"I recently ordered "Pale Criminal" recommended by Mike, I have been secretly hoping it arrives on my door step before I leave for a long awaited road trip next week (stay tuned for more beautiful nature images)."
What!? Nobody ever reads that book, which took me nine years to write, and which is dense and poorly paced, in the middle section most especially. Who, may I ask, is Mike?
Thank you. Thank him. You'll probably curse him after you've started reading it, and I won’t blame you.
None of the characters are based on anyone in real life, nor are any of the book's characters autobiographical. That question used to come up all the time. As the book progresses, the main character's father comes to take on more and more the figure of God the father (an Old Testament God specifically, jealous and angry but remarkable nonetheless), whereas his ghostly mother comes more and more to symbolize the Spirit of Truth, or Holy Spirit, as it were. The character most like me in the entire novel is the woman named Lauren. But it's a highly fictionalized account the purpose and theme of which was to explore the question of right and wrong in a Godless universe. I know it's heavy-handed subject-matter, but it was something that much interested me for a long time, and I got the idea for the story based on a phenomena I once read about called a psychogenic fugue, which is rare but real and classified as a type of amnesia. The filmmaker David Lynch also used the idea of a psychogenic fugue in his movie "Lost Highway," the first half of which I loved, and I explicitly sought to capture some of the same feeling David Lynch (and the writer Barry Gifford) captured in the first half of that movie. A few readers over the years have caught the "Lost Highway" influence. But only a few. One of them was a semi-regular customer at a bar where I once bartended, and she was also an aspiring novel-writer. She used to come in about once a month and give me very specific details about where and why the book reminded her of “Lost Highway,” and I liked that a lot.
May I tell you a little more, at the risk of going on too long and qualifying the story to death? When I was finished writing that book, I sent it to a publishing house in California called Counterpoint Press, the founder and editor of which is a guy by the name of Jack Shoemaker. He's published several writers I admire, foremost of whom is a poet and novelist named Nicholas Christopher, who teaches at Harvard, and who was kind enough to give me an endorsement quote for that very book. Not quite one year after I'd sent my manuscript to Counterpoint Press -- after I'd not heard a single word in response and had written them off -- I received a polite and handwritten note from Jack Shoemaker, who said that my manuscript had "divided his editorial staff." Half of them liked it, he said -- and he was one of them -- but the other half did not like it at all. He said that there was a time he'd have taken a chance on a manuscript that was fifty-fifty among his editors -- "but not in today's market." That was several years ago. It was a stake in my heart, but at the same time it made me feel strangely vindicated. Something very similar then happened with the next publisher I wanted: Greg Michelson at Unbridled Books. He also wrote me a letter, telling me heliked my writing "line by line," but didn't think the story was marketable. I tell you all this by way of explaining it's a book not universally beloved, as the guy who evenutally published it discovered the hard way (thank you, John Kirsch!).
The book is also about childhood. In fact, childhood is a major theme of the book, and you, coincidentally enough, in your amazing story "Discovering Mr. Wolf," completely captured almost the exact same thing I was going for. I'm still very proud of “Pale Criminal” (originally titled "More and More unto the Perfect Day"), but I never recommend it to people as the first book of mine to read. I've gone on at such great length here because the decade of my life I spent writing that book and then trying to get it published will always remain at the forefront of my brain. Thank you for letting me qualify the living hell out of it.
