We are delighted to welcome author Gordon Chaplin to Omnimystery News today.
Gordon has a new cross-genre novel out this month, Paraíso (Arcade Publishing; July 2016 trade paperback and ebook formats), and we recently had the opportunity to spend some time talking about it with him.
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Omnimystery News: Tell us a little more about the central characters of Paraíso.
Photo provided courtesy of
Gordon Chaplin;
Photo credit George Bouret
Gordon Chaplin: The two protagonists are brother and sister. The brother is two years older but they were very close as children, growing up in Philadelphia. At the time of the story, they've been estranged for years but the brother hears his sister is in trouble in Mexico and, after 9/11, decides he must go help her. The estrangement was caused by their psychopathic mother. So I've taken a dysfunctional family dynamic and moved it to an exotic location … Mexico … a violent land where death is always in the background and nothing is exactly what it seems.
OMN: How hard was it to find the right voice for these characters?
GC: One of my lead characters is female, but strangely enough I found I had no trouble writing from her point of view. It seemed to come very naturally. I had never tried this before and was frankly amazed at how well it worked out.
OMN: Into which genre would you place this book?
GC: My novel is definitely a cross over, half literary in the sense that it deals with intensely personal issues, and half thriller. I realize that successful marketing needs convenient categories and I'm sorry that mine doesn't fit completely into any one of them. But that's how it goes. For better or worse I can't write for the market. I do hope and pray that readers will buy it anyway. You don't write in a vacuum.
OMN: When starting a new project, which comes first: the storyline or the characters?
GC: For me, the storyline flows out of the characters.
OMN: Tell us a little more about your writing process.
GC: I have to let the story develop as I write. I've tried outlines and synopses, but always end up throwing them away after the story takes over. Writing to me is like building a brick wall: you have to lay the first course of bricks in order to have somewhere to put the second.
OMN: How true are you to the setting of the story?
GC: In this novel, I'm writing about a real place but a different time. My fictional town is the place I've lived in for thirty years, off and on, but the way it was when I first arrived. It was much more interesting back then.
OMN: What is the best advice you've received as an author?
GC: I think Faulkner said it best: "I only write when I'm inspired. Fortunately I'm inspired every morning at nine o'clock." In other words, there's no such thing as spontaneous inspiration, just the inflexible routine of sitting down each day in front of an empty page and staying there until it's filled.
OMN: What kinds of books did you read when you were young?
GC: My father was English and loved the old English adventure books by H. Ryder Haggard (She, etc.) He used to read me those, H.G. Wells (The War of the Worlds, etc.), and the ghost stories of Algernon Blackwood, which fascinated and terrified me.
OMN: Have any specific authors influenced how and what you write today?
GC: My favorite authors and books combine a love of nature with a style that speaks to me. Namely Peter Matthiessen, Jim Harrison, Tom McGuane, Rick Bass, and in a different category completely, the great Robert Stone. His style and subject matter is so compelling to me it's as if he were whispering in my ear. Among younger writers, I love Karen Russell the best.
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A former journalist for Newsweek, the Baltimore Sun, and the Washington Post, Gordon Chaplin has worked on sea conservation with the group Niparaja and since 2003 has been a research associate at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. He lives with his wife and daughter in New York City and Hebron, New York.
For more information about the author, please visit his website at GordonChaplin.com and his author page on Goodreads, or find him on Facebook and Twitter.
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Paraíso by Gordon Chaplin
A genre-bending story about love, sibling relationships, and the dark side of paradise
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Peter and Wendy — their mother chose the names — felt as close as twins, despite their difference in age. As teens, they fled their wealthy Philadelphia home in the family station wagon and headed for Mexico, only to be discovered sleeping in the car on the banks of the Mississippi, in Huck Finn country. Now, many years later, estranged by an apparent betrayal as profound as their family's dysfunction, the two live separate lives, Peter as an editor in New York, Wendy as an edgy sports photographer with a taste for risk. With a new book out and an invitation to Los Cabos, she drives the Mercedes inherited from their father to Baja California, finally completing the trip begun twenty years earlier.
But when the engine fails near a small town named Paraíso — Paradise — she lingers, exploring its underside in an affair with a dangerous man and, all too suddenly, becoming witness to a vicious crime. Meanwhile, in New York, Peter can't help but think of Wendy. When, from his apartment in lower Manhattan, he watches the Twin Towers fall on a beautiful September day, he knows it's time to leave his comfortable life, go find Wendy, and make peace with his long-lost sister.
— Paraíso by Gordon Chaplin
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