It's funny, but one of the questions I'm asked about ANCIENT LAKE is: why a book about Bigfoot? When there are so many more "important" or "literary" subjects I could have chosen? Coming of age, race relations, politics, you know: important stuff, not such... fluff?
First, though well meaning, the question presumes any author (or at least this author!) ever chooses the subject matter. Rather like love and favorite foods, the reverse seems to be more accurate and truthful: the subject chooses you.
Secondly, no book that's about "important things" is ever about important things only, or it's polemic. I prefer a bit of entertainment with my fiction; and that's not to say the aforementioned "literary" leanings aren't also at the black heart beating throughout my first novel. Hey, even the greats like Melville used such 'mass appeal' concepts as a giant white whale, after all... a creature many considered cryptid in nature until later years!
You can "read all about it" in an interview I did for
ANCIENT LAKE at the CryptoHaus Press web site
by clicking here if you're interested in an in-depth response. But the short of it? I grew up in a Bigfoot-centric environment -- a small, southern town (is there any other kind in the South?) that had actual sightings.
It's one thing to read about Spiderman swinging across the Manhattan skyline. And yet another to see practically every drive-in movie with a Los Angeles setting or backgrounds. Fact is, I didn't know movies could have a treeline that didn't have palms swaying in the b.g. until I saw my first foreign movies in college! ;)
So somehow, reading and hearing about a creature slinking around in the woods less than a hundred yards from your bedroom window had a much more visceral impact on me than the 'super' heroes and screen villians I normally experienced. Call it a hometown bias, but fact is, the folkloric tales of a marauding swamp monster made more sense to me, as I could relate.
Relate to the setting, the characters, even the threat. Doubtless a lot of New Yorkers would factor Sasquatch way low on the threat level. After all, there's never been a reported mugging by Bigfoot in Central Park! But alone at night with the trees and waterways visible outside your window? It didn't seem a matter of if but when.
When would a Bigfoot thrust his arm through those flimsy curtains? When would I step around a boggy bend and find myself face-to-hairy face with this ominous cryptid? And... when I did... what would I do? What would... it... do???
This fear-quaking series of 'what if' scenarios is what seized me, not the other way around, when I was writing ANCIENT LAKE. It was an admitted juvenile sense of terror I was reliving, but in an uncertain world of mass murder, terrorism, and W. as president? There was a true comfort in being scared not out of my wits but within reason. Or at least, unreason. ;)
So while the characters, milieu and plot are as realistic as I could craft them in the writing, ANCIENT LAKE probably isn't for you if you prefer nuclear blackmail, Edora Welty and/or women's romance as your fictional forte.
But if not? Buy a copy and sit next to an open window late at night while you're reading it. Go on, I dare you. And you'll see: those fears you thought were so distant when you were a youngster will re-appear with chilling frequency each time a shadow falls across your curtains or wind howls outside your window.
Hope you take the ANCIENT LAKE Fear Factor challenge! And if you do? Be sure to let me know how well -- or badly! -- you slept that very night! ;)
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David Coleman "Dave" sent the following posts to customers who purchased Ancient Lake