I read it. I think I read it at least once a day, but I’m not sure:
Your name is James Jansen. You are 43 years old. Right now you are at your cabin in the mountains of Montana near the town of Woodworth. You are paralyzed from the neck down. Your nurse’s name is Pam. She lives with you and will help you with anything you need. Your sister lives nearby in Missoula. Her name is Courtney, and she’s 37. You were injured four years ago in an automobile accident when you lost control of your car and crashed into a ravine. You were in a coma in St. Anthony Medical Center in Los Angeles, California, until last September.
Before the accident, you were a very famous actor. You won the Oscar (a very prestigious award) in 20--, for your role in Down From the Sleeping Trees. You’re holding it right now. Pam will tell you more about your acting career if you would like to know.
Today is April 15, 20--.
I look down into my lap. There is in fact a shiny gold statue between my legs, gleaming in the sun.
Wind comes across the water and blows the paper out of my lap into the bright grass beside Pam. I hear the wind moving through the fir trees. Chimes jingle on the back porch of the cabin.
I start to ask Pam about who I was before the car wreck, but I stop. I’ll bet I ask her that every day, and I’ll bet she gets sick of having to tell me. Or maybe I just think I ask her every day, and so I never do. Perhaps I’ve had this same train of thought thirty days in a row.
So I don’t say anything. It’s easier to sit here and not think and stare at the lake and the mountains and the evergreens.
I’m not sad.
Not at all.
I don’t feel much of anything except contentment to be out in this glorious morning.
Even if she were to tell me things about my old self, I don’t think it would move me any more than the memory of a dream, because the only thing real to me is this moment—the wind-stirred lake and Pam and the blue Montana sky.
THE END
Interview with Blake Crouch by Hank Wagner
Originally Published in Crimespree, July 2009
According to his website, Blake Crouch grew up in Statesville, a small town in the piedmont of North Carolina. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2000, where he studied literature and creative writing. He currently resides in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado. Crouch’s first book, Desert Places, was published in 2003. Pat Conroy called it “Harrowing, terrific, a whacked-out combination of Stephen King and Cormac McCarthy.” Val McDermid described it as “An ingenious, diabolical debut that calls into question all our easy moral assumptions. Desert Places is a genuine thriller that pulses with adrenaline from start to finish.” His second novel, Locked Doors, was published in July 2005. A sequel to Desert Places, it created a similar buzz. His third novel, Abandon, was published on July 7, 2009.
HANK WAGNER: Your writing career began in college?
BLAKE CROUCH: I started writing seriously in college. I had tinkered before, but the summer after my freshman year, I decided that I wanted to try to make a living at being a writer. Spring semester of 1999, I was in an intro creative writing class and I wrote the short story (called “Ginsu Tony”) that would grow into Desert Places. Once I started my first novel, it became an obsession.
HW: Where did the original premise for Desert Places come from?
BC: The idea for Desert Places arose when two ideas crossed. I had the opening chapter already in my head... suspense writer receives an anonymous letter telling him there’s a body buried on his property, covered in his blood. I didn’t know where my protagonist was going to be taken though. Around the same time, I happened to be glancing through a scrapbook that had photographs of this backpacking trip I took in Wyoming in the mid 90’s. One of those photographs was of a road running off into the horizon in the midst of a vast desert. My brain starting working. What if my protagonist is taken to a cabin out in the middle of nowhere, by a psychopath? What if this cabin is in this vast desert, and he has no hope of escape? That photograph broke the whole story open for me.
HW: Why a sequel for your second book? Affection for the characters?
BC: It was actually my editor’s idea. I was perfectly happy walking away from the first book. But once she mentioned it during the editing of Desert Places, I really started to think about where the story could go, wondered how Andy might have changed after seven years in hiding, and I got excited about doing it. And I’m very glad I did, because I would’ve missed those characters. Even my psychopaths are family in some strange, twisted way.
HW: Of all the reviews and comments about your books, what was the strangest? The meanest? The nicest? The most perceptive?
BC: The strangest: This was a comment about me and the reviewer wrote something to the effect that I was either a super-talented writer with an immense imagination or one sick puppy. I think that’s open to debate. The meanest: From those [expletive deleted] at Kirkus. Now, keep in mind, this is my first taste of reviews and the reviewer absolutely savaged my book. It was so mean it was funny... although I didn’t see the humor for some time. The review ended, “Sadly, a sequel is in the works.” The nicest: That’s hard to choose from. I particularly loved the review for Locked Doors that appeared in the Winston-Salem Journal. The reviewer wrote, and this is my favorite quote thus far, “If you don’t think you’ll enjoy seeing how Crouch makes the torture and disembowelment of innocent women, children and even lax store employees into a thing of poetic beauty, maybe you should go watch Sponge Bob.” The most perceptive: The reviews that recognize that I’m trying to make a serious exploration of the human psyche, the nature of evil, and man’s depravity are the ones that please me the most.
HW: Do you strive for realism in your writing, or do you try more to entertain?
BC: First and foremost, I want to entertain. I want the reader to close the book thinking, “that was a helluva story.” Beyond that, I do strive for realism. I want the reader to identify with my characters’ emotions, whether it’s fear, sadness, or happiness. The places I write about, from the Yukon to the Outer Banks to the Colorado mountains are rendered accurately, and that’s very important to me, because I want the reader to have the benefit of visiting these beautiful places in my books.
HW: The villain in Locked Doors seems almost a force of nature, cunning, instinctively brilliant when it comes to creating mayhem. Do you worry that readers might write him off as unrealistic?
BC: I decided to approach Luther Kite a little differently than my bad guy, Orson Thomas, in 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.