Features
Elizabeth Hand on Playwriting, Haunted Houses, and Shirley Jackson
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This interview has been edited for clarity and concision. A Haunting on the Hill is now available from Mulholland Books. Olivia Rutigliano: I’m so excited because this is the first continuation of The Haunting of Hill House that has been sanctioned by the Shirley Jackson estate. I’m so interested in how you came to this…
Love Behind Bars: On the Complicated World of Incarcerated Romance
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Of all the correspondents I’ve had in my life, Sam Israel has been among the most consistent. Sam was serving a twenty-two-year sentence in federal prison for fraud when we met. He’d been running a Ponzi scheme out of a hedge fund that began with him stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from investors and…
Rhys Bowen on Using Real Experiences As Inspiration
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My new book, The Proof of the Pudding, is the 17th in the series featuring Lady Georgiana, 35th in line to the throne in the nineteen thirties. When I started this series in 2006 I couldn’t have imagined that it would still be going strong and have readers around the world in 9 languages to…
Psychology Is Important For Motivation, But Your Characters Need More Than Diagnoses
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I teach creative writing at a public arts high school in Chicago. If you’re picturing Fame, with students breaking into song and dance in the hallways, you’re not far off. But for all the joy they bring to the classroom, my students often want to write about characters who have bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, depression,…
On Horror and Humanity’s Enduring Love Affair with Fear
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Hold, friend. I only have fifteen hundred words to save your life. You and I are bound in a bargain spanning hundreds of years, across dozens of types of media and thousands of artists. There’s a monster hiding in these words, ripping through the sentences and syllables, trying to get to your soul. It wants…
Fighting Toxic Masculinity Through Young Adult Fiction
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When I was dreaming up the plot of my latest young adult thriller, The Revenge Game, I posed the following research question to my social media followers: “It’s hard to phrase, but did you ever experience kids at school/camp participating in, like, sexual conquest competitions? Example: at my camp, the *cool kids* would rank the…
Wilderness Thrillers Featuring Fearless Women
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I’m what you might call a mini-adventurer. I’ve climbed rockfaces, rafted rivers, backpacked into the wilderness and once slithered through a cave tunnel so tight that the only way through was to lie flat, turn my head sideways and push with my toes. I’ve never done anything as daring as free-climbing the 3,000-foot granite wall…
From Sports Reporter to Crime Writer
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Ask me why I created a female sports reporter protagonist and the answer is easy. That’s my background. I intimately know the character’s experiences—the smell of the locker rooms, the chit chat with a camera operator and the adrenaline rush of a newsroom. Ask me why I decided to write a thriller—well, that question stumped…