Michelle Gagnon, author of THE TUNNELS, discusses the thrill of the dark side, even for those who enjoyed happy childhoods.
My mother called as soon as she finished reading my first book. I was excited to find out what she’d thought of the plot and characters, and to see if she’d identified the killer before the climax. Instead, she was intent on one issue: “Where did I go wrong?”
“What do you mean?” I replied, puzzled.
“We did our best to give you a happy childhood,” she said, distraught. “How on earth did you come up with all this?”
I opened my mouth to respond, then paused, mentally reviewing some of the scenes in my book. In retrospect, there was some very sick stuff in there. The way my victims were killed, for example; pretty gruesome, when it came right down to it. In my defense, those murders were based on accounts of ancient pagan rituals, but still...one reviewer had applauded my “imaginative use of gore.” That’s probably why when my agent first called to sign me, she confessed, “Honestly, I thought you were a man.”
And the ironic part is that I never set out to write a thriller. The book I had envisioned was a coming of age story set on a college campus, replete with romance, academic intrigue, and a graduation ceremony. I was aiming for chicklit: no gruesome murders, no mythical texts that explained how to raise the dead. I had a full outline for my opus, and spent months chipping away at it. The problem was that every time I got thirty or forty pages in, the story dried up on me. Time and again I scrapped what I’d written and started over, sometimes trying a different character’s perspective, sometimes altering the order of events. Nothing seemed to work. Then one December night, I was nine pages into the book. The writing process was going surprisingly well; two of my main characters were walking through the tunnel system beneath campus, en route to their first romantic encounter. The concrete walls were scrawled with graffiti, the ground mossy beneath their feet. Both were a little drunk and heady with the excitement of being somewhere forbidden. Dialogue was flowing, the scene was coming alive. And all of a sudden, one of them was brutally murdered. I sat back and stared at my computer screen, experiencing something akin to shock. This character was supposed to be the linchpin of my story. She had a major role to play, and now she was gone. After a moment, I started typing again, and another five pages poured out of me. Someone new appeared: an FBI agent with ghosts of her own who arrived on campus to investigate the murders. I hit “save” and decided to see where the story led the next day. And a few months later, I had a rough draft of The Tunnels.
It’s funny; now that I’ve completed two other thrillers, I can’t imagine ever writing anything else. After digging into the darkest domains of human nature, I don’t find chicklit satisfying anymore. And although I’ll admit that my ensuing books easily surpass the first in terms of gruesome detail, it’s never without a purpose. Despite happy childhoods, we all end up with demons to dispatch in some way, shape, or form. Both as writers and readers, we’re occasionally driven to explore our own worst fears, which is probably why the horror movie industry is booming. If you've ever walked alone down a dark street at night, worst case scenarios reeling through your mind, you know what I'm talking about. After all, situations like that frequently produce our best ideas.
So when people express surprise at the kind of books I write, unable to reconcile the woman pushing her baby in a stroller with the person who describes torture techniques in intimate detail, I just smile. Let them think I go home to walls plastered with crime scene photos, or that I sleep with an ice pick under my pillow. I know the truth, that any junior leaguer would feel at home in my house. She just wouldn’t want to visit my nightmares.
As for my mother, she has begrudgingly come to terms with the fact that her darling daughter has a very sick mind. She even claimed to enjoy my next book, although she confessed to skipping a few passages. And last Thanksgiving I noticed that she no longer trusts me with the carving knives.
Michelle Gagnon is the author of The Tunnels, a novel set on a college campus that James Rollins called, “a stellar work of suspense and terror.”A former modern dancer, freelance writer, dog walker, model, personal trainer, and Russian supper club performer, she lives in San Francisco with her family. In her spare time she runs errands and indulges a weakness for Hollywood blockbusters and stale cinema popcorn.
