Four Live Rounds (10 page)

My name is Donald Kennington. Please forward
this message to Arthur Holland, detective with the St. Paul Police
Department.

The death of my daughter, Tabitha Kennington,
brings me to these mountains. I am writing this in my car on August
5th, having followed Roger and Susan Cockrell, of Eden Prairie,
Minnesota, to Beech Spring Gap. I have taken their photographs with
a digital camera, along with pictures of their green Range Rover
and license plate. You will find my camera containing these
pictures in the trunk of my car.

At this moment, I do not know if Mr. Cockrell
was responsible for killing my daughter in a hit-and-run six years
ago. I plan to meet the Cockrells tonight and find out. To be
clear, I intend no physical harm to Mr. Cockrell or his wife. If
Mr. Cockrell is responsible, however, we will see if I’m so lucky.
Does a man who runs down a young woman and leaves the scene contain
it within him to murder in cold blood in order to hide his crime
and his shame?

I suspect he does.

The Cockrells will be thorough in disposing
of my body, tent, backpack, etc., which makes this last bit of
business a little tricky.

My camp is in a small glade in the
rhododendron thicket on the east slope of Shining Rock Mountain,
approximately a hundred vertical feet above the meadows of Beech
Spring Gap. The glade is twenty yards across, with a large boulder
in the middle. Look for a flat, shiny rock in the grass. My tent
now stands over it, and I’ve made a tiny rip in the tent floor and
dug a small, shallow hole in the ground under the rock.

Late tonight, if Mr. Cockrell admits his
guilt, into this hole, sealed and safe in plastic, I will drop a
tape recorder, and hopefully rebury it before he murders me.

###

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 short story from J.A.
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 started
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
Desert
Places
. In the first book, I tried to humanize Orson, to gin up
sympathy by explaining what happened in his childhood to turn him
into this monster. With Luther et al., I made a conscious decision
not to delve into any of that, and for this reason I think he comes
off as almost mythic, larger than life, maybe with even a tinge of
the supernatural. I don’t worry that readers will find him
unrealistic, because I didn’t try to make him like your typical
realistic humdrum villain. What I want is for readers to fear
him. 

HW: What’s the most important thing a book
has to do to keep YOUR attention? 

BC: It’s actually very simple... a great
story told through great writing. I don’t care if it’s western,
horror, thriller, historical, romance, or literary. I just want to
know that I’m in the hands of someone who knows what they’re
doing. 

HW: Who are your literary heroes?

BC: I grew up on southern writers -- Walker
Percy, Pat Conroy -- the fantasy of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.
In college I discovered Thomas Harris, Dennis Lehane, James Lee
Burke, Caleb Carr, and my favorite writer, Cormac McCarthy.
McCarthy just blows me away. His prose is so rich. He is unlike
anyone else out there today. His 1985 novel,
Blood Meridian
,
in my opinion, is the greatest horror novel ever written. 

HW: What makes
Blood Meridian
“the
greatest horror novel ever written?” 

BC: The writing is mind blowing. The violence
(which occurs frequently and in vivid detail) rises to the level of
poetry in McCarthy’s hands. And the story is fascinating. It’s
based on historical fact and follows a bloodthirsty gang through
the Mexico-Texas Borderlands in the mid-1800’s, who have been hired
by the Mexican government to collect as many Indian scalps as they
can. I read
Blood Meridian
every year. 

HW: Reading
Desert Places
and
Locked Doors
, it seems that you’re drawn to the horrific.
The books are filled with horrific acts, and with terrifying set
pieces, as in the descent into the Kites’ basement in
Locked
Doors
. Did the horror genre hold any attraction to you growing
up? 

BC: I honestly didn’t read a lot of horror
growing up, but I always loved the sensation of fear produced by a
scary movie or a great book. Some of my first short fiction
(written in middle school) could be classified as horror. In fact,
there’s a short story on my website called “In Shock” that I wrote
in the 8th grade. 

HW: Might there be a sequel to
Locked
Doors
someday?

BC: Midway through the writing of
Locked
Doors
, it occurred to me the story might be a trilogy. I may
finish out the trilogy at some point. I’m starting to miss my
characters (the ones that survived), and I have a feeling that I
will return to the world of
Locked Doors
at some point in
the future to check in on them. We’ll have to see. 

HW: Your latest novel,
Abandon
, is set
in Colorado, where you’ve lived for the past six years.  Did
you intend to write a novel set in that state when you moved there,
or did your surroundings inspire you to?

BC: This was definitely a case of my
surroundings inspiring me. Two months after we moved from North
Carolina to Durango, we had some friends come out to visit. My wife
and I took them on a backpacking trip into the San Juans, and it
was on this trip that I first saw the ruins of a mining
town—Sneffels, Colorado and the Camp Bird Mine. It made a huge
impression, the idea of living in these extreme conditions,
particularly in winter. The claustrophobia, the desperation, the
kind of people who would subject themselves to such a life
fascinated me.

HW: Did you have any particular goals in mind
when you embarked on this project?  Did they change as you
worked?  Do you think you met your goals?

BC: The idea of writing a “mining town
thriller” was with me for a long time, as early as the summer of
2003, before
Desert Places
was published.  Initially, I
thought it would all be set in the past, a straight historical.
Then in ‘05, while on tour for
Locked Doors
, I had a sudden
realization that this was the story I needed to write, and that it
wasn’t just historical. There would be present scenes, too, and the
mystery at the heart of the book would be the mass disappearance of
the town. My goal was to write a book that I would want to read,
and in that regard, I think I succeeded.

HW: How long did it take to prepare to write
the book?  How much research was involved?  Do you
research first, then write, or answer the questions that arise as
you dive into the writing?

BC: I started outlining in the fall of ‘05,
and finalized the book with my editor in the summer ‘07. 
There were 7 drafts, and tons of research, which occurred at all
stages of the writing.

HW: Was it tough striking a balance between
writing a thriller and the urge to display all your newfound
knowledge?  Any fascinating tidbits that didn’t go into the
book that you want to share with readers?

BC: Lots of stuff got cut, and some of it was
wonderful (and it still pains me to have let it go) but in the end,
it was all about what advanced the story.  For instance, there
was an Irishman who lived in one of the Colorado mining towns, and
the love of his life had died on their wedding night some years
prior. Every night, from his cabin above town, the sound of a
violin would sweep down the mountain. Mournful, beautiful music.
The town got used to hearing it.  One night, after the violin
went silent, a single gunshot echoed from the cabin. The townsfolk
went up and found him dead, with a note asking to be buried with
his wife. I loved that bit, wanted to put this guy into the story,
but it didn’t belong, so I had to let it go.

HW: Your first two books followed the
adventures of basically the same cast of characters.  Was it a
relief or was it scary to move on to a whole new set of
players?

BC: Both a total relief and completely
terrifying. But what’s worse than the fear of doing something new
and challenging is realizing one day that you’re in a rut, that
you’ve essentially written the same book again and again.

HW: Your first two books could be described
as pure, relentless adrenaline.  In fact, those are your
words.  Was it difficult to work on a novel taking place in
two different times, switching back and forth between the two?
 How about working with a larger cast?  Did that present
you with any particular challenges, issues, problems?