Ritter spins her own mystery in her debut novel, Bonfire
When Krysten Ritter was writing her first novel, “Bonfire,” about a shady coverup in small-town America, a plastics company with suspicious motives and a decade-old scandal given new relevance, she understood the genre she was working in.
Still, she surprised herself when she finished a first draft of the manuscript and was able to take it all in.
“The book is dark, I am aware,” she said in her natural, deadpan mode. “But I don’t think I was aware how dark until I read the whole thing in one sitting.”
Ritter has already shown an affinity for shadowy, suspenseful material in her film and TV work, playing enigmatic characters on shows like “Breaking Bad” and “Don’t Trust the B---in Apartment 23.”
And she has embraced the flawed but powerful title character she currently plays on the Netflix superhero drama “Jessica Jones,” a detective fighting to take charge of her life while she tends to some deep psychic wounds.
“Bonfire,” published by Crown Archetype this month, is Ritter’s fictionalized dive into her own rural upbringing and a thriller in the style of her favourite genre novels. In a review, Publishers Weekly called it “a triumphant fiction debut” and a “pulse-pounding thriller featuring a sympathetic, broken lead character.”
But Ritter said that she also considered the novel “an act of pure defiance”: a narrative she wants to see more of, featuring a female protagonist she relates to, made at a time when she was disappointed with other acting opportunities offered to her.
“I’m not conventional,” Ritter said over a recent lunch in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
“I try to be raw and vulnerable and gross.” The novel, she said, “was a way for me to create something for myself — to take the story back and do what I want to do.”
The protagonist of “Bonfire” is Abby Williams, an environmental lawyer in Chicago who returns to her modest hometown, the fictional Barrens, Ind., to investigate a case against Optimal Plastics, a conglomerate intertwined in seemingly every aspect of the community.
There, while Abby is reacquainted with all that she loved and (mostly) hated about living in the area, she is drawn back into an unsolved mystery from her high school days, 10 years earlier, when a group of her teenage tormentors were beset by an unexplained sickness and one of her mean-girl rivals went missing.
Ritter, 35, who came of age in the small borough of Shickshinny, Penn., said her ambition was to bring to life a “twisted backwoods” setting where “the party that you go to on Friday night is a bonfire,” and “the district magistrate is putting people in juvie when he’s out smoking weed with kids on the weekends.”
Some of the most evocative passages in “Bonfire” are about Abby’s awkward return to Barrens, a town she thought she outran.
There, Ritter writes, beauty works “by sidling up to you
when you least expect it” and an unappealing childhood home “seems to rush toward me and not the other way around. Like it’s eager to get me inside. Like it’s been waiting.”
Ritter did not have a high school experience as brutal as Abby’s but, she said, “I understand the feelings of being the outcast and the loner.”
In her early teens, she came to Shickshinny as an only child raised by a divorced mother, traits that she said made her a prominent target for whispers and rumours.
“At that time, where I’m from, nobody got divorced yet,” she said, “so everybody was like, ‘Psst, psst, psst.’”
By the time she graduated from high school, she was modelling extensively in New York, Tokyo and Milan, but craving work as an actor, producer and musician.
She has since found those opportunities on shows like “Breaking Bad” and the teenage noir “Veronica Mars,” as well as in projects she has developed with her production company, Silent Machine.
Gren Wells, a screenwriter, director and friend of Ritter’s, described her as “psychotically driven, in the best way.”
“In this industry, you have to be a self-starter and make your own career,” Wells said.
“She’s not the type of actor who sits around and waits for a phone call. She will create her own product.”
Her writing process, Ritter said, “looks like me pacing around in flannel pyjamas with a pot of coffee, jotting things down by hand.”
On any given day, she said, “if you checked my pedometer on my phone, I probably walked 10 miles, back and forth in my home.”
When Ritter would run into creative roadblocks, Wells said, “They would last no more than 24 hours, because she didn’t have time. She was trying to finish this before starting on ‘The Defenders,’ so she had a hard deadline.”
She might allow herself a few hours to knit or take a walk, Wells said, “and then she was back off to the races.”
Jennifer Schuster, executive editor at Crown Archetype, said she saw in “Bonfire” a wealth of storytelling talents that Ritter has gleaned from her onscreen career.
“She had a great eye for developing a complicated, messy female character — the kind of character that you recognize some of yourself in,” Schuster said.
“Some of your own fear, some of your own darkness, some of your own secrets.”
Having recently wrapped production on a second season of “Jessica Jones,” Ritter is now on a promotional tour for “Bonfire” and exulting in the sense of freedom that the project offered her.
It’s a feeling that Ritter said reminded her of an earlier phase of her career, when she started moving away from modelling and appearing in her first television commercials.
Recalling that era, she said, “I finally have control. It’s not all about, like, how pointy is your nose? I mean, I have a pointy nose. But what am I supposed to do? It’s what God gave me.”