon discovered, Mary’s total body count —for all her career — as tabulated by her most fervent and least forgiving pursuer — came to thirty-three persons infected, with confirmed deaths of only three. Although, in all likelihood, there probably were a few more uncounted, undiscovered cases associated with Mary. God bless her, she often worked off the books. So knowing nothing when I began this project, I soon found myself rooting around dusty collections, library stacks and archives. Research was fun, I have to say. I’ve been penned up in various versions of a 25-foot by 10-foot professional kitchen (like Mary) for most of my adult life, so it was a very new experience for me to acquire knowledge in silence, seated. It helped that I was writing about a fellow cook. The history of my profession has always fascinated me. Years ago, at culinary school, my fellow students and I loved the stories of Vatel, for instance, impaling himself on his sword over a late fish delivery. While we admired the seriousness with which he took his enterprise, we also thought, `What a punk! Who hadda cover for him the next day at work?!’ One of the best parts of being a chef or a cook is exactly that sense of belonging to something, of being made members of a large and secret society. It feels good knowing you are part of a long and glorious tradition of suffering, insanity, and excess. We may not have a secret handshake (though even brushing contact with the callused hand of another cook communicates, in an instant, scads of information) but we have a language, customs, tribal rituals all our own. There is a common structure, a shared understanding of the world, a hierarchy, terminology, and initiation with which we are all intimately familiar, and we take comfort in that too. If Mary was part of anything, she was part of a very different movement, one forged in hunger, dislocation and social upheaval, a sea-change which pushed millions of women out of their homeland and away from their traditional roles, across the sea and into the lonely business of domestic servitude. I have known, at various low points in my long and checkered career, what it feels like when one’s pride in what one does —one’s love of cooking, one’s faith in one’s ability —begins to fade, and I know the kind of sloppiness that can follow. Fortunately, in my case, those days are long gone. I got a second chance. Mary never did. Bouncing from job to job, with lousy pay, no health insurance, no sick days, no vacation, miss one day at work and it’s back on the treadmill . . . find another dirty, badly equipped kitchen . . . and no hope in the world. You endure simply so that you can afford to go on enduring. The small, simple joys of a perfectly made bowl of soup, a rustic stew, a lovely piece of fish cooked just right, disappear, replaced over time by a simmering forced-down resentment, bubbling up and choked down again and again like burning reflux. That you may have cooked good food in the past, worked in the homes of the rich, in great houses or great kitchens, seen the pyramids or danced naked on the moon, matters not at all. Nobody cares. Where once you would have turned your head to cough, you turn no longer. Wash your hands after going to the bathroom? Maybe. If you have time, you’re beyond caring. The people eating your food are abstractions now. Cough or no cough, you know they’ll be back tomorrow, maybe for the Early Bird, the All-You-Can-Eat special. Unwashed hands, an errant cigarette ash, a roasted chicken dropped on a dirty kitchen floor and retrieved on the bounce . . . we’ve been there, you and me and Mary. The central question when examining the career of Mary Mallon, cook, is always, `Why did she go on cooking when she had every reason to believe she was spreading a possibly fatal disease?’ Many of you who’ve worked in greasy spoons, coffee shops, cafeterias, failing, not-very-good restaurants, institutional food services, know the answer already. Cooks work sick. They always have. Most jobs, you don’t work, you don’t get paid. You wake up with a sniffle and a runny nose, a sore throat? You soldier on. You put in your hours. You wrap a towel around your neck and you do your best to get through. It’s a point of pride, working through pain and illness. And in the paranoid realpolitik world of the kitchen it makes a great deal of sense. If you don’t show up to work, someone else fills in for you —either an already overburdened fellow cook, who takes on additional tasks —or worse, an outsider, an interloper, a stranger who might well be considered to do a better job than you — or be less likely to call in sick in the future. When you are working in a kitchen that serves something less than haute cuisine, the likelihood increases that a strong back and the ability to endure are of the utmost importance, a chef or owner frequently passing over the superior technician for the more reliable one. Mary, it should be pointed out, felt fine. She was strong. She was tough. She could take it — and she was proud of her endurance. She worked, and she went on — and when after a time they told her to stop, she ignored them and went on working. One finds oneself being defined by one’s job. The job expiates us from sin; it excuses us our excesses and our lapses. That we are tired, or ill, or in extremis and yet persevere is all we have, sometimes, to sustain our image of ourselves. Mary learned her trade over time, the same way most of us learn. By watching, waiting, working our way slowly up from the bottom. By repeating the same tasks over and over again. It’s a terrible thing—the worst thing, when a good cook, a proud cook goes bad. When pride and proficiency turn to bitterness and sloth. When outside forces corrupt the desire to do a job well and take pleasure in the doing. It’s an awful thing to watch. It’s awful when it happens to you. It’s what happened to the cook, Mary Mallon. Try not to hold it against her. ___________________________________ From Typhoid Mary: An Urban Historical by Anthony Bourdain, on sale in paperback October 15 from Bloomsbury Publishing. Copyright © Anthony M. Bourdain Trust UW, 2024. All rights reserved. View the full article

My adult mystery debut The Treasure Hunters Club is set in a tiny coastal village in Nova Scotia that’s best known as the purported site of a hidden pirate treasure. But it isn’t just Captain Barnabas Dagger’s missing loot that casts a shadow over Maple Bay; Bellwoods, the dramatic, stately Victorian mansion planted across the bay on its seaside perch, has an equally tight hold on local imaginations. The ancestral home of a locally prominent family, Bellwoods is home to many of the novel’s most dramatic and exciting scenes, both in the past – as seen through the recently uncovered journal of a long dead resident – and in the present, when elderly Mirabel Bellwood sends a letter to her long estranged grandson Peter, imploring him to return to Maple Bay and the house his family has called home for generations, an overture with wide reaching ramifications. My home province is full of beautiful, often colourful, Victorian houses. Some of them have been well maintained, others have been abandoned to time and the elements, and many – like Bellwoods – have a front row seat to the ever-changing spectacle of the fickle North Atlantic. These houses have always fascinated me, and so when I set out to write a mystery set in small town Nova Scotia, it was inevitable that I feature one in the story. Bellwoods is just the latest in a long tradition of creepy houses in suspense novels, houses that tend to become characters in and of themselves. The dark, eerie, and often isolated nature of these homes provides a perfect backdrop for secrets, suspense, and sinister occurrences. If you’re a fan of spine-chilling stories where the setting adds to the mystery, here are some fantastic novels featuring creepy houses that will keep you on the edge of your seat. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier “Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again.” It’s one of the more memorable and iconic opening lines in all of literature, and it points directly at the scene of the… crime? In Rebecca, an unnamed protagonist marries the wealthy Maxim de Winter and moves to his estate, Manderley, where she soon finds herself living in the shadow of Maxim’s first wife, Rebecca, whose presence still haunts the halls of the mansion – kept alive, chillingly, by the sinister housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers. Du Maurier uses the sprawling estate to full effect, turning Manderley into a living entity, brimming with secrets, deception, and lingering memories of the past. Hidden rooms, overgrown gardens, and windows framing a taunting, beckoning ocean help heighten the novel’s tension as the mystery of Rebecca’s life—and death—unfolds. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson The titular mansion in The Haunting of Hill House might be the most prominent house in Jackson’s ouevre, but for me, it’s the ill-fated Blackwood family mansion in We Have Always Lived in the Castle that looms largest in my imagination. The narrator, 18-year-old Merricat Blackwood, lives with her sister Constance and their ailing Uncle Julian in their large, ancestral home, which has become both a sanctuary and a prison for the family after a mysterious tragedy. Years earlier, most of their relatives were poisoned during dinner, and while Constance was acquitted of the crime, the townspeople still view the family with suspicion. The arrival of an unexpected visitor threatens their secluded existence and things quickly spiral out of control, building to the unsettling final scenes as Merricat and Constance commit to a new existence in the now transformed house. Fingersmith by Sarah Waters Fingersmith is one of my all time favourite novels, featuring a twist so delicious and elegantly orchestrated that I gasped out loud when it was sprung upon me. Set in Victorian-era England, Fingersmith is a crime novel centering on two young women, Sue Trinder and Maud Lilly, whose lives become entangled in a complex web of betrayal and deception. Sue, raised in a den of thieves, is recruited to help swindle Maud, a wealthy orphan, out of her inheritance by posing as her maid. As Sue integrates into Maud’s household, she discovers unexpected feelings for her, which complicates the plan. However, nothing is as it seems, and the novel is filled with twists and reversals, exploring themes of class, identity, and betrayal. Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia Mexican Gothic is a gothic mystery set in 1950s Mexico. When Noemí is sent to investigate reports of her cousin Catalina’s strange and erratic behavior, she moves into Catalina’s new husband’s family home, High Place, a mansion deep in the Mexican countryside. Upon arriving, Noemí discovers the house is an eerie and decaying structure, filled with strange and evasive inhabitants, and hiding dark family secrets. High Place exudes an unsettling atmosphere with its crumbling walls, strange noises, and hauntingly claustrophobic feel, making it a perfect setting for the disturbing events that unfold. As she uncovers dark secrets about the family’s history and the house itself, Noemí becomes entangled in a sinister plot and has to rely on her wits to survive. Home Before Dark by Riley Sager Riley Sager’s Home Before Dark follows Maggie Holt, who returns to Baneberry Hall, the Victorian mansion her family fled when she was a child. Her father went on to write a bestselling book about their time in the house, claiming it was haunted, but Maggie has always been skeptical of his account. When she moves back to renovate the estate, she begins to experience strange occurrences that mirror the events in her father’s book, leading her to question whether the house is truly haunted or if something else is going on. As Maggie delves deeper into the truth about what’s going on in Baneberry Hall, Sager expertly balances psychological suspense with supernatural elements, creating a narrative that constantly keeps the reader guessing. The atmosphere in Baneberry Hall is thick with mystery, making it one of the most unsettling modern creepy houses in fiction. The Third Wife of Faraday House by B.R. Myers The most recent novel on this list, Faraday House follows Myers’ previous gothic thriller, the Edgar Award winning A Dreadful Splendour. Like The Treasure Hunters Club, this novel also takes place in Nova Scotia, in 1816, and follows Emeline Fitzpatrick, a young woman with limited opportunities, who finds herself shuttled off to the titular Faraday House, an island mansion where she’s expected to marry the twice widowed Captain Graves. But when she discovers that the second wife is still alive, and gravely ill, Emeline realizes that her grand but isolated new home is more of a prison, full of secrets and battered from all directions by the sea. Helped along by some unexpected allies, Emeline is determined to find out the truth about Faraday House before it’s too late. *** View the full article

‘I didn’t have time to write you a short letter,’ wrote Mark Twain, ‘so I wrote you a long one.’ As with many Twain sayings, the origins of this one are slightly obscure, but the sentiment still rings true. It’s not easy to write short stories. If you only have a few words, then every one of them must count. The best short stories tackle big issues – life, death, time-travel – in only a few pages. Perhaps the form itself allows writers to experiment, to approach themes they couldn’t sustain for a whole book. When I put together my short story collection, The Man in Black, I enjoyed revisiting existing characters but also exploring new ideas. What happens when a boy who doesn’t like books meets Jo March from Little Women? What would happen if you saw a murder from a ski lift? What can prehistoric footprints teach us about living with a terminal illness? Many short stories are set in exotic locations and I really enjoyed sending Ruth and Nelson on a trip down the Nile, following in the wake of my heroine, and champion short story writer, Agatha Christie. Here are ten of my favourite short stories: 1. The Monkey’s Paw by WW Jacobs The moral of this story is: be careful what you wish for. An old soldier gives an impoverished couple a mummified monkey’s paw, said to grant three wishes. Ignoring the soldier’s warnings, they wish for two thousand pounds. How this money comes to them is the stuff of nightmares. Yet it’s their third wish that turns the narrative into pure, spine-chilling horror. 2. The Signal Man by Charles Dickens ‘Holloa! Below there!’ These are the first words spoken and yet their meaning is not clear until the very end. The signalman’s job is to receive messages but is he hearing a warning of a tragedy yet to come? Charles Dickens’ ghost story has become a classic and the structure, everything happening in threes, is still the standard for supernatural fiction. 3. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman A woman suffering from ‘nervous depression’ after the birth of a baby is confined to an upstairs room. She becomes obsessed with the yellow wallpaper and, gradually, starts to believe that there is a woman hidden behind it. Is she the woman and, if so, who has imprisoned her? Gilman wrote the novella, first published in 1892, as an attack on the attitudes of the medical profession towards women and, in particular, the treatment of postnatal depression. It’s still just as relevant today. 4. The Double Poet by Alison Lurie I’m a big fan of Alison Lurie, the American writer who sadly died in 2020. Lurie wrote many excellent novels, including Foreign Affairs, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1985, but her short stories are also exquisite. ‘The Double Poet’ is narrated by a successful writer on the literary festival circuit. She’s becoming tired and somewhat disorientated. Is this why people keep describing encounters that she can’t remember? Then, one day, she steps onto the stage to discover that her double is already in the spotlight… 5. Three Miles Up by Elizabeth Jane Howard Elizabth Jane Howard’s short story collection, Mr Wrong, is full of gems, including the title story which will put you off second-hand cars for life. ‘Three Miles Up’ is a chilling little tale that unexpectedly makes the leap into mythology and horror. Two men on a boating trip meet a mysterious woman called Sharon. When they invite her on board, their journey takes a completely different course. The last scene is one of the most chilling things I’ve ever read. 6. The Star by Arthur C Clarke A Jesuit priest and astronomer is horrified when he discovers the fate of a planet once inhabited by civilised and highly-evolved beings. This is an example of a short story that tackles a huge subject. 7. The Traveller’s Story of the Terribly Strange Bed by Wilkie Collins A weary traveller seeks refuge in a seedy Parisian gambling house. He’s pleased, and rather surprised, to be offered a comfortable four-poster bed. Then, just as he’s going to sleep, the bed starts to descend into the floor…This story, which was one of Collins’ earliest published works, shows his fascination with bizarre and fantastical crimes. 8. Mrs Todd’s Shortcut by Stephen King Homer Buckley narrates the story of Ophelia Todd, a woman obsessed with finding shortcuts. After a while Homer notices that many of her routes don’t appear on any map and that Mrs Todd seems to be getting younger by the day. Stephen King is the master of the short story form and I thought about this one a lot when I was writing The Frozen People, a book about disappearing in time. 9. The Witness for the Prosecution by Agatha Christie It’s hard to believe that this slim story, initially entitled ‘Traitor’s Hands’, inspired two films, a TV series and a very successful stage play. Christie herself wrote the original play script and, in the process, changed the ending. It’s still an absolute classic and, as is often the case with crime fiction, the clue is in the title. 10. Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad by MR James Every Christmas Eve, Montague Rhodes James, a professor at King’s College, Cambridge, would gather a group of friends together and entertain them with ghost stories. When his work was eventually published, MR James was hailed as the father of folk horror. ]Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You’ is classic James, combining folklore and archaeology with dry humour – and golf. Read it by a roaring fire… *** View the full article

I didn’t have to conjure the setting for my novel, Every Moment Since. It’s been with me since I was a child and my family and I moved out to “the country”—which is what we called the outskirts of the larger city we lived in. We moved to a ranch-style house set on five acres, with a pasture and a barn, a rabbit hutch, and an expanse of land beyond our property to explore. It was a normal thing for my father and I to saddle the horses and ride on a Saturday afternoon. My pony’s name was Sugar, and she spooked easily. It stayed that way for a while. Living in a place not far from civilization, yet close enough to get to it if you needed to, was a good way to grow up. My brother and I roamed all over, building dams in the creek that ran across the back of our property and inventing imaginative games. It was mostly just the two of us, there were no neighbors to speak of, at least not ones that could be playmates. I’m convinced that was a key element of what made me a writer—a lot of solitude, a lot of imagination. And then change began to creep in. A neighborhood went in up by the fork in the road just up from our house. It was an “executive collection” style neighborhood, built to appeal to the young families being transferred from places like New Jersey, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Now, the houses probably seem modest, but back then they were considered big and luxurious. There was a farm that was sort of the centerpiece of all the land around us—a big sweeping place with a long drive leading to a quintessential southern farmhouse, flanked by a caretaker’s cottage that sat off to the side, with fields in front and behind featuring crops that, in my memory, seemed to change from season to season. Then one day I learned that the farm was being sold. I don’t remember why, but I remember knowing that, with the sale, more change was coming, harder and faster than ever. With an inevitable sense of foreboding, I sensed that the place I called home would not be the same very much longer. And I was right. The last time I was in my hometown I went back to the place where that farm once stood. It is now the site of hundreds and hundreds of townhome-style condos. The fork in front of it is a major intersection. But the neighborhood of executive-collection home remains. The home I grew up in is gone. Years ago developers picked it up and moved it off the land so they could build even more condos in the place where I once carved new paths in the woods, witnessed a calf being born, pretended I was Laura Ingalls Wilder. You might say it is all gone. Except. It lives again in my latest novel, Every Moment Since. With the aid of that imagination I once relied so heavily on, I brought it all back to life on the page: The two boys riding their bikes over from the new neighborhood, their mother wondering if they’ll be ok in the dark. The young man living in that cottage next door to the big farmhouse, annoyed at the sounds of children trespassing in the fields out front, a little girl who just moved in, wondering if she can join the kids who are playing in the empty fields. They are all there, in a place I may not can return to physically. But I did, in my mind. I hope I’ve done it justice and I hope that, in some way, it reminds you, also, of home. *** View the full article