Laura Benedict interviewed writer J.T. Ellison about her latest Taylor Jackson thriller, The Cold Room, on her blog yesterday. It’s the fourth title featuring the Nashville homicide detective and she’s up against a serial killer known as the Conductor, who kills his victims bloodlessly—once abducted, he starves them inside a glass coffin—before, (ahem), consummating the relationship. It’s, yeah, disgusting and horrible and creepy, but as Benedict puts it, “creepy is just what I look for in a killer novel.”
From their interview:
Laura Benedict: You've talked about how, after writing the first chapter of The Cold Room, you were so surprised (alarmed?) by the story's content that you had to take a step back from it for a while. What made you return to it?
J. T. Ellison: I was completely creeped out. The very idea of a man, so seemingly normal, revealing his true self—and that self is a very, very frightening human being—gave me chills. And the line was so innocuous on its surface, so simple and straightforward... I think I was a little surprised by my own capacity to tap into this guy’s mind so early in the process of a book. Normally it takes me a while to get into their heads, but Gavin, he was there right away.
But the Conductor isn’t through with them. Not yet. He proceeds to stage artistic scenes with his victims something that has also been happening across the pond. Is the Conductor working in Europe too? Are there more homicidally enthusiastic art collectors working in tandem? Competing?
Makes for a gripping book, but one so far outside of reality that you don’t get too uncomfortable reading it, right?
I dunno.
Craig McDonald's book Toros & Torsos created a link between some grisly murders early in the twentieth century (climaxing in the 1947 killing of Betty Short, the Black Dahlia), and the surrealist art movement (check out the can't-look-away Exquisite Corpse). Recently, McDonald, whose books are always rooted in lore and scholarly, “informed supposition” posted on his blog about new disturbing evidence that his own imagination is never going to trump reality. (Shudder) Who wants to end up matching a Dali anyway?
Any other wild premises that have caught you off guard when their true parallels have been revealed?
Jedidiah Ayres writes fiction and keeps the blog Hardboiled Wonderland.
