.By the  Author

When I sat down to write this book I had already spent considerable time doing research about the darkest sides of human beings and its most fiendish representatives: Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer. The usual suspects. I found mostly what you think I would in terms of common denominators. I also found that evil and mental illness are not mutually exclusive nor are they mutually dependent. Sometimes they just coincide.

I wanted to create a character whose urge to kill couldn’t be summed up with a diagnosis. Societally, we always assume the best course of action is to make it so that everyone can function at full potential. What if the monster performs best when he is at full potential? Psychosis might be preferable to what he does when he is clear-thinking. In order to troll for a victim, one must be lucid and methodical. 

Ironically, his mental illness- the organic one- might have been the one damn thing that prevented him from being organized and functional enough to kill: but we gave him medicine for that. 

That’s when he goes driving. That’s when he goes walking at 4 am. That’s when he packs his kit with masking tape and rope and a blade with which to slit your bedroom window screen.

He has to start somewhere. He has to start sometime. 

The only recourse we have is to depend on the heroes who go looking to stop him.

And that’s where my brain had to switch over to the best there is in human beings to create a character not merely willing to hunt a serial killer but deeply driven to do so: someone haunted-literally or psychologically- depending on how you, the reader, want to see it. That’s why the novel begins with an old coroner’s report.

I’ll end my first blog with this: John Steinbeck said there is really only one story to tell and that is the one about the good and evil in people.