THE TUNNELS Q & A WARNING: sections of the interview include plot spoilers Q: Where did you get the initial idea for THE TUNNELS? A: I originally set out to write a coming of age story set on a college campus. It was largely going to be based on my freshman year at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where a number of dramatic events occurred: the University President's office was fire-bombed, there was a student hunger strike, bullets were fired on the hill outside my dorm room. Various national and international organizations claimed responsibility for all the drama; in the end, it turned out to be largely the actions of two students who wanted to stir up unrest. Tragically, one of them was found murdered the following summer. I wanted to tell that story from the perspective of several different students, some intimately involved with what was going on, others just experiencing the madness from the periphery. But every time I hit the fifty page mark, the story stalled on me. I shifted gears, tried telling it from a different character's perspective, tried opening with a different scene: nothing worked. Then one night, I took it in a completely different direction. The end result was THE TUNNELS. Q: Why the interest in Norse mythology? A: I pursued an interdisciplinary major at Wesleyan that combined literature, language, history, and philosophy. We studied blocks of time as a whole: the Classical period, the Renaissance, the Modern era. One of the texts that always stuck with me was Njal's saga (partly because there was not one, but two characters named Ulf the Unwashed. Very confusing.) The mythology contained in that book and others seized my imagination; the stories were so vivid, very different from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Yet so much has carried over into our own world: Thursday is derived from Thor's day, for example, and Friday from Freya's Day (both are Norse Gods.) I found that fascinating. Q: How much research did you do? A: I spent about three months researching everything from ancient pagan rituals to FBI procedure. One of my great frustrations, always, is that a lot of research gets lost in the shuffle. Reading texts like the Heimskringla was how I elicited many of my ideas, but incorporating everything I learned into the narrative without slowing down the pace of the story was impossible. I managed to sneak in bits here and there, but at the end I couldn't help but think, "if only I could have added in that thing about the Yggdrasil tree…" Q: Is the Bishop Gottskalk story true? A: As far as I know! I came across it in the course of my research, and found it so striking: a Christian Bishop who was really a sorcerer, and possessed a book with spells for raising the dead. And then the continuation of the myth, that he was buried with the book, and all who tried to rob his grave either went insane or vanished utterly. As soon as I read about it, I knew it had to be incorporated somewhere. Q: How much of THE TUNNELS did you have plotted out in advance? A: None of it! It was my first attempt at writing a thriller, and I completely winged it; consequently, the first draft was a total disaster. In the second draft I changed everything, including who the killer was (initially it was supposed to be Dean Scott: far too obvious, don't you think?) By the tenth or eleventh draft I finally had a grip on the story. Q: What can we expect for your next book? A: I'm really excited about that. It's called BONEYARD. The story follows FBI Special Agent Kelly Jones and a few other select characters from The Tunnels on another case set in New England. I based the plot on months of research I did on various serial killers: the title itself refers to the boneyards left by Ted Bundy in Washington State back in the 1970's, in other words the places where he dumped his victims. Kelly has a tough job ahead of her, wrangling dueling cops from different jurisdictions, especially when an unexpected visitor arrives on scene. ABOUT THE BOOK EXCERPT BOOK GROUP QUESTIONS