Blake Crouch: Serial Uncut

I was immediately hooked. As I recall, we each wrote our sections in isolation, and we didn't share them with each other. When they were as good as they could be, you emailed me 200 words to kick off section 3, and I wrote back the next hundred words or so. You write much faster than I do so you pretty much just harassed me until I would email you back with my scene, or rather, my response to what your character had done. Do you remember the ground rules we came up with for writing section 3 together? I don't think we had an end in mind when we started. Didn't we just let it flow organically and hope it came out all right?

Joe: We had no ending planned, and we weren't allowed to get into our character's thoughts. It was a straight third-person observational point-of-view, with no head-hopping. Sort of like a screenplay. The action had to be on the page.

Blake: What made this so fun for me was that it was like playing chess with words. I created my very evil character and gave her a certain MO. You created the vastly demented Donaldson and gave him an MO, however as we began to email back and forth the text for section 3, we didn't know anything about each others' characters. In fact, I tried to get my girl to sit in the backseat, but you wouldn't let her. You insisted she sit up front. I didn't know why, but I knew it couldn't be good.

Joe: It was like we were really trying to kill each other. Which was fun to do with you, because you're just as twisted as I am. You were writing LOCKED DOORS at the same time I was writing RUSTY NAIL, and we both wound up with a similar gimmick independent of one another; all serial killers have families.

Blake: You and I share a similar sensibility in the darker side of fiction. There have been other instances when we were working on projects that had similarities. Like in AFRAID and SNOWBOUND when we both wrote scenes with wolves and bear traps. We also both love beer.

Joe: I'm about eight years older, so I've loved beer longer than you have. Might be worth doing a brief bio here, for those who haven't read us before. I write thrillers under the name JA Konrath, about a cop named Jack Daniels who chases serial killers. The books have some laughs, but also contain a lot of dark, scary parts, very much like the Taylor section of this novella.

Over the years I've gotten a fair amount of mail from fans, asking if I would ever do a scary book without any jokes. AFRAID was the result. Because it's no-holds-barred horror, I used a pen name, Jack Kilborn.

Blake: My first two books featured suspense writer Andrew Thomas, who gets pulled into a nightmarish world even worse than the ones he writes about. My latest book, SNOWBOUND, is coming out June 2010. It deals with human trafficking, a missing mother/wife, the Alaskan mob, and an elite Mexican ex-paratrooper group who are muscle for the drug cartels (they're real and they are so freaking terrifying I don't even call them by name in the book). Want to talk about all the negative reviews SERIAL has gotten?

Joe: Man, people sure are vocal in their hatred of this story. There have been hundreds of negative reviews on Amazon, Sony, B &N, and Apple, saying how sick and disgusting the story is, and how we're both monsters for writing such a thing.

First of all, it's a horror story. Horror is supposed to push boundaries and freak people out. What did they expect downloading a story about serial killers? Dr. Seuss?

Second, SERIAL was free, for heaven's sake. It's not like anyone was ripped off by us. They get it for nothing, then tear it to shreds because they don't like horror. If I didn't find it so funny, I might be a little hurt.

Blake: There have been some classic negative reviews. Clearly, a large group of people just downloaded SERIAL because it was free, without reading the explicit and redundant warnings you and I both went out of our way to post. The woman who wrote that she wanted to have a priest bless her Kindle and sprinkle holy water on it after it had been infected by SERIAL was my personal favorite. Did you notice that a new word was created in some of the reviews? I noted several people wanted to "unread" it.

Joe: I also liked those who said that "free was too much money" and "I wish I could rate this lower than 1 star." I'd love to watch some of those haters read this uncut version. And then go to therapy to unread it.

Blake: SERIAL UNCUT was your idea. How'd it come about?

Joe: I'd been wanting to do this uncut version of SERIAL ever since I wrote TRUCK STOP. With TRUCK STOP, my goal was to unite the Jack Daniels series with the Jack Kilborn books. But then we got so many bad reviews saying how graphic SERIAL was, when in reality most of the violence is understated and off the page, that I started wondering what would happen if we really did pull out all the stops. If we added TRUCK STOP to SERIAL, and then put even more material tying it in with your novels, this would actually be a short book. A short book about six horrible yet very different serial killers, that linked together the majority of both of our work.

Blake: From the first time you mentioned expanding SERIAL, I knew I wanted to do it, because I thought it would be fun to write some more about Lucy. And what you did with TRUCK STOP and bringing in characters from AFRAID and your Jack Daniels series seemed like so much fun. If you'll recall, my pre-SERIAL Lucy story was actually conceived in the Hyatt hot tub in Indianapolis at Bouchercon 2009 (the world mystery convention). You and I were talking about expanding SERIAL and what I could do with Lucy, and I came up with the idea of bringing in Orson, Luther, and Andy Thomas. Since we were at a mystery convention, and since Andrew Thomas is essentially a dark mystery writer, it made sense to set my pre-SERIAL Lucy story at a Bouchercon-type of convention.

Joe: From my end, putting this together was really easy. The opening section, where we learn how Donaldson got his start, practically wrote itself. Part of the fun of writing the original SERIAL was having two killers playing cat and mouse. With TRUCK STOP, I decided to see if killers could actually play well together. The opening scene, with Donaldson and Mr. K, was a nice precursor to those two scenes. Readers interested in the further adventures of Mr. K can find him as the main villain in the next Jack Daniels novel, called SHAKEN. Do you think it's more fun to write for the bad guys than the good guys?

Blake: Bad guys are without a doubt so much more fun to write. And I don't know what this says about me, but I definitely find them easier to write. The idea of killers playing well together certainly was the foundation of my Lucy/Orson/Luther section as well. We think of serial killers as these loners, societal outcasts who can't connect to other human beings. I think it's fascinating to consider two such outcasts (or three in my case) finding each other and comparing notes.

My next novel coming up is called SNOWBOUND. It's a thriller about the search for a missing girl, and the horrifying place the search leads. What's up next for you?

Joe: Besides SHAKEN, I've written two books in the TIMECASTER science fiction series under the pen name Joe Kimball. They take place in 2056, and the hero is Jack Daniels's grandson. I've also written two more Jack Kilborn horror novels that should be coming out soon. The working titles for them are TRAPPED and ENDURANCE, but titles change all the time, and I don't know what they'll eventually wind up being called. TRAPPED is sort of a semi-sequel to AFRAID, but it's a lot more visceral. ENDURANCE is also pretty intense. I also have a ton of ebooks available, including a lot of thriller and horror books and stories. What's up with you on the ebook front?

Blake: I just uploaded a short story collection to Kindle called FOUR LIVE ROUNDS. I'm going to be putting a horror novella up soon called PERFECT LITTLE TOWN, and possibly an early novel. Jeroen ten Berge, the genius behind the SERIAL graphic design and illustrations (and my website) is designing amazing covers for these eBooks. He has a great website at www.jeroentenberge.com.