Contributig editor Karen Harper recently discussed the new thriller Calling Mr. Lonely Hearts with its author Laura Benedict's.
Please briefly describe your story.
Roxanne, Del and Alice have been friends since childhood--a childhood full of silly games and the kind of mutual cruelty only young girls understand. The only man who almost came between them was Father Romero, their teacher at Our Lady of the Hills school in Cincinnati. Long after the three ruined his life and career with a single, ugly lie, Romero makes a Faustian bargain that will give him his revenge. Now grown, the three find themselves at the mercy of the devil himself and no one around them--not even an unborn child--is safe.
Calling Mr. Lonely Hearts has been called "an intelligent novel that elevates the horror novel." Do you think horror novels engage the reader's brain as well as emotions?
Horror novels--if they're done well--engage the emotions at a particularly primitive level, the ancient place in our brains where the "fight or flight" response has a very low threshold. But that doesn't mean that horror novels are necessarily simplistic. I would argue that horror novels have more in common with surreal literature than anything else. They speak to the reader from a world that's likely to suddenly become dreamlike, with dream-logic, and anyone who has ever tried to write a convincing dream knows that it's a challenging exercise. As to whether horror novels as a genre engage a reader's brain as well as their emotions--A series of shocking, evocative images by themselves are likely to end up being just an exhausting chore for the reader. That's how I feel when I watch a slasher film: exhausted. A good book in any genre goes for both.
Dare we ask if anything in your own life inspires your frightening plots? Your bio presents a midwestern, family-oriented person. In other words, has anyone at a signing ever asked, "Why does a nice girl like you write terrifying horror stories?"
People ask me that all the time--mostly, I think, because I'm now somebody's actual mother, and nobody wants to imagine that their mother might think about nasty, scary or violent things! But do we really know what goes on in other people's heads? I am extremely family-oriented. I gave birth to two Virginians, so I flinch a bit at the midwestern description--but I do currently live in the Midwest. I go to church on Sundays. And, yes, I bake cookies, make trips to the dry cleaners and throw baby showers. But when I see a dry cleaning bag on my bed, I see a possible agent of my death. I look out into my woods and imagine snipers and stalkers in addition to the bobcats and coyotes that are already there. If my husband is five minutes late in calling me, I imagine that he's been kidnapped, run off the road, or has decided--at just that moment--to run away and create a new identity for himself. It is never dull in my head (or for my family, I fear). Fortunately, I have been able to fashion my personality disorder into something reasonably constructive!
Your writing seems very cinematic--totally adaptable for a screen much bigger than a Kindle. Who would you cast as the three now grown women who are the targets of revenge? Who could best play Romero who is not only sinning but sinned against?
I'm so glad you asked this--it has captured my imagination for days! Actresses: Claire Danes, Kirsten Dunst and Summer Glau. Claire would be a brilliant, scary Alice, and Kirsten Dunst is a sensible sort who would make a good Del (or even Amber). Summer Glau as Roxanne--though I'm open to suggestions, particular of suitably scary brunettes. Christina Ricci, maybe, but she's not quite vampish enough. I had thought Kate Beckinsale, but, at 34 or so, she's a few years too old. Now for Romero, I would go with Javier Bardem. Varick is a challenge--He could go many ways: Johnny Depp or Robert Downey, Jr. or even Joseph Fiennes. John Malkovich would be good, too.
Booklist called Calling Mr. Lonely Hearts both suspenseful and sinister. Suspense most readers understand, but how does the concept of 'sinister' describe the book?
I quite liked the description of Calling Mr. Lonely Hearts as "sinister." For me it characterizes the book as having some truck with the evil forces in the universe--whether that evil comes from the hearts of people or somewhere less, well, specific. "Sinister" implies intention. And I confess that Calling Mr. Lonely Hearts is full of characters with bad intentions. Of course, it has many characters whose intentions are good, too. But we all know where those folks are just as likely to end up!
Can you give other authors some advice on creating villains? What are the challenges of making them understandable and despicable without going over the top?
In our post-Freudian, terribly rational world, most writers and editors worry an awful lot about motivation. But if one has a sense of the world that embraces evil as a kind of motivation-free entity--something that simply is--there's a lot of opportunity to make villains bad in really creative ways. Sometimes those ways might seem over-the-top, but I don't see anything wrong with occasionally going over-the-top. We have to get out of our own comfort zones if we're going to interest and entertain readers. If you want your work to stand out, you have to break some rules.
It's critical to make a villain just as complex as the most complex sympathetic character in the story. No actual human being is ever completely and thoroughly vile. If there's no single thing about the villain that a reader can identify with or at least have a grudging admiration for, why should the reader care? If a villain is one-dimensional, he or she is just a tool and not a character. The same goes for villains with a supernatural side--Yes, they may be made for evil, but they still need to appeal to the reader.
Your website (www.laurabenedict.com) is very dramatic and intriguing and your blog far-ranging. What are the challenges (other than it take time) to keeping a website vital?
I'm so delighted with the job my web guys do for me. I wanted my website to reflect my personality and my work--not just be a plain-wrapper place where people can get information about me. I fear the term "far-ranging" in regard to my blog actually means "random!" Notes From the Handbasket is kind of my personal sand box and I love to have people over to play. I do get distracted easily and I love to share new information or whatever is appealing to me at any given moment. I used to try to post every day, but I was getting very distracted from my fiction-writing, so I now post three or four times a week. Having guests every week or two makes things a little easier and I think it's fun for my readers. Keeping things fresh is always a challenge. I read a lot of other blogs, and find that certain themes will make their way through the blogosphere with everyone putting their own spin on things. Sometimes, though, if I don't really have anything to say, I'll just be quiet for a while. My online life is important to me. I spend more than half of my waking hours in a four-walled room with only a couple of dogs for company. It's nice to know there's a world on the other side of the screen.
New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author Karen Harper has been published for 25 years. She is the winner of the 2006 Mary Higgins Clark Award. A former college and high school English instructor, Harper currently writes contemporary suspense for Mira Books and historical novels for Putnam. She and her husband divide their time between Columbus, Ohio and Naples, Florida.
