A Very Fine Animal

I have been finishing up the copy edits on The Bone Orchard, and this morning at breakfast, I happened to come across an interview Norman Mailer did with the Paris Review. One paragraph leapt out at me:

A book takes on its own life in the writing. It has its laws, it becomes a creature to you after a while. One feels a bit like a master who's got a fine animal. Very often I'll feel a certain shame for what I've done with a novel. I won't say it's the novel that's bad; I'll say it's I who was bad. Almost as if the novel did not really belong to me, as if it was something raised by me like a child. I know what's potentially beautiful in my novel, you see. Very often after I've done the novel, I realize that that beauty which I recognize in it is not going to be recognized by the reader. I didn't succeed in bringing it out. It's very odd—it's as though I had let the novel down, owed it a duty that I didn't fulfill.

I have had this experience with every book I've written, watched it become a living creature apart from me. Reading Mailer's words, I realized that I had none of his regret concerning my own new novel. I consider The Bone Orchard my best book to date. I feel as if I have done everything I could to bring out what is potentially beautiful in it. Will readers agree? That's always the question.

Look for the book on July 15.

"Wildfire" Television Interview

I recently recorded an episode of the Maine TV show "Wildfire" with George Smith and Harry Vanderweide, talking about Maine's game wardens, both the fictional ones I write about in my books and the real life officers I've come to know in my research. The interview lasts about half an hour:

Toronto Star: "Meticulously Observed and Gracefully Written"

The Toronto Star has published an absoluting glowing review of Massacre Pond, which came as an early Christmas present. I even got top billing over Michael Connelly:

The new book is Doiron’s fourth in his meticulously observed and gracefully written Bowditch series. Massacre Pond’s difference from the earlier books is a matter of degree. It packs more power in describing the tensions between Maine’s environmentalists and its ordinary residents who pillage the landscape in order to feed their families.

Doiron is so persuasive in explaining the mindsets of Maine’s rugged individualists of all inclinations that even city slickers among his readers can’t help feeling dragged into a conflict that could save or doom the state’s natural character.

Thank you for the kind words, Jack Batten.

I'm Not Dead

Not a day goes by when someone doesn't arrive at this Web site by typing in "Paul Doiron Obituary." This leads me to believe that across North America men named Paul Doiron are dropping like flies. The alternative is that someone is fearing (or maybe hoping?) that I recently came to a bad end. I'd like to clear up any confusion in the latter instance: