The Dark Game
Ten ruthless writers cooped up for weeks on end in a house of Transylvanian design, with a looming, leering, sadistic madman pulling the strings. What inspired you to write The Dark Game?
The funny thing is, even though the plot bears a strong resemblance to And Then There Were None, I didn’t read the Christie novel until after I’d written the book and my agent pointed out the similarity. What did inspire the story was William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. As far as the “sadistic madman,” I imagined a combination of Stephen King and Cormac Mccarthy and then added a good deal of cruelty.
Your successful career has surely given you insight into the subconscious demons of novelists. Did you enjoy helping some of your characters descend into madness?
My first novel was published in 2012, but prior to that I endured about six or seven years of soul-sucking rejection. Those experiences definitely contributed to the struggles some of the writers experience [in The Dark Game]. I’ve also heard quite a few publishing horror stories from others, so several of those tales made their way into the novel. As far as enjoying the writers’ descents into madness … I have to admit that with some of the less savory characters, witnessing their decline was a fairly delicious experience.
Fear is such a powerful emotion. What’s your secret for bringing terror to life in a character?
Basically, I become the character when I write. At a marrow-deep level, I try to inhabit that point-of-view, both the positive traits and the negative ones. Fear, for me, is a relatively easy emotion to capture because I’ve been intimate with it since earliest childhood. I’ve always been a terrible sleeper, and for as long as I can remember, nighttime has brought with it a host of terrors, both real and imagined. Growing up, our little house was nestled between a graveyard and a creepy forest, and it was as though that setting mirrored my internal state. I’m still plagued by nightmares. So, unfortunately, I know fear very well, and probably because of that, I’m able to tap into it whenever I need to in my writing.