In the Forest of Harm
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Stephen Ambrose
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Stan and Jan Berenstain |
A harrowing journey into 'The Forest of Harm'
INTERVIEW BY MARTIN BRADY
Sometimes you just have to push yourself. At least that's what Sallie Bissell did. The result is the publication of her first novel, In the Forest of Harm, an engaging, well-crafted thriller with an ambience that's as big as all outdoors. Bissell, a native of Nashville who spends a good bit of her time at a second home in Asheville, North Carolina, has been writing seriously for about 10 years. She had some prior success ghostwriting for a series of young adult books, but her first two serious novels were never published. "My unpublished books were pretty much mainstream fiction," Bissell says quietly, seated at a Nashville coffee shop. "The second made the round of editors and agents. They liked the way I wrote and they liked my characters, but they all had this one problem: not enough was happening. So I got sort of aggravated and I said to myself, I'm going to write a book where a lot of stuff happens." That she did. In the Forest of Harm is a solid suspense tale about three young women lawyers who trek up into the hills of North Carolina in search of peace and relaxation, but instead find evil and terror. Bissell's protagonist is a welcome entry into the canon of mystery writing's fascinating plucky females. Cherokee Indian Mary Crow is an Atlanta district attorney, with a reputation for successfully throwing the book at the bad guys. But for all her personal strength, Mary has some nasty skeletons in her closet, and she bears wounds she has been unable to heal. A hiking expedition with her two best friends -- Joan and Alex -- takes Mary back to the hills of North Carolina's Nantahala National Forest, where she faces an old love and the memory of her mother's violent death. Bissell has a strong gift for portraying the rural mountain surroundings, and at times her descriptions of the forest and its vegetation are reminiscent of British novelist P.D. James, who has a similar regard for flora and fauna. "North Carolina's got such tremendous scenery," says Bissell, a slender, wiry lady. "It was irresistible not to put that in the book. I know the hiking trails pretty well, though I'm more of a day-hiker than an overnight camper." Bissell reached a point in her life where she knew she had to make an all-out commitment to writing full-time. In so doing, she decided to live someplace else for a while. "Asheville's a pretty writer-friendly town. I wrote my second novel there and then decided to write this book. It's interesting to go to a place where you're not a native. I can walk around Nashville and never notice it because I've seen it so much and it's not fresh. But then you go to the mountains and you see them for the first time." Bissell pauses wistfully. "After that, they're always changing." In this regard, Bissell is not unlike her leading lady, Mary Crow. "I was interested in a character who was between two worlds. I was interested in a woman who has a background that's very different from what she's currently doing. Mary has her feet in two different worlds and she's trying to integrate those two things together. I found that fictionally very interesting." As to notions of terror -- and In the Forest of Harm has plenty of that -- Bissell had to find her own inspiration. "I just sat down and thought, If I were on this trip, what would terrify me?" The result is every female's worst nightmare and a character who is almost cosmically evil. Says Bissell: "The writers' group I'm in sort of balked at Henry Brank and they said you can't have these women going up against someone they can't possibly defeat. So I toned him down a bit. In the first version, he was mindlessly evil for no reason. Then I gave him some background. It's funny how things work out sometimes. Characters sort of tell you what they need or want to be sometimes, and you have to go with it." Bissell is quick to credit her agent -- Robbie Anna Hare in Washington, D.C. -- and her editor at Bantam, Kate Miciak, for helping her to bring the book into focus. She's also grateful for being involved in not one, but two writers' groups, one in Asheville and one in Nashville. "I feel like they really helped me improve the book a lot. What's interesting about a writers' group is that they write and they read different things, so not everybody's a thriller writer, not everybody's a literary writer. But they all bring those gifts to the table. It's really a wonderful thing. I feel fortunate to be in a group with readers of that caliber." But in the end, it's just SalIie Bissell and her computer, piecing together the strands of a plotline carried out by palpable characters. The follow-up volume to In the Forest of Harm is due out sometime in 2002. "I know how the book ends when I start, but I don't know what's going to happen along the way. It's like saying, 'I'm going to go to Franklin, Tennessee, but I don't know what route I'm going to take.' The various characters always sort of tell you what to do. There was a point in doing some re-writing with Harm when my editor thought there was a certain section that was a little cliche. That struck fear into me," Bissell admits. "One of the biggest challenges of writing is that really not a whole lot ever happens in real life. I was faced with the challenge that once the initial mayhem occurs, the characters have to get from point A to point B. The way I did that was I just reverted to character." Push yourself, then follow the flow. It's a good formula for successful thriller writing.
Martin Brady is an editor, writer and critic. He lives in Nashville.
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