A LIVING GRAVE is the first book of a
series featuring Katrina (Hurricane) Williams. A PARTICULAR DARKNESS is the
second. The fact that A LIVING GRAVE became a continuing series, I think, owes
a lot to one of my favorite characters—the Ozarks location.
I’ve always been a fan of books that use
their environment as a character to shape and define the actions of the people
who live within it. The Katrina Williams series is set in a fictionalized
version of my own home, the Missouri Ozarks. It is a dark world where murder
collides with modern day bootleggers, mobsters, bikers, and a sinister figure
in the forest who may or may not be real.
My take on what I like to call, Ozarks
Noir, was inspired by other rural mysteries that have shaped the fictional
American landscape over the last few years. I’m proud to say that my books have
been compared favorably to those of a master. James Lee Burke has stamped his
mark on several locales and made them almost the personal possession of this
characters. He practically holds the title to Louisiana and New Iberia Parish
in the pages of his Dave Robicheaux novels.
More recently, Ace Atkins has staked out
rural Mississippi as the home for The Ranger, Quinn Colson. Location can serve
as more than a character too. The Longmire books by Craig Johnson and the Joe
Pickett novels by C.J. Box are filled with the living, breathing, west. At the
same time they define and create a whole modern western genre.
When I decided to write a novel about a
female main character I was stepping outside my comfort zone. I’m an old, guy,
what do I know about being a woman, let alone one who has Katrina’s troubling
experiences? So, when it comes to the world she inhabits I fell back on that
old dictum, Write What You Know.
I grew up in the Missouri Ozarks after my
father retired from the military and finally settled us. At that time and place
the rural world was just beginning to give way to the suburban. It was actually
a pretty good place for a kid to grow up. It was a world filled with ball
games, lake fishing, river swimming, and my least favorite, hay hauling. I only
did it a couple of summers but ¢2 a bale for a day of following a tractor,
bucking hay onto the trailer, then stacking it in the barn is not an easy
memory to let go of. I guess that’s the thing, none of them are easy memories
to be shed of and who would want to?
Since I began writing I’ve been setting
stories from the mundane to the fantastic in that world. There was a zombie
novel with Lovcraftian old gods in a cave, followed by an alien siege story. They
mostly got stranger from there. When I thought about writing a mystery there
was no other place to set it. I thought about how I wanted things to work out
and where they should begin, who the characters were and why they were the way
they were. But it wasn’t coming together. And if it wasn’t working for me I
knew for sure it wouldn’t do so for anyone else. I thought a lot about why and
I even took a couple of trips to the Ozarks to get a new feel for the old
places.
What was missing?
Home. The world had changed and I didn’t
know the new one like I knew the old one. I stepped back and started over. My
character, Katrina (Hurricane) Williams is a woman who was one of those leading
edge female Army officers. At a time when the Military was officially keeping
women from combat postings they were fighting wars with no front lines. Women
were at war, taking fire, but at the same time unacknowledged. More than that,
they were denied.
Changes. It was about the shift from an old
way to a new one and the damage that inflicts on those who make it happen. To
show that, I brought her back to our home, the one she and I share. But I took
a new look at what it is and what it was. Then I stated writing my Ozarks as a
melding of the old and new, my memory, my idealizing, with the world the way it
is.
Katrina, is a bit of a ghost in her world,
haunting old America even as it becomes the modern world. Her lake world of
deep green foliage, wooden boat docks strung with bare bulbs, country music
shows, and warm life, is colored by terrible events from a world away. I’ve
never been to war. I can’t write that experience, but I know home and how home
is taken away and shoved into memory by the events of a life. So that’s what I
wrote.
The Ozarks became a character more than a
location in A LIVING GRAVE. It engulfs the characters and in the case of
Katrina, it tries to shield her from the trauma of war and betrayal. It fails.
And because the location is another flawed character, a flawed home, I hope we
can all relate and find ourselves in that world for a little while. That’s not
up to me. It’s up to the reader to judge how I did. But I will say this to
anyone who chooses to read the Katrina Williams series,
welcome to my home.
I
wasn't born in a log cabin but the station wagon did have wood on the
side. It was broken down on the approach road into Ft. Rucker,
Alabama in the kind of rain that would have made a Biblical author
jealous. You never saw a tornado in the Old Testament did you? As
omens of a coming life go, mine was full of portent if not exactly
glad tidings.
From there things got interesting. Life on a
series of Army bases encouraged my retreat into a fantasy world. Life
in a series of public school environments provided ample nourishment
to my developing love of violence. Often heard in my home was the
singular phrase, "I blame the schools." We all blamed the
schools.
Both my fantasy and my academic worlds left marks and
the amalgam proved useful the three times in my life I had guns
pointed in my face. Despite those loving encounters the only real
scars left on my body were inflicted by a six foot, seven inch tall
drag queen. She didn't like the way I was admiring the play of three
a.m. Waffle House fluorescent light over the high spandex sheen of
her stockings.
After a series of low paying jobs that took me
places no one dreams of going. I learned one thing. Nothing vomits
quite so brutally as jail food. That's not the one thing I learned;
it's an important thing to know, though. The one thing I learned is a
secret. My secret. A terrible and dark thing I nurture in my
nightmares. You learn your own lessons.
Eventually I began
writing stories. Mostly I was just spilling out the, basically, true
narratives of the creatures that lounge about my brain, laughing and
whispering sweet, sweet things to say to women. Women see through me
but enjoy the monsters in my head. They say, sometimes, that the
things I say and write are lies or, "damn, filthy lies, slander
of the worst kind, and the demented, perverted, wishful stories of a
wasted mind." To which I always answer, I tell only the truth. I
just tell a livelier truth than most people.
Author
Links:
Twitter: https://twitter.com/WritingDead
Amazon:
http://amzn.to/2f9kurj
GIVEAWAY
advice for writers
characters
creating characters
giveaway
guest post
location
Robert Dunn
Robert E Dunn
Silver Dagger Book Tours
writing advice
writing tips
 Williams. A PARTICULAR DARKNESS is the second. The fact th...){kind=link}
0 Comments
I love to hear from you. So feel free to comment, but keep in mind the basics of blog etiquette — no spam, no profanity, no slander, etc.
Thanks for being an active part of the Writers and Authors community.