On the Road

I had a busy few days this week starting with an appearance at the Ocean Park Writers Conference in Old Orchard Beach where I was invited to talk about using "Setting as a Character" in The Poacher's Son. It's been years since I taught a workshop, but I think I managed to shake off the rust (or maybe I just had a very forgiving audience).

The next day I spoke at the newly renovated Portland Public Library as part of its noontime Brown Bag Lecture series.

And then last night I enjoyed a great dinner and great company as the host of a fundraising dinner to benefit Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance at the Salt Exchange in Portland's Old Port.

The idea of the author tour, in which a writer travels around giving readings and signing books, might seem like a glamorous activity to the uninitiated, but marketing yourself in service of a new novel can be an exhausting process.

Occasionally, you get a spectacular meal out of it, though. I recommend the lobster with Swiss chard, leeks, and red wine lobster sauce at the Salt Exchange. Also the octopus.

The Boulder Field

It's a week early for some reason, but I have a new editor's note up over at the day job. My subjects this month are, in no particular order, the auguries of Henry David Thoreau, the brilliance of Bernd Heinrich, the melancholy that comes from anticipating a profound loss, and a bittersweet trip I recently took with my two nephews to the Maine North Woods.

Killer Thrillers

National Public Radio has posted its list of the Top 100 Thrillers of all time. An audience of 100,000 readers voted in the survey. Here are the top 10:

  • 1. The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
  • 2. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
  • 3. Kiss the Girls, by James Patterson
  • 4. The Bourne Identity, by Robert Ludlum
  • 5. In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
  • 6. The Da Vinci Code, by Dan Brown
  • 7. The Shining, by Stephen King
  • 8. And Then There Were None, by Agatha Christie
  • 9. The Hunt for Red October, by Tom Clancy
  • 10. The Hound of the Baskervilles, by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

On the whole it's not a terrible list as these sorts of things go, although the snubs are embarrassing (no Jim Thompson? No James M. Cain?). But I was struck by the number of books on the list which are better known for their film adaptations than for the novels themselves. Does anyone really think that The Bourne Identity would have come in as the fourth greatest thriller of all time (!) if Doug Liman hadn't directed a kick-ass movie version starring Matt Damon? 

"Pure, Unadulterated Literary Suspense"

There are positive reviews that lift an author's spirits, and then there are reviews that validate years worth of hard work. This review by Catherine Ramsdell on the Web site PopMatters falls into the latter category for me:

Literary suspense—a story that scares with style, panache, symbolism, and metaphor along with a good dose of psychological terror—almost seems to be a thing of the past. That’s why books like The Poacher’s Son are not to be read but cherished.

The Poacher’s Son, Paul Doiron’s debut novel, is pure, unadulterated literary suspense. Beautifully crafted and perfectly paced, it makes you tuck your feet up under you while reading, and occasionally look nervously over your shoulder—just to make certain no one is there.

*****

The setting and the characters both contribute to the greatest strength of this novel—the psychological tension and realism. It’s the psychological aspects that make the book suspenseful—not the violence or the murders. By the middle of the story, it’s not clear who Mike doubts and dislikes more: his father or himself. That is perhaps the most haunting element of the book—Mike’s self-doubt and the universality of this self-doubt.

Everyone wants to think they can spot a monster, a murderer, that they would know if their own father was really a cold-blooded killer. After all who knows a father better than his own son? If Mike doesn’t know whether or not his father is capable of murder, what can he know with any certainty?  It’s that age-old, universal question: Who can you trust when you don’t trust yourself?

When you're writing a novel, you create an idealized reader in your head: one who understands and appreciates the choices you are making, who "gets" what you're trying to do. I have been fortunate to have had many wonderful notices for The Poacher's Son, but none of them has meant more to me than Catherine Ramsdell's review.

(And did I mention that she gave the book 9 out of 10 stars — "very nearly perfect"?) 

Radio Day

I spent an hour this morning being interviewed by Amanda Austin for her "Making Maine" show on WRFR radio in Rockland. We had a wide ranging conversation that covered everything from my editorial philosophy at Down East to real-life role models for characters in The Poacher's Son to my advice for aspiring writers. Give it a listen.