Blake Crouch: Birds of Prey

Luther scooted up, into her manacled embrace, his mouth finding hers, one hand frantically tugging down his zipper.

He stood and lifted Alex out her chair, the chains drawing tight against the D-ring in the floor. He pushed her across the table onto her stomach as Jonas watched, eyes bulging out, his hand busy behind the door.

Alex spread her legs as wide as the chains would allow, and Luther drove himself into her, the steady slap-slap-slap of skin against skin building in strength and frequency until his legs went weak and he collapsed onto her, sweaty and grunting and their chests heaving against each other.

“I need more doctors like you,” Alex said, wiggling her ass against him.

Luther abruptly pulled out, collapsing into Alex’s chair.

“We need to get you out of this place,” he said, zipping up.

Alex sat up on the table facing him, her legs still open, completely comfortable with her nudity.

“How?” she asked.

“I could help you escape. We could go after Jack together.”

“I would love to kill with you, Luther,” Alex said, “and I want us to make that happen. But Jack is mine. You see what she did to me.”

“I think you’re beautiful.”

“She’s mine, Luther. You let me have her, and I’ll do things to you that will make your fucking head explode.”

Luther stood up, walking around the table to his original chair. He lifted his briefcase and opened it covertly, hiding it from Jonas who still stared through the window.

Luther removed the false bottom and took out three small items.

“Can you pick locks?” he asked Alex, lowering his voice.

She nodded, her eyes getting bigger. He reached over, clasping her hands, slipping her the lock pick, the tension wrench, and the plastic disposable lighter.

“There’s a utility closet down the hall,” he said. “Probably locked. Probably filled with flammable cleaning supplies.”

“There’s no way they will ever let me walk out of this dump.”

“So let someone else take your place.”

Alex nodded. “But even if I burn them, they’ll check dental records.”

“I couldn’t risk bringing in a pair of pliers, didn’t know if I’d have to go through a metal detector. But I’m sure you can make do.”

Then Luther closed his briefcase and walked briskly to the door.

Rapped on it twice.

“See you on the outside, Luther Kite,” Alex said as Jonas let him out.

In Which Blake and Joe Interview Each Other About the Experience of Writing SERIAL KILLERS UNCUT…

JOE: So once again, here we are, discussing the never-ending saga that has ultimately become SERIAL KILLERS UNCUT.

It seems like we’re writing an epic novel in installments.

BLAKE: We were talking about this recently, how if SERIAL KILLERS UNCUT (hereinafter, “SKU”) had been released by a legacy publisher, it would have taken us over two years to get to this point, and…

(a) no one would have gotten to read SERIAL, BAD GIRL, TRUCK STOP, SERIAL UNCUT, KILLERS, KILLERS UNCUT, or BIRDS OF PREY yet; and

(b) Even worse, we would just now be turning this novel in, which means it still wouldn’t be coming out for another 12-18 months, which is what, three and a half years after we initially released SERIAL?

JOE: In a way, we’re following the same model as independent musicians. Release the songs as they’re completed, then release the EPs (a few songs at a time), then the final album with everything together.

Do you feel like we’re ripping off our readers by doing this? Or being generous by releasing things as we write them, rather than making them wait months or years?

BLAKE: I can only put myself in their shoes. If I had the choice to read the work of my favorite novelist right now, as opposed to three years from now, I have to go with now every time. Besides, it’s not like we’re releasing $26.95 books every time out. Many of the individual stories that comprise SKU were priced at $.99 or $2.99. And SERIAL was and still is free. There may be some overlap between projects, certain stories being present in several omnibus collections, but I think that’s a small price to pay for having immediate access to our work. It simply wouldn’t work any other way.

Did you think when we started SERIAL it was going to morph into a 120,000-word double-novel?

JOE: No way. This project was a strange one for myriad reasons. Wonderful, and rewarding, but strange. We’re both fans of F. Paul Wilson (in fact, we wrote a novel, DRACULAS, with him), and Paul has done an admirable job linking his entire oeuvre together. The majority of his stories intermingle, and characters can pop up in seemingly unrelated books and stories.

As a fan, I LOVE this. It is rewarding to see a character I remember from a previous story come back in another one. So that’s the approach I wanted to take with this series.

The point of SERIAL was to see how two killers interacted when they met up on the road.

When we originally expanded SERIAL into SERIAL UNCUT, we wanted to take it up a notch. You took characters from your books and had them meet, I took characters from mine and had them meet.

Then we went even further with BIRDS OF PREY. Now we completely intertwined our universes. My bad guys meet your bad guys, from over a dozen of our novels.

BLAKE: You and I write a lot of bad guys. It was so much fun doing the killer-killer interaction in SERIAL UNCUT, that with BIRDS OF PREY, we simply said, let’s bring every major villain we’ve ever written into the same book. And not only that, let’s have Joe’s villains and Blake’s villains share scenes together. And not just any old scenes. Scenes that perhaps set up or anticipate big events in our major works like your Jack Daniels series and my Andrew Thomas series. I think of SKU as a glove that fits into all the spaces left between our collective novels. So Charles Kork from WHISKEY SOUR has a scene with Luther Kite and Orson Thomas from DESERT PLACES. Donaldson and Orson share a scene. Alex Kork and Luther Kite share a scene. And of course, there’s the centerpiece of the entire thing, “An Unkindness of Ravens.”

JOE: That 16,000 word section features Javier (Snowbound), Luther Kite (Locked Doors), Mr. K (Shaken), Alex Kork (Rusty Nail), and Charles Kork (Whiskey Sour) on the side of evil, along with cameos by Kiernan (Run), Donaldson (Serial), Lucy (Serial), Dwight Eisenhower (Endurance), Isaiah (Abandon), Swanson, Munchel, and Pessalano (Fuzzy Navel).

They went up against the forces of good, Jack Daniels, Clayton Theel (Draculas), and Tequila (Shot of Tequila.)

It was like a greatest hits battle royale, and so much fun to write.

Which is part of the reason the end product is over 120,000 words long and took two years to complete. This double novel takes place between all of our other novels, filling in gaps, expanding back-stories, and revealing clues to our upcoming collaboration, STIRRED.

BLAKE: There are some huge clues in here, no doubt. To me, the benefit of writing something like this, is that we’re using characters who have already been battle-tested in other books. We know they work, we love to write them, and so instead of spending all our time inventing and developing brand new characters, we’ve taken this group and put them to work building an entire monster of a book.

JOE: I’m pretty sure this hasn’t been done before. Not on this scale. Not with two authors completely meshing their worlds together.

At least, not in horror fiction. Comics and TV shows have been doing this for years. Superheroes and Supervillains always appear across many titles, and who didn’t love the 70s when Magnum PI would appear on Simon & Simon, or Mork did a cameo on Laverne & Shirley?

BLAKE: Let’s talk about how our collaborative process has developed over the last two years. With SERIAL, we started out emailing each other back and forth until a scene was finished, and there was a big element of gamesmanship, of not knowing what the other guy was up to and using that energy to propel the scene into interesting places. Then with KILLERS, we started using Google docs, which we’ve talked about previously, allowing us to write in the same document at the same time. But what interests me most is how our writing style (when we write together) has changed. I think we’ve truly developed a Konrath/Crouch style that is quite different from our individual styles. It seems like we edit each other much less now, and I think that’s because I know what kind of a sentence will pass your bullshit test, and vice versa.