When Real LIfe Meets Research

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Oh, gosh. What a thought-provoking post today from author Lynne Squires. I wonder how many of us have stories like this..but that’s not the question she has for us at the end of this touching essay.

See what happens when one discovery in a her life--developed not only into a novel, but into understanding and compassion.


When Real Life Meets Research

By M. Lynne Squires

After my mother’s passing when I was in my 30s, I found out she had been committed to an asylum for depression when I was just a year or two old. Mental health issues were treated differently then. What would be addressed today with medication and therapy, in the 1950s still subject to more arcane methods, from “fresh air cures” to lobotomies.

I was able to request the records for her stay there. There were meager notes about her time there, but enough to know she received shock treatments before her release.

Now in my 60s, I began a story about a new mother with auditory hallucinations and depression, inspired by my mother’s experience.

When I started writing fiction, it never occurred to me the research that would be involved. I thought research was the denizen of the nonfiction author. That misconception was debased early in my make-believe world creation journey. In the past few years, I have found myself down rabbit holes about the history of safety deposit boxes, how cross-stitch samplers came about, and more recently, the origin of the phrase “above the fold” in reference to newspaper articles.

I often find research for historical fiction is best accomplished in viewing old photographs and postcards. The nuances the eye can observe are often the details a narrative might overlook. A recent deep dive centered around asylums from the 1950s and backwards through the 17th century. Photographs and postcards are plentiful, although I wonder who would be excited to receive a postcard featuring an insane asylum?

An actual visit to a long defunct asylum a few hours from my home was enlightening and disturbing in equal measure. Designed in such a way to promote good air flow through cross ventilation, I imagine when the number of patients swelled from the intended capacity of 240 exceeded 2,400, the air quality suffered.

My main interest was in researching reasons for commitment to an asylum. In the earliest days, they ranged from “reading” and “asthma” to “laziness” and “vicious vices.” Often courts approved commitment of individuals for assessment and treatment, leaving them for lengths of stay dependent on the whim of the facilities administration or medical staff. Families could drop off a child, spouse, or other relative at an asylum door and many times never return for them.

The setting for my book, River of Silence, is such an asylum in the 1950s. When finding photos of nurses in the 1950s, I could practically hear the squeak of nurses polished white leather shoes against black and white tile floors and feel the white uniforms stiff with starch. Legs were always encased in opaque white stockings and white caps topped each head.

In that era, patients diagnosed with depression and anxiety were usually given electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). Lobotomies were performed far more frequently than one might imagine. On a typical day, dozens might be administered one after another, without the benefit of any anesthesia. Pictures of the equipment used were horrifying. The lobotomy tools were the equivalent of a basic ice pick and hammer.

My protagonist, Anastasia, committed to an asylum against her will learns the horror of being there, the helplessness of staying there, and the battle of trying to escape. Her story is told through the connected experiences of various people. Her family, friends, hospital staff, and other patient’s narratives come together to illuminate the picture of how mental health was dealt with over a half century ago. To tell Anastasia’s story through her eyes alone would not encompass the depth of her experience.

In telling this story, I realized the value of seeing how each character’s narrative enriched the story by weaving in details of setting and experiences outside the main character’s view. I wanted, in essence, a novel told in short stories where different elements were given space to expand and contribute to the overall story arc.

And FYI, possibly my favorite character is Agnes, a feisty, thin-as-a-rail patient, whose constant disheveled appearance belies her razor-sharp wit. If you must be in a new unfamiliar situation, you’d want an Agnes in your corner.


So Readers, at my age, writing about the 1950s hardly seems to be historical fiction, yet here we are. Stories set in what era do you most enjoy reading?



HANK: I agree–how can the fifties be historical fiction? Or the sixties? Yikes. What do you think Reds and Readers?

River of Silence is a story about a woman, Anastasia, taken away from her husband and infant daughter and committed to an asylum in the 1950s. Her story is told from multiple perspectives: the patients, her physicians, nurses, an orderly, an aide, and fellow patients. Within their stories is woven the world in which Anastasia finds herself. She undergoes electric shock treatments so common at that time. Her struggle to return home is difficult, punctuated with cruelty, misunderstanding, and despair.

She becomes friends with two women far different from her friends in her life at home. With nothing in common, the three make tenuous steps toward forging a relationship. A sane act in their uncertain world, the three come to care for, support, and defend each other.

The mental health world in the 1950s was in transition with antipsychotics being a newly introduced treatment for mental disorders. Some doctors embraced change, and some eschewed it. Anastasia struggles with the fear of falling prey to her old-school physician who believed lobotomies were a fallback cure for any patient he deemed difficult or incurable. He seems to dislike her, accusing her of not talking or interacting, and she fears the worst. A young physician fights for the patient's right to utilize new treatments. He's aware of the high mortality rate with lobotomies.

Anastasia starts teaching the women on her ward to crochet, and through that, she becomes engaged with staff and patients to the doctor's begrudging satisfaction.

The present-day last chapter has Anastasia's daughter preparing to sell her mother's home. She ruminates with her friend about her mother's journey and her eventual return home.

M. Lynne Squires, an Urban Appalachian Author, writes fiction, essays, and dabbles in poetry. Her first novel, River of Silence is forthcoming in May. She has penned four books, and her work has appeared in numerous journals, such as Change Seven and The Ekphrastic Review, and multiple anthologies, including the Anthology of Appalachian Writers, and Fearless: Women's Journeys to Self-Empowerment. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and is the 2020 Pearl S. Buck Writing for Social Change Award recipient. She writes at her home in Appalachia beside her furry overlords, Scout and Boo Radley.


RIVER OF SILENCE (currently in pre-order) is available at mountainstatepress.org. The release date is May 31st.

HOT OFF THE PRESSES

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  Hurray! You know how much we love debut authors here on Jungle Red, and we are so thrilled to give a standing ovation to the fabulous Christina Estes, an intrepid experienced reporter who finally, after years, took the big step into fiction.

 

I can tell you, Reds and readers, her debut novel OFF THE AIR is a must read--and a perfect beginning for a series. A winner in every way! (And all of you who wonder: do I need to start at the beginning of the series? Christina makes it easy, because this is book 1!) The iconic and revered JA Jance says “it's a tale that demonstrates how behind the smiling faces of TV anchors, covering the big story is a dog eat dog world.”

 

And today, Christina gives us the inside scoop. And breaking news: a copy of OFF THE AIR  to one very lucky reader! Enter once here with a comment, and you can get a second entry by coming to the Reds and Readers Facebook page and commenting on the post there, too!

 

HANK: Have you always wanted to be a mystery writer? How and why did that start? 

 

CHRISTINA ESTES: I remember being young and some adult asking, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

 

Since I devoured books, I would answer, “An author.”

 

But I never met an author and didn’t know anyone who pursued writing as a career. My love of reading included magazines and newspapers and I was exposed to reporters on TV and the radio, and that led me to study journalism.

 

J.A. Jance’s Ali Reynolds series, about a former L.A. newscaster who moves back home to northern Arizona, planted the seed for my writing. Hank’s Jane Ryland series about a Boston reporter helped it grow. Or at least helped me contemplate the idea of writing a series featuring a Phoenix TV reporter. It would be many years before I became serious about writing.

 

HANK: When did you decide that you were really and truly going to seriously write a novel? It’s such a big step – – what made you take it? 

 

CHRISTINA: In 2009, I said, “I’m going to write a book.” And, fifteen years later, I’m being published. Fifteen years!

 

I naively thought that because I’m a reporter and write every day that I could write a novel. Big mistake. There’s a huge difference between writing a thirty-second or three-minute broadcast story and a 300- page novel.

 

There was a lot of writing, rejection, stopping. More writing, rejection, stopping. You get the picture. I went years without writing. That’s not how you get published.

 

When I finally accepted that I didn’t know how to write a novel, I focused on learning (and I’m still learning) and got serious. I started saying ‘No’ to a lot of things in order to prioritize writing. It will not take 15 years to get published again! 

 

HANK Makes sense! And of course. But—what happened to make you finish this time?

 

CHRISTINA: There was no ‘aha’ moment that I recall. I just felt more committed. I wanted to see it through and figured I would give it my all one more time. Fortunately, perseverance paid off because Off the Air was selected for the Tony Hillerman Prize and I received a publishing contract through Minotaur Books.

 

HANK: What idea sparked this particular novel? The ONE thing you wanted to write about?

 

CHRISTINA: Besides taking readers behind the scenes of local news, I wanted to showcase Phoenix. I remember reading J.A. Jance’s first Ali Reynolds novel years ago and practically squealing with delight at the local references. There are so many great series set in cities like Boston, New York, Minneapolis, Chicago and Los Angeles, and I want to read more set in the city I call home.

 

The theme that kept swirling as I wrote centered on recognition. We all need it. People leave jobs and relationships when they don't feel valued. In the case of Jolene, my main character, she gets the acknowledgment she craves by breaking stories. Part of her desire for recognition comes from her upbringing, which she doesn’t yet realize or chooses not to accept.

 

HANK: So—do you blend fact and fiction in this novel? Do you use your real-life reporting experiences as a basis for your story?

 

CHRISTINA: I include references to two stories I covered as a reporter. The first involved residents who gathered to celebrate the demolition of an abandoned restaurant that had become an eyesore and attracted criminal activity. I changed the restaurant’s name but kept the party details – neighbors really did bring balloons and sparkling grape juice to cheer the demolition.

 

The other story relates to my personal experience being nominated for an Emmy for reporting about a fish going to the dentist. It lost to a story about bubble wrap. Yes, bubble wrap! In the book, it is Jolene’s loss. It’s interesting to hear reactions to that vignette. Some readers relate to Jolene’s disappointment, while others laugh.

 

HANK:  A fish going to the dentist? You must tell us about this in the comments.  How did the book change from how it was when you began? How did it become different—darker, bigger, scarier, more thought-provoking, deeper?  What did you learn?

 

CHRISTINA: My main character initially had a different name and backstory. I was writing about the 29-year-old TV reporter that I wish I had been. I needed a character with some rough edges, a character that I cared about and could root for.

 

I created Jolene’s backstory based on my experience as a former foster parent. It was uncomfortable because I didn’t want to cause pain for anyone who had experience in the child welfare system. It’s a big reason why I included a content advisory in the book. I love Jolene. I know some people will say, “She’s a character, not a person” and they would be right. But Jolene feels real to me.

 

HANK: One of the most difficult things in having a new novel is that you need the elevator pitch! So here we go… Tell us about this book!

 

CHRISTINA: I’m glad you asked because I need to practice for Good Morning America. Off the Air will be their Buzz Pick on March 30 and I get to pitch via video. Here’s what I’m thinking:

 

Off the Air introduces Jolene Garcia, a local TV reporter in Phoenix trying to cover real issues in a society that seems more interested in clicks and reels.

 

When a controversial radio talk show host dies on air, Jolene’s managers are ecstatic because she conducted his last interview. They’ve got the advantage – but not for long. National media descend on Arizona with bigger budgets and better scoops. Jolene is determined to solve this murder. It’s an investigation that could make or break her career—if it doesn’t break her first.

 

HANK: YAY! Massive congratulations on GMA. I absolutely love this book, it was surprising and wise and knowledgeable and fast paced and fun to read. How do you hope  people will feel at the end of it? 

 

CHRISTINA: Thank you, Hank. I hope readers feel entertained and are curious about what’s next for Jolene personally and professionally. A sequel is in the works!

 

HANK: Hurray!  And cannot wait to hear about all of your adventures. SUCH a joy to have a debut novel, and we are cheering you from the reds room!  So, Reds and readers, let’s talk TV.  Do you have a favorite television reporter? Past or present, fictional or real?

 

And a copy of the hot-off-the-presses OFF THE AIR  to one lucky commenter!

Remember, you get another entry by commenting on the Reds and Readers page!

 

 

 

 

 

Emmy award-winning reporter Christina Estes received the Tony Hillerman Prize for Best First Mystery Set in the Southwest. Off the Air is the first in a series featuring a local TV reporter. Having worked for several local TV stations, Christina now reports for the NPR member station in Phoenix.

www.christinaestes.com

https://www.facebook.com/ChristinaEstesAuthor/

@reporterestes on Instagram, X/Twitter, Threads

You will SWOON. Hurray for Anne Oman

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  You know how Jungle Red goes when we introduce you to a new author. There's an intro, and a tiny bio, and then the author writes something, and then at the end there's the book synopsis and more bio. And then we chat.

And that works fine, it really does.

But today, I'm going to set this up differently. Because two things. 

One, Anne Oman wrote MANGO RAINS, her first novel, when she was  79.

So there's that.

And now, read the description of MANGO RAINS.

 “Before the monsoon came the mango rains, which were short, hard downpours that forced the mango trees to surrender their just-ripe fruits and tantalized the city’s inhabitants with a hint of the release the monsoon rains would soon bring. 

Julia Galbraith, a newly arrived Foreign Service Officer just short of her 23rd birthday, stood on the terrace of her ground-floor apartment on the rue Pasteur and watched the rain fall. She was not beautiful, or even pretty, but she was tall and slender and blonde, which almost made up for the lack. Though a little shy, she exuded the freshness and vulnerability of a woman on the brink of life….”

Mango Rains is a story of love, loss and political intrigue in Southeast Asia during the turbulent 1960s. While war rages next door in Viet Nam, expats in the sleepy, peaceful Cambodian capital fall in and out love and dance to the tune of the famously mercurial Prince Sihanouk. As the gentle mango rains give way to the tumultuous monsoon, world events—the assassinations of JFK and South Viet Nam’s Ngo Dinh Diem—precipitate a crisis that scatters the characters to the far corners of the globe.

HANK: Are you swooning? Or what?  And now, more from the amazing Anne Oman.

CONFESSIONS OF A FAILED MYSTERY WRITER

by Anne Oman

I once tried to write a mystery novel – it was harder than I thought.

I set it in Kauai. There was a female food writer, a Colombo-like cop, a poet who posted his works (which were really clues) on telephone poles, drug smugglers, and a backpacker pushed to his death from the treacherous trail that winds atop the Na Pali coast. I figured I could take a few “research” trips to Kauai and claim the expenses on my tax return.

But when I reread the unfinished story, I came to a sobering realization: there wasn’t any mystery. Even the thickest reader would be able to identify the culprit. I needed a plot twist. I stuck the manuscript in a drawer – and I can’t remember which drawer.

So, I have great respect for people who can write mystery novels, which I read voraciously. My all-time favorites are Ross MacDonald, whose hard–boiled detective Lew Archer solves noir crimes in 1940s LA, and Agatha Christie, queen of the English country-house mystery. Alas, both are dead, and I’ve read all their books. Among the living whose works I wait for impatiently: Sarah Paretsky, Michael Connolly, Peter Robinson, Deborah Crombie and Elizabeth George. And I love finding other exciting mystery authors, and look forward to reading the books of the Jungle Red writers I haven’t discovered yet.

When I finally published my first fiction, a novella entitled Mango Rains, it was not a mystery but so-called literary fiction, a pretentious catchall term for anything that doesn’t fit neatly into any other genre box. But I did include some nefarious activity: opium smoking, espionage – are murder.

Some background: the book begins in Phnom Penh, the sleepy capital of Cambodia, in 1963. Like the book’s principal character, Julia, I was a newly minted 22-year-old Foreign Service Officer assigned there. People at Foreign Service posts tell a lot of stories, especially to newcomers. The idea is to make the newbie understand that “Before you come, things here were more exciting/scarier/more dangerous/more fun/better/worse.” You had to take the tales with a healthy dose of skepticism. One story I heard from several sources was about the killing of a young American boy by a group of cyclo-pousse drivers.

A cyclo-pousse is a carriage propelled from behind – or pushed – by a man on a bicycle. This was the main form of public transportation in the city. The drivers all knew rudimentary French, and you could direct them by saying “a la droite,” “a la gauche,” etc. 

 When you arrived at your destination, the driver would name a price, and you could pay it – or haggle. But the boy in the story, the son of an American aid official, would take long rides, refuse to pay the fare – and run. 

 Eventually, a group of drivers, having received only a shrug from the police, took matters into their own hands: one of the kid’s joy rides ended on a lonely road where a group of drivers ambushed him and stabbed him (sort of like the ritual stabbing in Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express). His body, with multiple stab wounds, was found several days later in a rice paddy.

Was the story true? I took cyclos all the time, and found the drivers reliable and courteous. But then again, I always paid the fare. And who knows what impoverished, disenfranchised people will do if they have no other recourse? Anyway, I was writing fiction, so I decided to use the story.

I introduced it in the second chapter, at a dinner party in the home of an American economic attaché, when a Cambodian journalist asks: “What will your Embassy do about the murder of the American boy by the cyclo drivers?”

The host, a seasoned, cynical and hard-drinking diplomat named Bill Harper, tells the reporter that the Ambassador has taken the matter up with Cambodia’s head of state, the famously mercurial Prince Sihanouk, who has piously promised to investigate. But, his tongue loosened by drink, he explains that the Prince is simply telling the Ambassador what he wants to hear but that “he doesn’t really expect the Ambassador to believe it.”

The problem, he adds, is that “the Ambassador doesn’t know the rules of the game here --he takes it all literally… He has no grasp of Asia.”

It’s dangerous to make sweeping pronouncements about a whole people, but it’s generally true that in Asia, face is all-important. You may know the façade isn’t quite real, but you at least have to pretend to believe it -- as long as you don’t fool yourself.

The never-to-be-solved murder comes up again at a vernissage –the opening of an exhibit of paintings at the American Library. The same Bill Harper, cocktail-fueled, tells his young protegėe: “…All the art exhibits, all the perfumes of Arabia, none of it matters a damn…. “I’m not sure any of these people matter either… Look outside, at the man sweeping the street, or the guy pedaling the cyclo. Do we have any inkling of what they’re thinking? Maybe someday they’ll tell us, and I’ll bet it won’t be pretty. Maybe we got just a hint of that in the murder of the American boy.”

This is a 20/20 hindsight allusion to the Pol Pot holocaust, the time of the brutal killing fields of the Khmer Rouge. In fact, I had absolutely no premonition of these horrors to come, and had trouble taking them in when they occurred. (The best book on that subject is Elizabeth Becker’s When the War Was Over: Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge Revolution.)

In the last chapter of Part I of Mango Rains, many of the Americans, including Julia, are leaving Cambodia in the wake of the diplomatic breakup. At the airport, Julia sees the family of the murdered boy: “The Air Lao plane to Vientiane was called, and the family of the child killed by the cyclo drivers started to board. The father had been transferred to Laos, and the wife carried a brass box that held the boy’s ashes.”

If this were a Christie novel, Hercule Poirot would have called all the cyclo-pousse drivers in Phnom Penh into the library and given us all the benefit of his little gray cells and revealed exactly which ones stuck their knives into the boy. The obliging Inspector Japp would have carried the culprits off to justice, and the rest of us would have raised a toast with our glasses of sherry.

But, alas, this is the mysterious East, where mysteries don’t get solved that easily. Or at all.

Namaste.

HANK: Okay, Reds and Readers. Do we want to be Anne Oman, or what?  Tell us what you think when you read this...and congratulate a wonderful new author. 

(And Anne, my Dad was a cultural affairs officer for USIA from 1960 or so until he retired. And his wife was also in USIA. I wonder if you'd crossed paths. Seoul, Cebu, Bangkok, Hamburg, London?)



Anne H. Oman began her career as a Foreign Service Officer for the now defunct US Information Agency, which was charged with “winning the hearts and minds of the people.” She served in Cambodia and Indonesia and was expelled from both countries, for political, not personal, reasons.

Since that time, she has worked principally as a journalist. Her articles have appeared in the Washington Post, The Washington Star, The Baltimore Sun, The Washington Times, Washington Woman, Family Circle, Sailing, National Geographic World, Senior Scholastic and many other publications. Currently, she is Reporter At Large for the Fernandina Observer in Fernandina Beach, Florida. She has also published four non-fiction books. Mango Rains is her first work of fiction.

New England Gothic

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Two things today. No, three.

One.  My dad was the music critic for the old Chicago Daily News. As a result, he got to see many productions before the rest of the world.

One was Kismet. (I mean—the musical, Kismet.) Another was West Side Story. Yup. West Side Story. In press previews.

Many years later, I asked him: did you know, when you heard it? When you heard This is My Beloved? Or Tonight?  Did you know they were special?

Yes, he told me. I did.

Two. And it’s the same for books. I get asked to blurb a lot of books. A lot. And often, I say no. I truly do not have time. And I do not want to give a book short shrift.

But sometimes, I say yes.  And then—when the book is fabulous, I feel as if I—like my dad—I have been privy to something special. Something that the rest of the world will soon discover.

Doug at launching Mysterious Books

Three. Meet Doug Burgess. And his (Publishers Weekly starred reviewed!) Fogland Point.

And a copy of his debut novel to one lucky commenter! My name is on the cover. With Nick Petrie, and Michael Koryta. See? Fabulous.

What is Fogland Point about? Please welcome Doug Burgess to tell you.

New England Gothic: 

Mystery and Memory in a Rhode Island Village

When I was a kid, my Uncle George figured large in our dinner conversations. There were stories of his war exploits, his travels around the world, the time he met film star Peggy Hopkins Joyce on the Fall River Line ferry to New London and proposed (unsuccessfully) somewhere in Long Island Sound. Finally I brought up the nerve to ask why this remarkable person was never invited to our house.

“Because he died in 1939,” my father answered.

Growing up in a damp and ancient house deep in Swamp Yankee country, the dead were everywhere around me. Our once-large Rhode Island family had dwindled down through the generations until the only remnants were my grandparents, parents, brother and myself. Yet both my elementary and high schools were named after relatives, as was the posh university across the street. The many branches of the family tree lent their names to half the streets of Providence and Newport. 

My father liked to pull the car into random cemeteries, point to a weathered piece of granite and announce brightly, “There’s your Great-Aunt Lydia!”

All this could make a child morbid, or worse. In my case it gave me a curious sense of time. My grandparents, both near-centenarians at their death, had been born when ice was delivered in horse carts and there was still an Austro-Hungarian Empire. 

But when they spoke of the past it did not seem so long ago: the people they described were as real to me as my friends. Vignettes from their lives were offered like a basket of rolls at every holiday dinner: Grandpa Butler gifting his wife with peaches at Christmas because he fancied peach jam, Cousin Betty feeding Alka-Seltzer tablets to the despised seagulls that terrorized her Chihuahua, Uncle Walter in his fisherman’s sou’wester paying for a Steinway piano with a scaly roll of hundred-dollar bills. 

Soon I, too, began telling their stories—eventually, as my grandmother’s mind declined, I told them back to her.

The places, likewise, did not seem impossibly distant, but that was because they were still there. Like much of New England, Rhode Island never changes. The main street of my parent’s town looks much like it did when John Quincy Adams passed through on his way to Washington; the town library where I borrowed my first Agatha Christie was once a congressional hall that voted down the U.S. Constitution in 1790. 

Even the furnishings of my house unmoored me: in school there were Game Boys and Backstreet Boys, yet each evening I wrote my calculus homework on a table brought back from Burma in 1850 and slept in a bed that had birthed three generations of ancestors.

When I came to write Fogland Point, history, memory and place were much in my mind. The story of a young man who returns to the small Rhode Island village of his childhood to take care of a grandmother now coping with dementia, only to discover a body in the house next door, there is much beyond the mystery that is both personal and autobiographical. 

What few people realize is that dementia is not just about what one forgets, but remembers.

As it progressed in my Nana’s mind, she began to move through time at random. One moment she would be a little girl describing the fixtures of her parents’ house in Riverside; next she would begin a conversation with her friend Florence who died in the ‘80’s. 

Once in our car she became convinced that my dad, her son, was abducting her from school and said angrily, “My father is going to be so mad with you!” But then she turned and saw me in the back seat and immediately asked how my studies were getting on. It was as if she had finally transcended the fragile bonds of past and present that I had brushed against my entire life.

Dementia brings the concept of the unreliable narrator to a new level, and this, too, I wanted to explore. Were my grandmother’s memories to be believed? Were her confessions to be trusted? Was my Great-Uncle Bob Daniels really a pedophile, as she suddenly and startlingly claimed? Secrets came pouring out of her, but each left more questions than answers. Much of this translated into the novel.

 Nevertheless I was surprised when a friend read an early draft and said, “Well, you certainly brought Southern Gothic to Southern New England.” So surprised, in fact, that I looked up Southern Gothic on Wikipedia. 

And there it was: “deeply flawed, disturbing or eccentric characters who may be involved in hoodoo, ambivalent gender roles, decayed or derelict settings, grotesque situations, and other sinister events…”

Substitute hoodoo with the Congregational Church and this could have been on the dust jacket for Fogland Point. The world of a dementia sufferer—and those around them—is indeed a kind of gothic landscape where the veneer of the familiar overlays horrors, real and imagined, beneath.

There is a line in the book that strikes particularly close to home: “The house looks just the same as it always has…like nobody has told it the bad news. All my grandmother’s things are waiting for her to come back.” The backdrop remains both homey and comforting, even as the story becomes increasingly bizarre. This was my experience with my own grandmother, and I expect for many others as well.

That porous barrier between real and imagined takes on an increasingly desperate dimension as the disease progresses. We want to hold onto the memories before they are gone for good. A plot device that frames much of the novel—a series of stories told into a tape recorder by multiple narrators—came from one such reel I discovered myself in the family library.

 On it was my father’s youthful voice, and my great-grandfather’s, which I had never heard. Dad asks Grandpa about life during the Depression. “What Depression?” Grandpa wonders. Already the confusion has begun to claim him, as it would his daughter. Sometimes I think I wrote Fogland Point out of fear—that I, too, must tell my stories before it is too late.

I certainly did not set out to write a New England Gothic mystery; on the contrary, in their speech, mannerisms, histories and lives, each of the characters is as real and down-to-earth as I could make them. But the phlegmatic New England Way is a mask we all wear. Anything ugly, unsightly or not-quite-right is shunted behind the house, hidden in the garden shed, so that we can present a pleasant face to company.

In that sense, Rhode Islanders make the best murder suspects anywhere—we conceal everything. The exquisite distress that family and friends experienced as my Nana began voicing her truth is mirrored by the characters in Fogland Point; as Aunt Constance says in the novel, “You shouldn’t pay too much mind to the things she says. She can’t keep stuff inside anymore.”

New England also lends its atmospheric presence to gothic mystery: no craggy moor or swampy fen was ever so desolate as Easton’s Beach on a blustery November afternoon. I chose the town of Little Compton partly because of family connections, but mainly because of its rugged beauty and curiously isolated location, a peninsula jutting out into the North Atlantic without even a bay to protect it. 

The place names were so evocative that I sometimes feared to include them, lest the novel seem garish: Quicksand Pond, Despair Island, even Fogland Point itself. In rendering them I tried to remain as true to the landscape as possible (although my father experienced a moment of panic when he realized, after consulting the map, that Fogland lay just over the town border in Tiverton. Oh, well).
If Fogland Point is gothic, it is only because Rhode Island is equally so: a place where the dead are never truly gone and the past seems forever present. Gothic mystery doesn’t need rotting plantation houses or Spanish moss. A whitewashed Colonial, a neatly trimmed yard and a secret that can’t stay hidden will do just as well.

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Whoa. Fabulous. And this is a terrific book. SO—do you love Gothic novels? What does that mean to you? And what do you think about what Doug says?

And a copy of FOGLAND POINT to one very very lucky commenter!

"Elegant prose, a veritable Chinese box of puzzles, and authentic, well-rounded characters make this a standout." Publishers Weekly starred review

Preorder HERE.

Doug Burgess was born in Connecticut. After moving to Rhode Island, where his paternal family has lived for over three hundred years, he received his first education from the Quaker Friends at ses Brown School. Burgess received a BA  from McGill,   a JD from Cornell,  , an LLM from the University of British Columbia and a PhD from Brown University . He now teaches at Yeshiva College.

In 2003, Burgess wrote a dissertation arguing for the legal linkages between piracy and terrorism, and for the possible use of piracy law as a foundation for defining international terrorist organizations. This concept was later articulated in articles for Legal Affairs Magazine,  the National Security Law Report, the New York Times  and other publications. It appeared in book form as "The World For Ransom" (2010). Burgess continues to lecture around the world on counter-terrorism and the law.

Burgess has authored numerous articles for trade and scholarly journals, and one novel, FOGLAND POINT —a mystery set in Little Compton, Rhode Island.

He is a featured blogger for The Huffington Post.