A Conversation on The Summoning

Where do you usually turn for inspiration? How did you decide to write about a not-so-phony medium?

I’d wanted to write a novel about a medium from the time I was living in England, but until now had never quite found a way in. Apart from the work of the Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski, whose films are filled with the shimmer of the uncanny, the sense of an unspoken mystery woven into a character’s daily life, two movies in particular had inspired me from early on: Seance on a Wet Afternoon, with Kim Stanley and Richard Attenborough, and Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now.

Based on a short story by Daphne du Maurier, Don’t Look Now is an ingeniously structured psychological thriller. Though a medium features as an important character, what interests me is the way it deals with how the living try to reconcile themselves to the dead. In the case of the couple at the center of the movie, played by Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, it’s the loss of their young daughter that has broken their lives, their marriage, their hearts. In joining her husband in Venice, where Sutherland’s character has been commissioned to restore an old church, Christie’s character comes to believe that she can reach her daughter in her afterlife. But they are caught in a tragedy that has been unfolding since the first minutes of the movie. As though the characters’ fates had been waiting all along for them.

Kit Capriol, my protagonist, recalls the film in remembering her initial encounter with Alison Ingalls, the docent at the Met with whom Kit feels an affinity, whose voice is so like Christie’s. But what interested me in having a spiritualist—or someone who portrays one—is the relationship between the medium and the client. Persuasion is on one side of the equation, while the desire to believe is on the other. If one truly wants to have faith in reaching the dead, then it’s possible to convince them that they actually have—especially if one has a few facts or impressions to hang a séance on.

Although there are certain authors who have inspired me over the years, in general I rely more on exploring themes common to many of my books, from my first, The Man from Marseille, until now: time and memory, and how past actions can haunt the present, which is something I’ll be exploring more explicitly in my next novel.

Most of the characters in the book could be classified as skeptics. Do you believe in the supernatural yourself ?

Though I’ve had no direct experience of “seeing” the dead (other than when my mother appeared in a dream to me around the same time she died, looking forty years younger, which really doesn’t count as supernatural), my wife’s mother had had several experiences of this nature and took it all in stride. Nothing ever frightened her. When a relative suddenly appeared in her kitchen, she looked up and said, “Oh, you’ve died, haven’t you.” A minute or so later the phone rang with the news that he had indeed died. She had a number of similar experiences after that.

Unlike in The Drowning, which was based on my own traumatic experience as an 8-year-old at summer camp, this novel emanates less from personal experience than from my own fascination with the relationship between the medium and the client. And with the sense that the curtain between the living and the dead is thinner than one might think.

If you could visit a medium who was completely legitimate, would you go?

Definitely out of curiosity, though I’m not sure whom I want to contact. Although as I get older I’ve grown increasingly more aware of, and uncomfortable with, my own mortality, the religion I was raised in stressed life in the here and now, not afterward. And heaven and hell never came into it, so I’m not fearful of falling into the great fiery pit or anticipating ascending a stairway to heaven.

But death is the one great mystery common to us all—writers, rock stars, politicians—and no one can state with any certainty exactly what is going to happen after we take our last breath. Hamlet calls death, “The undiscover’d country from whose bourn no traveller returns.”

Except, of course, in a séance...

Do you prefer heroes or villains as a writer? As a reader?

Villains are always far more interesting. Consider Shakespeare’s Richard III: he’s a kind of evil incarnate, ordering the murder of children, seducing a widow at her husband’s funeral, and so on. Yet we can’t take our eyes off him. Likewise with, say, Hannibal Lecter. Or John Milton’s Satan, the most compelling character in Paradise Lost, even though the competition is stiff, what with God and Adam and Eve. I’ll also toss in Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, who would as soon kill you as look at you, and yet somehow you’d be flattered to be in his company.

And who was it who said the Devil has all the best lines...?

Evil requires style, for style is a means of seduction, and the villain has to work at it as meticulously as an actor prepares for a role. Dracula is a prime example, with his (very) old-world charm, that cape, and his inescapable magnetism. He can also bite and fly, but he would see those as merely perks of the genre.

What was the most challenging part of writing The Summoning? Were there any scenes that were especially fun to write?

The challenging part was in finding a balance between the thriller elements and the supernatural, so it didn’t just become another ghost story. I find it’s best to work in subtler ways, such as when Kit, in channeling an Irishwoman’s daughter, feels the little girl’s fingers in her hair. Or when she hears someone playing her daughter’s piano in the dark predawn hours. Creepy haunted moments that would make anyone question their own sanity.

The séance scenes were especially satisfying to write. From the atmosphere of the little room with the table and the candle, to the words Kit has so carefully field-tested and worked into a script, to the whole psychology of manipulation: as though she were preparing a scene in a movie—something that comes naturally to this actor. There’s the sense that at least Kit seems genuine, hopefully leaving the reader wavering between doubt and belief. And then she becomes genuine.

Or is she just a very skilled con artist...? What I liked about creating Kit was in giving her this ambiguity—this human-ness, if you like—so that at first glance the reader thinks she’s a reprehensible con artist preying on the most vulnerable among us…until you see that she brings people genuine comfort; comfort that she, perhaps, has never had since the death of her husband on 9/11 and the accident that has left her daughter in a coma. Kit doesn't advertise or demand huge sums of money, and by requesting only donations she skirts the law. She’s not a bad person, but rather a complex person, as most people are.

I look at creating fictional characters as a kind of Cubism: each time they come into view you see them from a different angle, the good, the bad and the ugly, until you realize that they all exist at the same time. It’s this complexity with all its contradictions that makes us human, isn’t it.

What are you reading these days?

I’m doing research for my next novel, a complex psychological thriller which shifts between 2009 in New York and the summer of 1969 in Los Angeles. It’s about memory and guilt, and how we carry our past within us, knowing that some day it may all come spilling out. There’s a quote by a man who ran a tiger sanctuary in Indonesia I came across in the New York Times some years ago: Once tigers kill human beings, they realize that we're nothing. I’ll just let that sit there.

So I’m reading a lot of nonfiction, memoirs and such. I’ve also been reading Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, two of the most acute and acerbic observers of the Southern Californian culture of the sixties. Though I remember 1969, largely from a New York perspective, Los Angeles had a very different scene, a different vibe. The sixties everywhere, though, weren’t as sunny and happy as some have portrayed it. There was a dark side to it that I was aware of, even in the so-called Summer of Love in 1967 (with all its genuinely good times) when I was living in Greenwich Village. And then I’ll mention Manson and Altamont, and that pretty much wraps the decade up in a shroud.

I found the late Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark fascinating, also pertinent to my next project, as one of my two main characters is a successful true-crime author. I was especially taken by the relation between McNamara and her subject, and how what begins as a routine review of files and police reports and maps becomes an obsession that engulfs her life up until its tragic end. The book is as much about the author as the killer she’s hunting (and who was eventually captured not long after her death).

I’d also reread Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, which I’d first encountered as a senior in a private high school in what became a yearlong law course. There were no textbooks—just primary works—and one day our teacher, who had a law degree, sauntered in with a stack of just-published hardback books. That was our December holiday homework: read about two men who killed four members of a family in Kansas. It was the first book that ever gave me nightmares. In them I remember seeing Perry Smith’s motorcycle boots walking around my room as I lay hiding under my bed, knowing that very soon he and Dick would find me.

But it’s Capote’s way of handling facts—and fiction—that my work-in-progress deals with in a very different story. How much is true? How much is fiction? And who suffers from the way a writer intermingles them?

Otherwise, as I really don’t read much contemporary fiction, I’ve been rereading novels that had an impact on me years earlier. I also keep up in reading (and rereading) novels in French. And—this may seem odd—but I like reading biographies of artists. This past year I read volume two of William Fever’s biography of Lucien Freud, and, more recently, Annalyn Swan’s and Mark Stevens’ fascinating biography of Francis Bacon. Art has played a role in a few of my novels—The Discovery of Light, a contemporary mystery based on the paintings of Vermeer; and Vermeer’s painting, A Maid Asleep, has its place in The Summoning.

A shorter version of this piece can be found in the back pages of The Summoning.

Being Branded

My blog requested by, and published today, in Strand magazine: https://strandmag.com/can-you-manipulate-your-audience-to-avoid-being-branded/ .

Risk

Without even being aware of it, I’ve taken a risk with every book I’ve written, published or otherwise. By my third attempt—after my first unpublished novel, set in the Dublin of 1940, my second unpublished novel, set in Dublin in 2025 (I was heavily into Joyce in those mid-‘70s days, and teaching Ulysses to a savvy group of high school juniors and seniors), and my third novel, which I seem to remember involved a New Yorker who had religious visions. Oh, and he was Irish. And, obviously, a little crazy. 

And then I was told by someone that I was “writing against the market,” which meant, what, that I wasn’t writing like everyone else? I’d been an English major for four undergraduate years, and likewise for two in graduate school, so I’d been immersed in everything from African literature to Old English to the psychology of Victorian literature, though I was aware of what was being published, as I read the New York Times Book Review every week, and I was always in and out of bookshops, of which there were many in Amherst, Massachusetts and its surrounding college towns. 

I went ahead and wrote more unpublished novels, one per year, sending them to the two professionals who were willing to read me without submission by an agent, a senior editor at Viking, the other at a more junior level at Little, Brown when it was still in Boston. They passed, of course, but were always encouraging me to submit more to them. And then I wrote a novel about an aging Englishman, living quietly in London, who vanishes. It’s a kind of metaphysical detective story. And it landed me an agent. And for that I’d had to move to England. Which is where my career began.

That novel, Byzantium, was not placed, and I went ahead and continued to produce novels (and teleplays, but that’s another story), and my London agent, who, incidentally, wore a monocle, was growing increasingly frustrated with my output: again, a matter of marketability. Until I sat down and, for five quick weeks, wrote The Man from Marseille. That, too, was set in another universe, actually in several of them: Russia in the 1920s, the South of France in the ‘30s, Occupied Paris in the ‘40s, and London in the ‘70s. The book was only 55,000 words long, but it covered a lot of history.

He sold it within two weeks to John Murray Ltd. And the week it was published it was optioned by a British production company. I was finally published. But I still take risks. My next book (following The Drowning), If She Were Dead, like my fifth novel, Breathless, has a woman as its main character in this psychological thriller about the voodoo of adultery. And as I start to play more and more with genre, which I find fascinating, I’m now working on a detective novel set in L.A. And Mexico. And Russia. 

Taking risks in your writing lifts out of your comfort zone. You begin to write not to revisit what you’ve lived through, but to explore and learn what you don’t know. It was once suggested to me—not by a writer or anyone in publishing—that I had an easy life being a writer. I said, “I wake up every day and reinvent the world. How would you like to do that?”

On Genre Writing

I have always toyed with genre in my novels, though have never attempted full-blown genre until The Drowning, a psychological thriller with not just plot twists, but also narrative twists that makes the reader a participant into what’s happening to the protagonist, Alex Mason. 

I came to genre primarily through my reading of certain French authors who blend genre with literary fiction: J-P Manchette, René Belletto, Patrick Modiano, and even Marcel Proust, whose In Search of Lost Timeis, in parts, a spy novel as well as a detective story. After all, it’s about a search for something that eludes the narrator until the end. And then there’s Alain Robbe-Grillet, whose 1953 novel,The Erasers, is a modern-day detective story based on Oedipus Rex. It, too, isn’t a conventional tale. It plays with time in a wholly new way, and demands an attentive reading and re-reading. 

I only occasionally read genre: the odd thriller, espionage tale, and detective novel. And I’ve seen lots of thriller movies and quality TV series. Before I even began to think about writing The Drowning I saw at least five different limited TV series about a missing child, each excellent in its own way. But in every case the story follows a similar pattern: a child goes missing—a situation that for any parent watching can be wrenching, since we automatically think of our own children rounding a corner in a supermarket, say, and then vanishing—followed by the hunting of clues, the following of leads, the denouement when we learn what had happened to the child. The Drowning, as I’ve mentioned in a previous blog, is based on something that happened to me. But I’m still here, because there was no plot twist to make me vanish.

But all too often when a child goes missing, he or she is never found. The mystery never goes away, and the agony for the parents and siblings never lessens. And once you have a mystery (is he or she still alive? Will there ever be closure?), time begins to polish it into a legend that lives on. There is no neat ending that will satisfy the genre reader.

As I mentioned in an interview included in The Drowning, I’ve grown increasingly interested in genre, though not coming from that world I try to bring to it a different sensibility. Genre provides a writer with known forms and structures; it’s what you can do with it to make it new that provides the great challenge for the author. As a screenwriting manager once said to me, “Write the same old story, just make it so different from all the others that it becomes irresistible.” 

The Kid on the Raft

I’m eight years old and on a train out of New York City headed to my second overnight camp, in Upstate New York. Last summer, when I was seven, I was in an overly-athletic camp which hardly suited the underly-athletic me, for whom competitive sports involved trying to outrun the other kids for the few remaining chocolate milks they’d offer before bedtime. 

As is the custom, camp lasts eight weeks without any two- or four-week options, as is so often the case these days. There is no internet, so no emails either, in fact there are no computers, and we aren’t permitted to use the camp’s phone. Postcards and letters are the order of the day: Dear Mom and Dad, How are you, I am fine. Camp is fun, even though it really isn’t fun, at least not all the time. If you don’t like group activities, which means most sports, it’s a bit of a downer. I like tennis, however, which involves me playing someone like me, and chasing fuzzy white balls as they end up in the woods and tall grasses around the courts when we aren’t at the net discussing comic books and movies. 

In the woods and tall grasses are creatures most of us haven’t encountered in the Bronx or Brooklyn or Yonkers: snakes and huge spiders and, once in my bunk, crawling like Nosferatu on the screen window next to my bed, a bat. The worst thing I’ve ever seen before this was a sewer rat, a pale, fat beast some nine inches long on the street outside the house where I’m growing up. At least that thing was already dead. 

We were there for the long haul. Upstate. Somewhere else in the universe. I imagine for some there who would grow up to watch prison films the situation will seem familiar. You had to serve your sentence with no time off for good behavior. And there were no plea deals, as I soon discovered. 

Our bunks, as is always the custom, are unheated. It gets cold here at night, and even colder when we wake to a bugle playing Reveille, and to get warm you have to move fast, fight your way to one of the three or four sinks allotted to us in the bathroom, wash, brush our teeth, then line up outside for inspection and the walk to the dining hall. 

Most of us are city kids, or at least suburban kids, mostly from New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. Camp like this is not an inexpensive way of getting your kid out of your way for an entire summer. Just as private school does likewise for the rest of the year. And you get what you pay for.

It’s now the final stretch of the camp season, it’s late afternoon, and I’m in my swimming activity. The waterfront is a large dock that separates the shallow water from the less-shallow water and ends with a long dock that faces the deep water of the lake. I’d often stand by the ranks of rowboats and canoes looking out over the lake, to the dense woods surrounding it, to the dark, deep water. 

But right now I’m standing on the dock with my group. I sense what’s going to happen, and, no, I don’t like it. I don’t like it because, 1) I can’t swim in anything but water shallow enough for my feet to settle on the bottom, 2) I can’t really swim, and 3) I’m deathly afraid of deep water. 

Like Picasso, also a non-swimmer, I can stand in water up to my chest and pretend I’m swimming (looks good in photos), but I can’t paint, either. 

I have to note here that ever since I was old enough to understand these things, I was told by my mother that I was born in a caul. As David Copperfield puts it, I was born with a caul, which was advertised for sale, in the newspapers, at the low price of fifteen guineas. Whether sea-going people were short of money about that time, or were short of faith and preferred cork jackets, I don’t know; all I know is, that there was but one solitary bidding, and that was from an attorney connected with the bill-broking business, who offered two pounds in cash, and the balance in sherry, but declined to be guaranteed from drowning on any higher bargain.

It was believed by sailors—many of whom couldn’t swim to save their lives, hence making them expert sailors—that either being born in a caul or owning one that had belonged to a newborn guaranteed that you couldn’t drown. 

Lord Byron, one of the elect among us, was an expert swimmer; while the novelist J.G. Farrell, also a caul-barer, was swept from a rock while he was fishing by Bantry Bay in Ireland, his body never recovered. 

I never put much faith in my caul.

So I’m waiting on the dock, and I’m getting nervous. It’s going to happen, I think, he’s going to make us jump in, and of course he says, “Okay, guys, let’s go, it’s time to show that we’ve learned so much over the summer,” and the other kids start jumping in, perfectly happy to be in water that’s probably twelve feet deep.

I don’t jump in, and resort to begging, hands together, “Please, please, I can’t, I can’t swim.” Looking back over all these years I can still see myself saying that. I can still sense the immense fear that my life is now in someone else’s hands. And I can still remember what happens when he throws me in the water. Just like it was yesterday…

I’m drowning. There’s nothing to hold onto, no lake bottom to stand on, no up or down or left or right, and I’m panicking, I’m losing it, in fact, I’m going under for at least the second time, my lungs filling with water, and the counselor, a big, burly college kid probably no more than nineteen and working to make a few extra bucks, jumps in beside me.

I can see him to this day. He has reddish-blond hair. His face is wide and florid, nearly orange, and around his neck is a religious medal which I seize and twist in my panic, and begin to choke this increasingly angry man. 

I have let him down. I have disappointed him. I have failed him as a swimming counselor, because I can’t swim. So angry is he that he grabs onto me and begins swimming me out into the deep water. We reach the raft, and he lifts me onto it. It’s a small raft, with a pole mounted on one side, that I hang onto until my knuckles are white. He says, “Either you’ll swim back on your own, or you can stay here and die.” And he turns and, with long, confident strokes, swims back to the waterfront, heaving himself out of the water and…walking away.

I sit there and watch the dragonflies land near me. I look down into the water. It’s dark, and deep, and for maybe ten seconds consider doing it. I’ll jump in and swim back, but I know that I can’t swim back, that I would, in fact, drown and die. But if I stay here I’ll also die… 

I sit, and I think, and I wait. And I wait, and I inch closer to the edge…

In the novel, my body is never found, not in the lake or the campus. But twenty-one years later the swimming counselor, now a billionaire real-estate developer in New York, wakes up one morning to find his swimming pool filled with what appears to be blood and, once it’s drained, the words Remember Me are seen crudely-engraved into the bottom.

It seems that I’m back… And that’s where The Drowning begins… 

On Urban Legends

Picture this: a still, starlit August night, as warm and clear as it had been all day and the day before and the same as it will be tomorrow. An open field, surrounded by pine woods so dense and dark that the seam between sky and earth has vanished. Soon, the campers will be packing their T-shirts and shorts, their tennis racquets and baseball gloves and bags full of dirty laundry, and heading home to New York, to Connecticut, to New Jersey and beyond. 

         Campfires light the faces of the boys as they sit in circles: the younger ones toward the center of the field, the older campers by the edge of it, nearer the woods. Dinner—hot dogs on sticks cooked over open flames, potatoes baked in foil among the coals, marshmallows blackening on twigs—is over. The fires move from glow into fade into cinders and, in just a few minutes, into ash as, pacing the perimeter of the circles, the counselors tell the same story they’ve recited from one year to the next, quietly and reverentially, as though it were a secret meant to be kept forever. A tale that was by now as woven into the camp’s culture as the songs they sang in the social hall—odes to the outdoors, to teamwork, to Echo Lake and the hills beyond. The boys stare into the dying embers, watching the words come to life or keeping their eyes shut as though wishing camp were already over and they were home, where nothing bad could ever reach them. 

         “One night, every seven years since Camp Waukeelo was founded in 1937,” one of the counselors begins, “long after lights out, a local man, John Otis, would sneak into the camp through the woods behind the bunks and take one of the younger boys.” He falls silent, the better to let his words take root in the boys’ minds. “Townsfolk said that John was someone who wouldn’t stand out in a crowd, just a guy of average height and weight, but”—he pauses a moment—“with the eyes of a dead man. When you looked into them, you felt the temperature drop.” 

         So begins my seventh novel, The Drowning, to be published in January 2019 by Sourcebooks Landmark. The next night one of the boys will disappear, eight-year-old Joey Proctor, only to return to life, it seems, twenty-one years later.

         A campfire is where many of us first heard an urban legend: at summer camp, or Boy Scout camp, or simply camping with friends. When I first heard about John Otis I was in the last summer camp I attended, in the Berkshires. This wasn’t the usual camp tale about monsters or vampires, the familiar creatures of the movies; this was a crazy man, and that was somehow far more terrifying. To make it worse, the counselors would show us the old leather binders filled with camp photos dating back thirty and forty years, to the 1920s and ‘30s, and point to this camper and that: “He disappeared one August night in 1944. His father was in a prisoner-of-war camp. His mother never saw either of them again.”

         Showing us the photos was the key to making it all the more credible. Add a detail, show a face, and suddenly a story made of words told around a campfire has come to life. And I think we all realized then that woven into our mundane lives of camp and school and families was a thread of mystery. People disappear; people go mad; bad things happen in that house they told us about where John Otis lived, high above the camp with the marble steps cut into the hillside leading to the lake, where Otis would quietly row to the camp’s waterfront and make his way up to the bunks every seven years at two or three in the morning, never leaving empty-handed. And where were the boys he had taken…?

         There’s another I heard about a young couple. They’re out in the country and run out of gas. The guy tells the girl to lie down in the back seat to stay safe and unseen while he locks the car and walks to the nearest gas station. After a long while she sees the reflection of police flashers, and a cop taps on the window. “Sit up and don’t look back,” the officer tells her. She follows his direction, unlocks the car, and the cop continues to tell her not to look back at the car.

         Sitting on the trunk, looking into the car, is the decapitated head of her boyfriend.

         I’d heard that story many, many years ago, and often told it when I was in college and we were all a little stoned (it was the sixties, after all). But what I added were specifics: the kind of car he drove, actual street names, usually prefacing it with, “You know what I’m talking about, that corner where the white house is…?” They could picture exactly where it was taking place and then imagine was happening. I once saw a very large football player cry real tears when I told it, slowly, adding one detail after another. That’s the power of storytelling: make it specific, make it real, make them believe. And always, always, add that tiny element that is so unbelievable your audience has to believe it’s true.  

         Though it’s a psychological thriller in every possible way, The Drowning is also a novel about narrative and credibility, and making the fictional a little too real. Which is when the novel tips its metaphorical hat to horror: when even a real person can become part of a story created by someone else. And then all control is lost. Forever. 

On Writing from (My) Life

I have always resisted writing out of my own life, because by necessity it would involve writing about people I knew, or have known, and to me this seems unseemly and—yes—even a little disrespectful. Because, of course, were I to shine a positive light on them they’d still be offended, because, really, who wants to be defined for some as that weird guy in that novel I just read? I have, however, on one or two wicked occasions, added tiny cameo (though non-named) appearances of people who may have deserved eternal damnation and hellfire, or at least mockery in a few lines of prose. And once, with his permission (and a subtle change in name) based a secondary character on a guy I knew in college. And in my fourth novel, The Discovery of Light, a painter I knew makes an appearance under his own name, again with his permission. As for the others, they won’t know who they are, but I will, and it makes me feel all the better. 

But I’ve also broken my rule on two occasions. The event that triggers the action in my sixth novel, Airtight, was directly based on something that I was involved in during in my first year of college. The idea came to me while watching the Quentin Tarantino film, Jackie Brown. Seeing all these middle-aged people involving themselves with planning a crime reminded me of something I had completely forgotten. I turned to my wife and said, “We never dug it up.” 

And then I realized I had a story to tell about a drug deal in Cincinnati, about the worst batch of $450 weed I had ever helped to purchase in those very interesting years, and how, unable to sell much more than a nickel bag or two at the very straitlaced Midwestern college I had mistakenly decided to attend (and which eventually, and politely, and to my eternal gratitude, asked me to get out), my co-conspirators and I buried them in airtight Mason jars on the college property. And then promptly forgot about them. Until, in the novel, both out of work and desperate to raise money, they remember where they’d left them. And thus begins a tale of low crime in high places. 

In a similar way, my forthcoming novel The Drowning was triggered by a movie, writer-director Joel Edgerton’s The Gift, starring Edgerton, Jason Bateman and Rebecca Hall. It’s about an affable and successful man who has relocated to L.A. from Chicago, and who, while shopping with his wife for furnishings for their new house, runs into Edgerton’s character, whom he’d known in high school, and whom he called “Gordo the Weirdo.” And then Bateman’s world comes tumbling creepily down because of something he’d done in the past to this man, who had never forgotten it, and whose life has been marked by this trauma. And Bateman goes from being an affable guy to something of a monster. 

 Something about the concept—the idea of the past coming back to haunt and even sabotage one’s life—stuck with me. I remembered what happened to me when I was eight years old in summer camp, and saw exactly the hook for my next novel. Which is how The Drowning came to be. More on that in my next blog… 

Somewhere Else in the Universe

[Before I begin a series of blogs leading up to the publication of The Drowning in January, I thought I’d start with this, a slightly-revised essay I’d originally published at The Nervous Breakdown in 2010(and later adapted as a screenplay) and, with the website’s permission, reposted here.]

Somewhere Else in the Universe

It seems to me that in every writer’s life there’s one event—an epiphany, even—that can be considered a defining moment when the seed is planted that will one day blossom into a lifetime of putting words on a page.

When I was in college, while others were assiduously working towards becoming attorneys, bankers, and various other highly-remunerated and potentially-indictable members of society, my choice was to be a rock star. Not a great musician, but a rock star. It’s mostly about the perks, of course: chauffeurs, groupies, stimulants, and stepping onto a stage while 40,000 people scream YES!!!

For me, this early stage of my ascent to stardom involved playing bass guitar in an under-rehearsed band that gigged most Friday nights at Harvard Law School smokers where none of us, save the rhythm guitarist, was actually studying. We were paid well and in cash, an amount that today would probably be the equivalent of something like $200 apiece. In any event it bought one lots of records, books, a late-night dinner at the Deli Haus (where all the musicians playing Boston came after their last sets, save that they were instantly recognizable and we were just a bunch of guys with their girlfriends eating pastrami on rye), and a pair or two of nine-dollar Landlubber bellbottoms. Being a rock star at this level involved not a lot more than showing up, keeping your instrument in tune and convincingly vamping your way through requested songs whose chord changes were still something of a mystery. It was fun watching future federal court judges trying to dance, but my being an English major inevitably led me to graduate school, then a teaching job, and then becoming a writer. My Gibson Thunderbird is now just history. As is my music career.

Just as Proust could date his start as a novelist to his sudden vivid awareness that the past is eternally here in the present, I think I can locate my origins in something far more mundane, and yet also very out of the ordinary.

In my very early teens, perhaps as a means of escaping a distinctly neurotic home life tipping into full-blown disfunctional, I joined an organization devoted to the study of UFOs. While other boys were studying baseball statistics or even, oddly enough, doing schoolwork, I was reading about sightings, visitations and—though these were fairly rare back then—outright snatch-and-grab jobs (and the ubiquitous anal probings one always heard about in later accounts) by little green men. I now see that this was a gateway to some very serious years of drug use, both psychotropic and of the harder variety, that came later in college. By which time I wasn’t the least bit interested in waiting around for things to appear in the sky. I saw things without even having to glance out the window.

Meetings were monthly, and were usually held in one seedy hotel or another in the West 40s, an easy walk from Grand Central. These hotels had about them the lugubrious air of suicide and failure, the smell of tough luck emanating from every peeling wall and acre of stained carpet. One rarely saw what one might think of as guests there—none of your ladies in furs and gentlemen in their Brooks Brothers suits smoking in the lobby, waiting for a taxi to take them to a show and dinner afterwards at Longchamps or Sardi’s. But there was no one, and never was, save the elevator man, always beyond weary as he sat in his little box going up and down the floors.

The organization was run by a perfectly decent man from New Jersey who could have easily passed for an accounting professor at a community college. Meetings were attended by some forty or so people of various ages (and, from the outer boroughs, a few followers of the John Birch Society, which in retrospect doesn’t surprise me in the least), and the evening would begin with the group’s accountant, a harried-looking middle-aged man in a gray suit who looked like he’d walked out of a pinochle game in Washington Heights. He’d step up to the microphone and detail the treasury. “Cash on hand, $356.54. Bills paid for the month of March, twenty-two dollars and forty-nine cents to the printers; twenty-three dollars to Cohen’s Hebrew National for lunches; a hundred and fifty for this evening’s speaker.”

Behind him would sit his British wife, who, in a deep trance sometimes broken by alarmingly loud outbursts and exclamations, would hold a Ouija board on her knees, her fingers resting daintily on a planchette as it zipped around the alphabet grabbing messages from the great beyond. This was a scene of immense absurdity I cannot convince anyone actually took place. Yet it did. Many times. I am your witness. And I have photos. 

The speakers ranged from disgruntled Air Force officers to the respected Saturday Review journalist who in a few years would write the first account of Betty and Barney Hill’s supposed alien abduction, Incident at Exeter. In the audience on some evenings could be found such personalities as the legendary broadcaster Long John Nebel and the magician known as The Amazing Randi. Meeting him I asked if I should call him Amazing or simply Mr. Randi, and we settled for Jim.

Among the regulars there was the Mystic Barber, a chubby ordinary man with a five o’clock shadow and a pencil mustache who wore on his forehead a kind of TV antenna and an earphone attached to what looked like a transistor radio wrapped in electrical tape. He claimed he was listening to Mars, and he told me that for five bucks I could, too. (Though after a time he was good enough to allow me a freebie: static, sadly, is still static, no matter how much you pay for it or what planet generates it.) In real life the Mystic Barber was Andy Sinatra, a Brooklyn-based tonsorial artist who claimed to have traveled not only to Mars but also the center of the Earth, and whose afterlife lingers still in a photo taken of him by Diane Arbus. He had also been a guest on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show.

The exceptionally tall skinny man in the light gray suit, the one who could be either an advertising executive or a retired basketball player (from my altitude, always near to the ground, I assessed him as being close to seven feet tall), was the entity known as Ed from Venus. The man was dead serious and immensely articulate. I remember he told me with a completely straight face: “This is the form I assume when I’m on Earth. Otherwise you wouldn’t be able to look at me.” He would ask intelligent questions of the speakers, listen attentively to the answers, and his manners would not have been out of place in the court of Louis XV. Yet he claimed to be from Venus and, if asked, would always tell any interested party how things were up there. (“Cloudy,” was the usual response. And, no, I’m not making that up.)

Another regular was a young woman—I would guess in her late twenties—who, wheelchair-bound, would be pushed in by her companion, an older woman. She remains for me the true enigma of these times. I remember her as genuinely beautiful; radiant, with a kind, serene smile, golden hair, and always dressed as if she were a bridesmaid. She carried a wand with a foil star on the end of it, just as on her gown had been pasted foil crescent moons and planets. This was the Princess of the Galaxies. It was what she called herself, it was how she was greeted, often accompanied with a slight bow, and as she was wheeled to her place at the front row she would bless us with a graceful wave of her wand. For me she became a matter for speculation. Was she, like Miss Havisham, a bride deserted at the altar years before? Or someone whose promising early career, perhaps as an actress or a fashion model, had been tragically cut short by a car accident? 

She seemed to me just too young and dazzling to be so entangled in this flying-saucer fantasy: what, I wondered, had led her to assume such an identity? Did she also use it after hours, so to speak, when having a drink at the Carlyle or checking out the latest titles from the public library? At least the Mystic Barber had his haircutting business, and, I assume, Ed from Venus some perfectly respectable job in a Madison Avenue office. But the Princess…? Where did the fiction begin and where did it finish? And did it, in fact, ever end?

What remains of my memories of those times isn’t anything about flying saucers or lights in the sky, but rather the people who came there—these wonderfully eccentric men and women who, possibly bullied in their youth for being handicapped or outrageously tall or simply as ordinary, I now imagine preening for these monthly events, adjusting antenna, wand or gray suit, and then returning to a life of solitude in a studio apartment on the Upper West Side or in Brooklyn where all that remained for them was their imaginations, their sometimes identities, and their boundless desire to flee the four walls of their room with its unchanging view, the bottle of bourbon on the counter, the voice of Johnny Mathis emanating from the Zenith radio beside it. For them going to these monthly gatherings may have been an escape into a galaxy far from their own where they could be considered an equal, accepted for whatever they wanted to be. Had the Princess of the Galaxies written the narrative of her own life, a story of light years and distant travel and visits to places unimaginable?

This rich history with its own mythology, its own royalty of which she was the shining representative, may have given her a life that even had she had the use of her legs might have been forever denied her. For me, their worlds became a matter of speculation and empathy. It became, in fact, my gateway to the nature of fiction.