We are delighted to welcome authors Tamara Thorne and Alistair Cross to Omnimystery News.
Tamara and Alistair's new psychological thriller is Mother (Glass Apple Press; April 2016 ebook format) and we asked them how important setting is to their stories; their guest post for us today is titled, "Places are People Too".
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Photo provided courtesy of
Tamara Thorne and Alistair Cross
When we begin a novel one of the first things we do is decide where our story takes place. For us, location is a character as important as any other. A region, a town, a street, a house, they must all be built by imagination and knowledge. We prefer to write about areas we've both visited, though that's not vital. But good research is.
In Mother, the quaint little town of Snapdragon is set in the heart of California's Gold Country, an area that's nestled against the Sierra Nevadas. You may know Gold Country from Mark Twain's tale, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, or as the birth of the Gold Rush after John Marshall found flakes of gold near Sutter's Mill. It's a beautiful area with a rich history and today is home to thriving towns as well as picturesque ghost towns from that long-ago era. We chose this area not only because we visited it together, but because it harkens to slower time, to small towns and Americana.
We chose the name, Snapdragon, because it fits well with other town names in the region like Lotus, Volcano, Fiddletown, Auburn, Angels Camp, and Meadow Vista. It rings true.
Then we built a history of Snapdragon, setting it in Calaveras County, adding an old downtown full of false front western-style buildings that all celebrate the history of the town. Then we built the residential area, beginning near downtown with a stately courthouse and a gaggle of huge Victorians, before progressing to newer areas. We moved on, describing smaller but still-stately Victorians, California Bungalows and then, as we moved farther from the heart of the town, we saw older cabins mixed in with newer ranch-style homes. When our protagonists, Claire and Jason, finally reach Morning Glory Circle — with its upper middle class tract homes — we've seen what the town was and is.
Morning Glory Circle is idyllic if you like clean modern streets and houses and before Claire and Jason pull up to Mother's house, we get to see one of the neighbors, Stan Portendorfer, walking his neighborhood, looking at houses, nodding to neighbors, and … thinking about them.
We created the neighborhood before the neighbors, and appearance of the homes informed us about the human inhabitants. From paint color to the state of the lawns and the pets in the yards, we know a lot about the neighbors before we ever meet them. That was important for our world-building because in a book with a multitude of minor characters, it's important they're all easy to identify, both by word and appearance. Knowing the houses tremendously helps in this task.
Mother's house presides over the street from the short end of the cul-de-sac. It's a Federalist, tall and dignified,white with black shutters, and people refer to it as "the White House" because of the way it looms. From the artificial grass to the American flag waving from a tall pole, Prissy Martin's house commands respect with its stately, almost smug, perfection.
Prissy's immediate neighbors have no respect for her sensibilities and she loathes them. On one side there's Candy and Milton Sachs. Candy loves pink and their cotton candy house is an abomination in Prissy's eyes. On her other side is what she calls "the Halloween House," because she disapproves of the burnt orange paint. And the neighbors, "newbies" who own a — gasp — motorcycle shop, sport a few tattoos, and lipstick-red hair, continue to hurt her eyes, in the same way as the color of the paint offends her.
Another neighbor, Phyllis Stine, is stuck in the 60s and still wears eyeshadow the color of penicillin. Her house is the same shade of blue, making it uniquely hers. And so we go around the block, houses and lawns reflecting personalities.
But there's so much more to location. Stephen King has referred to "bad places," and with good reason. Bad places are often important characters. In Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House, the famous opening paragraph of the novel firmly sets up Hill House as a character.
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone."
There are many infamous "bad places," including Richard Matheson's Hell House and Anne Rivers Siddons' The House Next Door. These places are imbued with hauntings and ghosts. Mother's House is not considered haunted — not by Mother or her daughter Claire. It seems to lack the ghosts that prowl the other houses (though in Hill House we never quite know if the ghosts are real) but it is certainly haunted by the past. It is imbued with it. Like Siddons' house next door, it is a beautiful and (relatively) new building in a lovely neighborhood — and it is a bad place.
Downstairs, everything is perfect — but Mother's furniture is, for the most part, stuck in the 70s. That's the way Prissy Martin likes it — she has the old furniture reupholstered when it begins to wear and new carpets laid in the same colors as they were in the early 70s. There is no change, and in true show-don't-tell fashion, that reveals something about Prissy. Her kitchen, dining room, and other first floor rooms are equally out-dated yet fresh and clean, and that makes one wonder if she's gone retro on purpose.
But upstairs, we get a glimpse of the darker side of Prissy Martin and these surroundings tell us more about her than her personal appearance or opinions do. Her master bedroom is clean and neat and her wall is covered with family photos. On her rather unusual patchwork quilt are three freeze-dried dogs, all long-deceased pets. Her son's room — a son who killed himself twenty years ago — is a shrine and her invalid husband's room is spartan. Most of the other rooms are locked up tight so no one can see Prissy's secrets. She is a hoarder and this fact tells us even more about the woman.
As we leave Prissy's house and walk out into the sunshine on Morning Glory Circle, to see barbecues and bake sales and uniform decorations on holidays, — all of which Prissy has a hand in — we can view Prissy Martin in ways we couldn't without the location details. She is the dark spot on a bright street, the small town martinet that is allowed by others to run things because she's really not that bad.
Or so they think.
And as we pull off Morning Glory Circle and head back into town, we breathe a sigh of relief and enjoy the drive, perhaps stopping for one of the famous cheeseburgers at the Daffodil Grill before driving through the twisting mountain passes to return home to the city.
All our other locations, from Alistair's Crimson Cove (The Crimson Corset) to Tamara's Candle Bay, Moonfall, and Eternity, are in this same universe and several are mentioned in Mother. And while we usually don't return to the same town, we are so taken with Snapdragon that we've decided to set our other two books in the Trilogy of Terror that began with Mother in Snapdragon. The Trilogy of Terror is not a sequel to Mother, but rather, a continuation of the town, and a continuation of books in the same vein as Mother. We are planning to start the second book upon the completion of our current collaboration. Sometimes towns are so great that they deserve a series of their own.
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Tamara Thorne's interest in writing is lifelong, as is her fascination with the paranormal, occult, mythology and folklore. She's been an avid ghost story collector and writer all her life. Today, she and her frequent collaborator, Alistair Cross, share their worlds and continue to write about ghosts and other mysterious forces. Whether collaborating or writing solo, there is no shortage of humor, sex, blood, and spookiness. Tamara and Alistair also co-host Thorne & Cross: Haunted Nights LIVE! every Thursday night on Blog Talk Radio.
For more information about the author, please visit their websites at TamaraThorne.com and AlistairCross.com and their author pages on Goodreads (Tamara Thorne and Alistair Cross) or find them on Facebook.
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Mother by Tamara Thorne and Alistair Cross
A Psychological Thriller
Publisher: Glass Apple Press
Priscilla Martin. She's the diva of Morning Glory Circle and a driving force in the quaint California town of Snapdragon. Overseer of garage sales and neighborhood Christmas decorations, she is widely admired. But few people know the real woman behind the perfectly coiffed hair and Opium perfume.
No one escapes Prissy's watchful eye. No one that is, except her son, who committed suicide many years ago, and her daughter, Claire, who left home more than a decade past and hasn't spoken to her since. But now, Priscilla's daughter and son-in-law have fallen on hard times. Expecting their first child, the couple is forced to move back … And Prissy is there to welcome them home with open arms … and to reclaim her broken family.
Claire has terrible memories of her mother, but now it seems Priscilla has mended her ways. When a cache of vile family secrets is uncovered, Claire struggles to determine fact from fiction, and her husband, Jason, begins to wonder who the monster really is. Lives are in danger — and Claire and Jason must face a horrifying truth … a truth that may destroy them … and will forever change their definition of "Mother."
— Mother by Tamara Thorne and Alistair Cross. Click here to take a Look Inside the book.
