What would you trade to gain the thing you really want?

That’s an age-old question, but it’s one that virtually every person is faced with at some point in their lives. The chance to leap for the thing you desire… with the ultimate cost being the risk of everything you have here and now. Is the gain worth the risk? Ask a lottery winner. Ask a Vegas gambler on the run from men in dark shades. You’ll get different answers.

There are a couple of things that go into making a “covenant.” There’s that split second decision that moves you from hedging to signing the deal. There’s that long period of frustration with your existing situation, that tills the mental ground to leave you fertile to entertain the idea of entering into a contract to change your situation.

The genesis of the novel Covenant comes from the same couple of things that drive people to make a deal. There was the fertile ground – my years of working as a reporter, and a troubling news article that percolated in the back of my head for a year or more. And there was the split second decision… the night that I sat down and suddenly said… I’m not going to write a 2,500 word short story about haunted pumpkins today… Today, I’m going to start a novel that will take years to write and end up somewhere around 85,000 words.

The seed of my Covenant was planted way back in 1994, when my dayjob editor at the time handed me a news story from Britain. I’d been publishing short horror stories in small press magazines for a few months at that point, but had no plans to ever embark on a novel. When she gave me the clip, my editor said “I know you like this weird stuff” or something like that. The story was about a bar somewhere in Britain perched at the top of a cliff. Apparently, it had gotten a reputation as being the place to take one last drink – depressed and determined people came from all over to tilt their last drink at the bar before walking down the path a bit and jumping… the cliff was apparently the most popular suicide spot in the country.

I filed the story away mentally, but it had power. Why were these people so determined to jump? What would drive someone to do that? The bar never became a part of Covenant… but those questions did.

I suppose, the question of why someone would take their own life has always troubled and intrigued me. My first bit of published fiction – back in my high school newspaper – was about a character who does himself in. The reader doesn’t really know why (I hadn’t exactly learned plot or character development yet at that point), but the short fragment was poetically grim. In my mind, it seems that there is almost always a chance that you can find a way to improve your situation without simply ending all chance at happiness.

 In the late ‘80s I graduated from journalism school, but while I loved to write, I was never really comfortable with writing “news.” I loved interviewing bands and doing “personality profiles” of stars, but when it came to hard news… I always hated the fact that at the core, there was someone who was hurt… or, in the case of “investigative reporting,” someone who was going to get hurt when the story broke. You can imagine how much I loved doing obit duty and calling the bereaved to fill out their loved one’s obituaries.

After a stint of local news reporting, I moved to a music editor job for awhile before deciding I needed to pay the mortgage. Then I moved into trade journalism, because there, nobody really ever “gets hurt” from the story – or in the story. The lead character of Covenant is a reporter who shares some similarities in that “escape” with me.  Joe Kieran is a former Chicago Tribune reporter who has left the big city behind because his investigative journalism has not only served to “hurt” those caught in his reporting of the dark underbelly… it has hurt his (now) ex-girlfriend. Joe turns his back on the thing he loves – the chase of the story – and retreats to a small town to write about bake sales and library events.

Not surprisingly, he’s not terribly happy at this “covenant” to avoid the risk of heartache from his true love, investigative reporting. So when he catches wind of a series of suicides off the cliff outside of town, he jumps. (forgive me)

But his editor says to back off. Don’t dig into pain, or it will get its digs into you.

Joe didn’t learn his lesson, not really, in Chicago… and soon he’s on the trail of a series of suicides that stretch back 100 years to the time of the town’s founder.  And he also finds a secondary set of suicides that seem to be connected with the death of a young girl 20 years in the past. Now the children of that dead girl’s friends are dying, one by one, one each year…

Covenant is a novel about the deals with devils that we all make to protect ourselves, to protect the ones we love; deals that ultimately injure the very people they’re forged to protect.  By trying to be “safe” in escaping Chicago, Joe puts his very soul at risk. By trying to protect his town, Terrel’s founder puts generations in peril. By trying to protect themselves, five girls mortgage their children’s future…

In a lot of ways, the heart of Covenant centers on the folly of searching for insurance against the unknown. You can’t walk through life with a safety net around you; it will ultimately drag you down.

But undertones in a novel should be just that… under. When I set out to write Covenant, I set out to write a fun, fast, spooky novel that hopefully sucked you into its mystery and dragged you along the rocky rapids to its bloody end. I grew up as a voracious reader, and for me, there was no better thrill than the rush of finding a book that sucked you instantly into its plot and carried you along in a current so strong you couldn’t put it down. The kind of book that you read until 3 a.m…. or until the last page was turned.

That’s the kind of book I wanted to write when I began Covenant, more than a dozen years ago now. I put the manuscript on a shelf a few times, for months at a time, stalling. Unsure. It was safer to pen short stories that I could write – and sell – quickly. Covenant was a real investment, with no guarantee of return. But in the end, I couldn’t, didn’t, take the safe way out. I forced myself to continue down its path, without a safety net. I finished the book about the time my first short story collection came out… and then rewrote it and expanded it by a good 10,000 words a couple years later, into the final version that won a Bram Stoker Award in its limited Delirium hardcover edition, the same text that Leisure has published in paperback in 2008.

I hope you’ll find it a fun, fast and spooky ride.