by Robert Masello
We are delighted to welcome novelist Robert Masello as our guest.
Robert's new thriller is The Romanov Cross (Bantam, March 2013 hardcover and ebook formats).
Today Robert tells us about his latest novel of supernatural suspense and reflects on the ones that preceded it.
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This morning I got a box from my publisher, containing copies of my new book, The Romanov Cross. After kissing and caressing the first copy out of the box and putting one more on the mantelpiece in the living room in case any impressionable female should ever stumble in there, I put a third copy on my bookshelves in the den.
Photo provided courtesy of
Robert Masello
Right next to the two previous novels from the same publisher (Blood and Ice and The Medusa Amulet, in case you're wondering) and all the other books, some of them nonfiction, that I have cranked out, with varying degrees of success, over the years.
Then I sat down on the sofa, my dog Becky beside me, and took in the display.
For me, every book is like a trophy — the end result of long and hard labor. It's not that I'm so proud of each one on its merits — I happen to be one of those writers who can't stand even to open one of his old books — but it does represent a whole slice of my life. From the moment you get the first glimmer of an idea to the moment like this, when the finished copies come out of the box, writing a book can easily stretch over several years. It takes me a year or more to write each one — they're fat books and involve a lot of historical and scientific research — and usually that long for the publisher finally to bring it out.
So this is the time when I breathe a huge sigh of relief. Whatever the reviewers have to say in the coming weeks, I will always have this handsome hardcover book to prove that I am actually accomplishing something, of whatever value, by sitting in this messy little office all day.
Writing is such a strange and amorphous occupation. I was married to my ex- for over twenty years, and I still think she never got it. She would see me sitting in an armchair downstairs, classical music playing as I stared into space, daydreaming or dozing, and accuse me of brooding. She thought I was just sitting there getting depressed (not that depression isn't another occupational hazard), but she did not understand that I was working. That I was letting my brain run through all kinds of scenarios, ideas, plot complications, character notes. I did always keep a pad handy, to jot down any inspirations that came my way, but I was just trying to let my mind take me down various pathways and, when I was lucky, unknot some thorny problem.
Some writers don't need to spend as much time in that state as I do. They do elaborate outlines and make copious notes and even diagrams, to chart the course of their story and the arc of their characters' developments, in advance. Oh, how I envy them. My friend George, who writes military thrillers, knows just about every about twist and turn of his story before he writes a word of the actual draft. Personally, I have never been able to accomplish much that way. Even when I have done an outline, it's been sketchy, and after two or three chapters, I have departed so far from its projected trajectory that it has become utterly useless.
With The Romanov Cross, for example, I had seen in my mind's eye the opening vignette — a young woman in an open boat, landing on the frozen shore of a remote island — and I had imagined the rough settlement on the cliffs above. But even I was surprised when a pack of black wolves showed up at the end of the beach and started galloping toward her. I really wasn't sure how she would escape, though I did know that she would have to — she was supposed to be a major figure in my story.
Nor did I get a clear sense of my protagonist, a malaria-afflicted, U.S. Army epidemiologist, until he punched out a superior officer and got sentenced to that same dark and dismal island, to perform a thankless and dangerous task there. I find that when I'm writing characters, they take on flesh as I put them in one situation after another, and where they are forced to react to whatever is happening. I'm not going to go so far as to claim that they take on a life of their own — they're still marionettes, and I still hold the strings — but they do have a way of gradually becoming more real and, yes, to some extent assertive. I find that there's always a point or two at which it might be easier, plot-wise, for them to do one thing, but they dig in their heels and refuse, until I can come up with something more suitable to who they have now become. And that's gratifying in a way — it means that they've become real enough to me that they might feel real to my readers, too.
I'm always surprised when readers do send me comments on my characters. I wrote a pair of novels years ago — Vigil and Bestiary — that featured a young couple named Carter and Beth Cox. He was a paleontologist, she was an art curator. At the end of the first book, they had a baby. I thought the book was a stand-alone, but apparently there were a fair number of readers who wanted to know more about this young family. In fact, I was criticized for writing a book that was so plainly designed to foster a sequel — when I had had nothing of that sort in mind. But people wanted to know — for sure — who the true biological father was of the baby (something that I had thought was made abundantly clear) and what happened next in all of their lives. And so I wrote a second book. If it had sold a few more copies than it did, I might have written a third one, too. But the groundswell was insufficient, and I had to let Carter and Beth and their baby go off into the sunset forever.
I can visit them any time I want — the books are up there on the shelf along with the new one — but I never do. I hope they're happy, but I wouldn't want to intrude.
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Robert Masello is an award-winning journalist, television writer, and the bestselling author of many books. A native of Evanston, Illinois, he studied writing at Princeton University, and from 2002-2008 served as Visiting Lecturer in Literature at Claremont McKenna College. He currently lives and works in Santa Monica, California.
When he isn't reading, he says, he's writing, and when he's not doing either of those things, "I'm taking a long, sunset walk on the beach with my black lab Becky. Once a romantic, I guess, always a romantic."
Learn more about the author and his work by visiting his website at RobertMasello.com.
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The Romanov Cross
Robert Masello
Nearly one hundred years ago, a desperate young woman crawled ashore on a desolate arctic island, carrying a terrible secret and a mysterious, emerald-encrusted cross. A century later, acts of man, nature, and history converge on that same forbidding shore with a power sufficient to shatter civilization as we know it …
Army epidemiologist Frank Slater is facing a court-martial, but after his punishment is mysteriously lifted, Slater is offered a job no one else wants—to travel to a small island off the coast of Alaska and investigate a potentially lethal phenomenon: The permafrost has begun to melt, exposing bodies from a colony that was wiped out by the dreaded Spanish flu of 1918. Frank must determine if the thawed remains still carry the deadly virus in their frozen flesh and, if so, ensure that it doesn't come back to life.
Frank and his handpicked team arrive by helicopter, loaded down with high-tech tools, prepared to exhume history. The colony, it transpires, was once settled by a sect devoted to the mad Russian monk Rasputin, but there is even more hiding in the past than Frank's team is aware of. Any hope of success hinges on their willingness to accept the fact that even their cutting-edge science has its limits — and that the ancient wisdom of the Inuit people who once inhabited this eerie land is as essential as any serum. By the time Frank discovers that his mission has been compromised — crashed by a gang of reckless treasure hunters — he will be in a brutal race against time. With a young, strong-willed Inuit woman by his side, Frank must put a deadly genie back in the bottle before all of humanity pays the price.
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