Premises I Love

If I see a book, movie or television show about any of these stories, I just can't pass it up.

• The isolated group of people--and one of them is a ________!   I love stories where people are trapped together, it's best when they're strangers, and they slowly realize that someone in the group is not what they seem. The most recent version of this was the movie Devil, where some people are stuck in an elevator and one of them is an insurance adjuster. I mean the devil.
• +1 if they're stranded because of a raging storm
• +1 if one of them is secretly a werewolf
• A contentious will reading leads to danger!   A lot of estate issues in real life cause strife, but don't make good stories. What makes a good story is if the dead guy or gal's attorney gathers all the nefarious relatives together to read a will that surprises everyone and sets in motion blackmail and murder.
• +1 if the will specifies that they must stayed in the creepy house together
• -1 if the deceased is revealed to be still alive. Unless he's also the killer
• A deadly prank comes back to haunt a group of friends!  I talked about this a little in regards to Kevin O'Brien's book The Last Victim. Whether this set-up leads to a ghost story, a slasher revenge story, or a taut thriller (like O'Brien's), I'm probably going to like it.
• +1 if they're stranded somewhere together
• +1 if it's at a class reunion
• My neighbor is a __________ and no one will believe me!   Like the last one, I love this premise no matter where it's going. It doesn't matter if the guy next door is a vampire like in Fright Night or a killer like in Rear Window. And for what it's worth, if you tell me you saw your neighbor doing something crazy or unbelievable, I'll be that side kick who stands lookout while you break into their place looking for their coffin or the murder weapon.
•  -1 if the neighbor is totally innocent, unless there's a good twist where someone else is guilty
• +1 if the cops won't help
• The classic locked room!   What I mean by classic is: someone is dead, murdered, in a locked room with no apparent way anyone could have gotten at them. This is a great premise and easy to start, but very difficult to pull off successfully. My love of this sort of thing goes back to an episode of Hey Dude I saw when I was about 10 or 11 and they told a story about people being found dead with all their doors and windows locked from inside. Maybe that wasn't a good plot for a kid's show, but it stuck with me!
• +1 if the solution is clever, not too simple or too technical
• -1 if an animal did it, that's been done by the masters and I could only barely tolerate it when they did it
• Finally, Bigfoot!   If a group of people go into the woods or the mountains and they're running into a skunk ape or yeti or whatever, I want to know about it. For me this goes back to stories at boy scout camp and the Peter Cushing movie The Abominable Snowman.
• +1 if they've ticked Bigfoot off
• -1 if it's about the monster truck, unless a real Bigfoot is driving it

Someday I hope to combine all of these beloved plots into one grand magnum opus. Okay, picture this, Bigfoot is found stabbed to death in a locked motel room after receiving threatening letters referencing his recent inheritance and a high school prank.

All right, I need to think about this some more.

Yee-Haw

A photo to commemorate the first time I've put on a cowboy hat, as an adult anyway. Sure the only country I listen to is Johnny Cash and I can't wear boots, but I gotta say it felt more right than I'd have thought. But if I got one of my own I'd go for something a little...less tall. Not a ten gallon. Maybe a six gallon. Whatever the hell that means. That's a Pistons 2004 Championship shirt, by the way.

Anyway I've just about lost track of the books I've read lately but I'm hoping to get a Recent Reading entry up as soon as I get re-organized. Then there's the Supporting Authors magazine for November, so I may just surpass my blistering blog speed this month. I'm thinking, like, four posts.

Seeing Stars

A lot of times when I'm reading a novel, I form no visual impression of the main character. Even if they're described, they remain a fuzzy portrait as I read. But then there are times when I get an image in my head of a character that, for whatever reason, morphs into a celebrity's face. I don't know if my brain is trying to cast the movie or if celebrities are just handy references. Maybe I'm the product of a screen generation, or maybe I'm just a bit off.

I've done this for a long time, too. I remember reading Night of the Twister in the late 1980s. I was eight or nine. I pictured the kids in the book as Kevin, Paul, and Winnie from The Wonder Years. That didn't even fit the descriptions of the characters, but somehow it rang true enough to me that I merrily disregarded the author's own vision.

I'd like to think I've at least gotten more accurate. The latest celeb who has been acting out novels for me is Owen Wilson playing John Sandford's Virgil Flowers. Here's Sandford describing Virgil in Rough Country, the first Virgil Flowers novel I read*:

Virgil was lanky and blond, a surfer-looking dude with hair too long for a cop, and a predilection for T-shirts sold by indie rock bands....

That's all it took. For some reason that sounded like Owen Wilson to me, and it's stuck throughout the three Virgil Flowers novels I've now read.

One more curious thing: this never, ever happens while I'm writing. To me, my characters either look like the people I'm basing them on, or like completely new people as I've written them. But it does make me wonder, on the off chance that others share this quirk, what celebrities a reader might cast in my work.



(*The first I read but the third of the series. To be fair, I may have started out of order but I did circle back to the beginning.)