Special Feature: Bloodstone
by Nate Kenyon

Birth of a Novel

Bloodstone began, as most of my work does, with a picture in my head. In this particular case, it was a tough-looking man driving at night with a woman next to him in the passenger seat, handcuffed to the door. The two strange companions didn’t look at each other. The man, tall and gaunt and haunted, stared out through the windshield with both hands clutching the wheel, as if in pain. He was hearing voices, I decided, telling him to do things. The woman, pretty but fragile as a butterfly in a jar, sat as if in a trance. She’d been abused for so long, she had lost all sense of herself.

Clearly something terrible had happened, or was happening, between them; but what? Was this some sort of random abduction? Did they know each other? Where were they going?

And, most importantly with these sorts of things when writing fiction: what would happen next?

The scene interested me because of the immediate tension it created for the reader. But I didn’t sit down to the keyboard quite yet. This was a well-worn horror/thriller cliché. There was nothing immediately different about it from a thousand other movies or books, many of them done by writers much more talented and accomplished than me.

In other words, the powder had been laid down, but the match had not yet been struck. I needed something else to light the fuse.

I decided to challenge myself: anyone could write about a very bad and possibly crazy man abusing a young woman, but what would it take to turn that scenario on its head? Could I spend the rest of the novel trying to turn that man into a hero? Was it possible to make readers end up identifying with someone they first met doing something so reprehensible?

And finally, what if the voices in the man’s head were real?

That got my butt in the chair pretty darn quick. But oddly enough, when I started writing, that opening scene isn’t what came out first. Instead, I got a second picture in my head, and this time I wrote it as it played out: a young man was driving alone at night through a deserted stretch of wilderness, driving a little too fast and reckless, as if trying to outrun something. His father had died behind bars, and he was headed to prison to pick up his father’s belongings.

That scene with Jeb Taylor came out in one sitting, pretty much as it exists today. Immediately afterward, I started wondering how this young man fit in with the other man and woman. Were they related in some way? Did they know each other? Would they play some role in each other’s lives in the future?

The birth of a novel creates, for me anyway, a sort of manic period where ideas start clicking and I’m energized beyond belief. I call it a birth because when it’s happening it almost seems as if the novel has already been written, and I’m simply delivering the words, one at a time.

Of course, that period never sustains itself through the entire process, and those words end up being re-worked and re-written many times. But there’s nothing quite like those first few days with a new book, and with Bloodstone, I remember being particularly excited about where I was taking the story. The man and woman were on their way to the same small town where Jeb Taylor lived, and they were going to cross paths. There were a host of other characters in that town who would play a role in these peoples’ lives, but the main thrust of the action would occur between the three of them.

The two men were, in many ways, mirror images of each other; whereas with Billy Smith, I wanted to turn someone who seemed like a villain into the hero, with Jeb Taylor, I wanted to turn someone who just might be a hero into the villain. Those two ideas formed one of the larger themes I spent much of the rest of the novel trying to explore. When faced with particularly difficult circumstances or challenges, what makes one person rise up and overcome them, while another gets dragged down into the muck of life and never recovers?

Now that (for me anyway, and I hope for readers too), is interesting stuff. I don’t mean to suggest that there’s some sort of explicit and final message in Bloodstone about human behavior, because I don’t think that makes for particularly good fiction. I didn’t want to solve that particular puzzle. But I think good fiction should do something more than just tell a great story, and I hope Bloodstone does that, without getting in the way of entertaining the reader.

Because that is ultimately what this business is all about: telling a rip-roaring good tale that makes people want to keep reading. I hope I did that, but only you, dear reader, can tell me whether I succeeded. Bloodstone ended up full of long-buried secrets, witchcraft and demons, ghosts and possession, and even the walking dead, but it all began with a man and woman in a car, and what was happening between them.

I invite you to crack open a copy and find out where they ended up.