Sign Up

Get the latest ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.

All Thriller Coverage

Interview by

John Fram, author of The Bright Lands, shares his fresh and frightening take on the small-town thriller and describes what it feels like to be compared to Stephen King.


What was the inspiration for the story? Where did the idea come from and what compelled you to see it through to the end?
All my life, I’ve wanted to read a suspense novel that featured a queer hero and dealt frankly with all the pressures and pleasures of the queer experience. One morning, over coffee, I realized that after spending years away from Texas, I would still be terrified to return to my hometown, even if something desperate were to arise and my family needed my help. I began to wonder what sort of chaos my queer hero could cause in just such a situation, especially if he came to suspect his hometown was hiding something from him.

The last author I interviewed laughed when I asked if she used a whiteboard to organize her plot. So I’ll just ask, what is your writing process and what did you learn that might help you next time?
The moment I started living in this book’s world, I found so much material—and so many characters—that I went more than a little overboard with the planning and the notes. This might be shocking, but apparently it’s not a great idea to write a rough outline that’s as long as a novel itself. Even after slicing out reams and reams of material, I still submitted a manuscript to my agent that needed to be cut down by another third. It was a humbling experience, but not an entirely unpleasant one. There’s nothing quite so thrilling as throwing 20 pages of decent material in the trash in the hope that five better ones will grow in their place. It takes faith, and maybe a streak of masochism.

“I think we’re all suckers for nostalgia.”

What is it about small-town America and football that is so eminently relatable to readers?
Oh, man, how long do you have? One of the greatest pleasures I take from a novel is the feeling of losing myself in a world where everyone is getting into each other’s secrets, making each other breakfast, robbing each other blind. On a purely technical level, small towns also give us a setting that’s easy for the reader to hold in her head, so to speak.

As for football, there’s something nice about a conflict in which we know exactly who to root for. Beyond that, I think we’re all suckers for nostalgia. Who doesn’t have some latent scent memory of bleacher steel, thunder, dry grass? We all love to suspend ourselves in the past again. What better way to do that than in a novel where everyone seems like someone you once knew?

Some early critics have likened the novel to those by Stephen King. Who are your influences, what did you learn from them and if you had to compare your writing to someone’s, who would that be?
The comparisons to Mr. King are more than mildly daunting. I think he casts a long shadow over all of us, though I didn’t actually have the courage to read him until I was in my late teens (when he, of course, rocked my world). When I was younger, my two idols were the British crime wizard Ruth Rendell and the almighty Alice Munro, who can teach us more about time and irony than anyone in English. Also, what little gay boy in the sticks doesn’t identify with Munro’s moody country girls, all eager to discard their childhoods?

A few years ago, I discovered Kate Atkinson and found, in her wry English observations, the courage to write in the voice my family used to tell stories at the table. Atkinson treats her characters in a way that’s imminently Texan: She regards them with compassion, brutal honesty and a bleak, gut-busting humor. So, these days, if I had to be anybody, I’d like to be the gay son that she and Stephen King never had.

There’s an obvious theme in the book about the pressures and expectations others put on a person, especially a star athlete like Dylan. His brother, Joel, is a gay man and faces his own prejudices. What compelled you to write about those pressures, and what lessons do you hope readers might take away from this novel?
I think subconsciously I understood that these two pressures aren’t all that different, though it took me until well into the writing process to articulate it. I’m not saying that the star athlete suffers as badly as the closeted kid next door, but both can suffer incredible pain if they fail to fulfill the need their hometown has for them. Once I had that epiphany, I realized I could expand the novel to encompass all manner of “other” people who are held to impossible standards or pushed out by society: women, people of color, the poor. I wanted to make the reader feel, if only for a few pages, how terrifying it is to be different in a place that doesn’t accept you. Ideally, that reader would feel empowered to kick down a few walls wherever they live. Otherwise, they’ll at least know why the weirdos like us won’t go away without a fight.

All of the characters depicted in The Bright Lands are richly layered and authentic. Did you draw from people you know in real life to help flesh out those characters, or are they more of an amalgamation of people you’ve met?
Like a lot of authors, I’ve always felt that I can turn a little invisible when I’m around people I want to know more about. Ever since I was little, I’ve blended into the edges of rooms and grocery lanes to eavesdrop on housewives, employees and schoolmates and gather up every odd turn of phrase or token of their inner life they might drop. It’s a valuable skill. After a few years, I realized I’d seen enough people to start stitching together a few of my own.

How much of yourself do you see in your characters? Did any of them reveal any truths about you that you hadn’t thought about until you saw it on the written page?
There’s a line about midway through the book that came to me only a few weeks before the book went out on submission. To paraphrase myself, it says that shame and fear, while one can lead to the other, can never be felt at the same time. I had worked a long, long time on the scene where that line appears, and when the words finally came together, I realized that it was maybe the only thing I’d learned in the first 25 years of my life.


ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of The Bright Lands.


For the first 200 pages, your book reads like a crime novel. We have a disappearance followed by the discovery of a body. But the further you get, the supernatural aspects become more prevalent. How difficult was it to balance those genres?
In its original form, this book was . . . I guess you’d say secular: no ghosts, no whispering voices, no shared nightmares. But I saw, in looking over that draft, that the text was so filled with strange, occult imagery—a deep hole, impossibly dark, kept creeping into all my metaphors—that I just sort of gave myself over to it during the rewrites. Introducing elements of the supernatural into a book with a carefully constructed mystery at its heart posed some incredibly satisfying technical challenges (to make sure the reader never felt cheated or done over) while also allowing me to heighten the drama for all of my characters. Yes, there are some strange powers at work in Bentley, but they’re simply enabling our culprits’ bad behavior. The darkness, in short, is already there inside them.

What do you hope a novel like The Bright Lands can do for readers in a time when the COVID-19 pandemic is gripping the world?
This might sound ridiculous, but I’ve found horror novels and thrillers to be weirdly homeopathic during this massive existential threat. I think this panic is driving home to the entire (straight, white) population something that queers and people of color and women have been saying for years: The world isn’t safe, and the people in charge are not looking out for you. Where can we find a better mirror to that reality than in a brutal piece of suspense?

What’s next for you?
If I’m lucky, I’ll be able to keep telling stories like The Bright Lands: character-driven supernatural thrillers whose monsters allow us to examine the sorts of scary truths we’d rather not acknowledge.

 

Author photo © Luke Fontana.

 

Something terrible lurks behind the facade of a small Texas town in John Fram’s thrilling debut.
Interview by

Failing technology and an unknown disaster loom over the events in Rumaan Alam’s smart and terrifying novel.

There’s a stranger at the door. The phone doesn’t work. We’re trapped here. These are some of the many thriller elements that writer Rumaan Alam incorporates into his new novel, Leave the World Behind. Yet despite the familiarity of these tropes, the 43-year-old novelist has written a wholly unique story that feels of the moment for all the darkest reasons.

Leave the World Behind features Clay and Amanda, white parents from Brooklyn who have rented a summer home in an isolated part of Long Island. Their vacation has just begun when the house’s owners, George and Ruth, a wealthy Black couple, arrive unexpectedly in the middle of the night. George and Ruth apologize for interrupting the family’s vacation, but there has been a strange blackout in New York City.

A blackout doesn’t seem like such a big deal, Amanda thinks. She’s not entirely convinced that George and Ruth are who they say they are and wishes they would leave. But the homeowners explain that they sensed they would be safer outside the city. Safer from what, no one can be sure.

“That parental fear is really a primal fear.”

Alam wrote the first draft of Leave the World Behind in only three weeks, during what he describes as a “fevered state.” The novel is a true departure for the author, whose previous books, Rich and Pretty and That Kind of Mother, stick to the intimate realms of family drama and women’s relationships. They certainly aren’t quite so creepy.

“I wanted to write a book that appeared to be very domestic but actually was talking about the whole world,” Alam explains during a call to his home in Brooklyn. The novel’s inspiration came from a summer vacation taken by Alam with his husband, the photographer David A. Land, and their 8- and 11-year-old boys. George and Ruth’s luxurious second house is based on one the author rented via Airbnb.


ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our starred review of Leave the World Behind.


Leave the World Behind unfolds over just a few days, and the momentum of the increasing dread is masterful. “I hoped that the book would have the sense of a ticking clock,” Alam says, “that once you’re in the world of the book, time is mirroring your experience of reading it.” He describes that kind of page-turning, stay-up-all-night reading experience as “sticky.”

In this, Alam undoubtedly succeeds. However, the book isn’t trying to be a mystery for the reader to decipher. “There’s a lot the book does not answer, in part because I don’t know the answers to those things,” Alam says. “The book raises 30 questions, and I think it answers, like, 12 of them.” Throughout the novel, snippets of explanations provoke more questions—scarier questions—a few pages later. And amid the mounting horror, the book’s messages about privilege, safety and comfort—as well as gender and race—slowly but deliberately sharpen into focus.

Unsurprisingly, Alam was influenced by Jordan Peele’s 2017 film, Get Out, another tale in which a seemingly benign excursion careens into pure terror. Alam also sought to conjure the “psychological menace” of the film adaptation of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, based on the 1962 Edward Albee play. Other influences include Stephen King’s 1983 horror novel Pet Sematary and Paul Beatty’s 2015 novel, The Sellout.

Leave the World BehindMuch of the dread, confusion and fear in Leave the World Behind comes down to technology: The internet is down, and the radio and TV aren’t working. Alam knew that readers would relate to the experience of having a bad Wi-Fi connection or their cellphone being out of range. But we also trust these devices to eventually reconnect. What if they didn’t? For the characters in Leave the World Behind, frustration at the lack of concrete information soon turns to panic. Speculation replaces fact. The terror lies in the unknown.

These fears will resonate with readers, Alam thinks, due to not only the pandemic but also political malaise. “It’s clear to me that the book is born of a feeling of dread [that] has been in politics, or in the culture, for a couple of years now,” he says.

Like many authors, Alam mined his own fears for his novel, and his concerns come down to a feeling of powerlessness. Writing, he jokes, would be essentially useless toward keeping his children alive during a disaster. “I have nothing to offer my children in the event of a calamity,” he says.

After all, there’s almost nothing scarier in a book than what you fear will happen to your children. “That parental fear is really a primal fear,” Alam says, and Leave the World Behind holds nothing back in exploring how far that fear can go.

 

Author photo by David A. Land

Failing technology and an unknown disaster loom over the events in Rumaan Alam’s smart and terrifying novel.

Paul Vlitos and Collette Lyons explore the anxiety-inducing allure of Instagram in their debut thriller, People Like Her, written under the pen name Ellery Lloyd.

Congratulations on your first Ellery Lloyd novel! How did you decide on your collective pseudonym? Did you also come up with the idea for the book together?
Collette: We should probably have a better answer for this, but after toying around with various combinations of our own names, we decided to just go with something we liked the sound of. Long first names and short second names sound good we think, and we wanted something unisex that wasn’t just initials—so then it was just googling and playing around with it. We only remembered after settling on Ellery Lloyd that Ellery Queen was the pseudonym for a pair of crime fiction writers in the 1930s!

Your novel takes us into the minds of Emmy, a famous “mumfluencer,” her conflicted husband, Dan, and an unnamed person who wants to destroy Emmy. Did you each take a character? Did you do anything to inhabit those points of view?
Paul: We did start off writing separate characters, but actually by the time it came to the second draft, we both wrote and rewrote all of it—and we can’t now tell who did what.

Collette: There are parts Paul is especially proud of that I am pretty sure I wrote, and vice versa! In terms of research and inhabiting the parts, well, we had a young child, and I personally—and not with the novel in mind, just as a new mum whiling away hours stuck on the sofa under a baby who fed constantly and wouldn’t sleep—fell down an Instagram scroll hole. So I felt quite immersed in that world!

"We wanted to show both sides of the coin, the good and the bad, in People Like Her."

People Like Her certainly captures the joy, pain and occasional grossness of parenthood. Did you look back on your lives together for inspiration?
Collette: The grossness, definitely. There were a lot of exploding nappies in the Ellery Lloyd household! Something a friend said before our daughter was even born really lit a spark in my mind for the novel: If you find it all easy, if you’ve had a good birth and your baby is a dream, doesn’t cry, feeds well, sleeps through—don’t tell other parents, because they will either think you’re lying or hate you. We didn’t have that baby (she didn’t sleep pretty much ever), but I thought that was so interesting, and we definitely riffed on that with Emmy and Dan.

Collette, you’re a journalist and editor, and Paul, you’re a novelist and professor. How did your backgrounds inform your writing? Did either of you get veto power over any aspects?
Paul: We’ve both spent our careers giving people feedback or editing others’ work. It would be a bit churlish to complain about someone else editing our own—especially someone you’ve been married to for a decade. Practically, we work in a Google Doc and so can see when one is tinkering with the other’s sections, and honestly it’s never caused an issue, but we do need a watertight chapter plan from the outset, or it ends up like a game of Consequences!

What is your relationship with social media?
Paul: I don’t use it really, apart from Twitter occasionally.

Collette: I used it far, far too much when our daughter was little, and perhaps that was why I wanted to place it at the heart of our first novel, so that at least I could chalk all those hours up as research! I didn’t use it in an especially healthy way if I’m honest—I never interacted, only scrolled, because I was shy, I think—but I was also conscious that some people do find real community and connection there. We wanted to show both sides of the coin, the good and the bad, in People Like Her.

Your approach to Emmy is so clever: an Instagram influencer who draws a million-plus followers by making her life seem worse, not better, than it is. Do you think people will reevaluate those they follow on social media, and why they follow them, after reading your book?
Collette: None of us presents an exact replica of our true selves on social media, and anyone who uses Instagram hopefully knows that. So no, I’d be surprised if it made anyone reevaluate who they follow or why. I hope it might make people question why women especially have to belittle their own achievements to seem relatable, and therefore likable, though.

The business acumen of Emmy and her agent, Irene, is impressive, whether dealing with endorsements or reacting to a crisis. Was it important to show the savvy and strategy behind the selfies—and to explore the conflict between what gets followers vs. what’s morally sound?
Collette: They are both smart, ambitious and intelligent, two young women who have thrown themselves into the influencer industry and are really, really good at it. Yes, sometimes they make bad—terrible, even—decisions, but those decisions are based on what they know works. They’d both probably argue that it’s the audience’s fault they’re driven to those lengths to keep their business going. Whether or not you’d agree with them is another matter, of course.

What sorts of patterns did you see as you researched influencers?
Collette: The biggest pattern I saw is that only the people who take it seriously actually succeed and make money. You don’t become an influencer by accident. What I think will be interesting, and we explored this with Emmy, is how this very new career path pans out in the long term. Because the one constant with this sort of technology is that it will change, and that is something even the biggest influencers can’t influence.


ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of People Like Her.


How have you been celebrating the release thus far? What’s next for you?
Paul: Well, given the pandemic, we have mainly been celebrating by sitting at home and writing our second book, which is set in the world of celebrity private members’ clubs. We are hugely excited by all the positive reviews of People Like Her, and we can’t wait for it to reach a wider audience. It would, of course, be amazing to see Emmy and Dan on screen. We have offered our services to play them but weirdly haven’t heard anything back. . .

 

Author photo by Annick Wolfers.

Paul Vlitos and Collette Lyons explore the anxiety-inducing allure of Instagram in their debut thriller, People Like Her, written under the pen name Ellery Lloyd.

With many references to Jane EyreLittle Threats is a hybrid of a thriller and a literary novel. Ultimately, its thriller components—the story’s beginning, when a murder victim is discovered, and the end—are most compelling. In between is a coming-of-age tale set in the 1990s.

Emily Schultz (The Blondes) sets the scene well. When the novel opens, Kennedy Wynn has just been released from prison after 15 years. She and her twin, Carter (named for the American presidents), grew up in an affluent suburb in Virginia where they brought Haley, a girl from a poorer family, into their orbit and helped her strive to be one of the cool kids at school. But then after a night of teenage rebellion, Kennedy found Haley’s dead body and eventually went to prison for killing her. Even after all these years, she has no memory of the crime, which occurred while she was tripping on LSD. And no murder weapon was ever found.

Gerry Wynn, the father of the twins, brings Kennedy home from prison. He was among those who urged Kennedy to go to trial rather than reach a plea deal, a plan that turned out disastrously for her. Upon Kennedy’s release, she and her sister are estranged, partially because Carter has become romantically involved with Haley’s brother. Complications set in when a team from a true crime TV show show up, determined to uncover new evidence.

The plot chugs along on typical suspense tropes, including a hidden book about sex, a folded-up note stashed in one of the girl’s duvets, a jackknife and a letter opener. But Schultz’s attempts to tie these haphazard clues together are as unsuccessful as the TV producer’s efforts to rewrite the history of the crime, and Little Threats fails to meet the standards of suspense set by books like Gone Girl. Readers may feel that they are viewing the Wynns through a scrim. And as the ghost of Haley wanders through the pages, it somehow feels as though the dead girl is more alive than anyone else in the book.

With many references to Jane EyreLittle Threats is a hybrid of a thriller and a literary novel. Ultimately, its thriller components—the story’s beginning, when a murder victim is discovered, and the end—are most compelling. In between is a coming-of-age tale set in the 1990s.

Sign Up

Stay on top of new releases: Sign up for our newsletter to receive reading recommendations in your favorite genres.

Recent Reviews

Author Interviews

Recent Features