To Liz Jensen, trouble sounds interesting--at least on paper.She said that in her latest book, THE RAPTURE, "I'm following a personal rule... which stems from one of my favorite jokes. The joke goes like this: There's an optimist and a pessimist. The pessimist puts his head in his hands and says, 'Oh no, things can't get any worse!' And the optimist replies, 'Oh yes, they can!'"
Gabrielle Fox, the central character in THE RAPTURE, being realeased in August by Doubleday, is the unfortunate beneficiary of this philosophy. The psychologist, crippled by a car accident, takes on the case of a violent teenager named Bethany. But the teen turns out to not just be cruel, but possibly prescient... and she is predicting the end of the world.
"The biggest natural disaster [Bethany] predicts is similar to a catastrophe that took place 55 million years ago, when methane was unleashed from ocean seabed, causing sudden extreme heating of the Earth, wiping out most marine life and kill ing off huge numbers of land species too," Jensen said.
But the central premise isn't pulled out of superheated air. The potential for mentally disturbed people to see patterns that others miss has been documented, she said.
"I read about a scientist called Jose Luis Aragon who discovered that Vincent van Gogh's famous swirling skies accurately reproduced a very precise mathematical pattern that charts turbulence," she said. "He speculated that this was because van Gogh was suffering from epileptic fits at the time, which made him ultra-sensitive to patterns in nature that the human eye can't normally see."Jensen, the author of six other novels, has harnessed her creativity in many ways, from journalism to sculpting. She admits to rearranging furniture to make her home more interesting, and said writing fiction gives her an outlet to give ideas dimension and life.
"It's all about taking something amorphous and chaotic--be it a lump of clay, a news story or a set of ideas and characters--and working what you have in your hands or in your head into some kind of shape: giving it a structure and a frame," she said.
Jensen said she spends several hours a day writing--always working alongside her partner, and sometimes alongside a glass of Chardonnay--and revises as she types. Her bookshelf contains the work of many thriller writers, as well as another well-regarded piece of apocalyptic fiction, Cormack McCarthy's THE ROAD.
But writing about the world's end isn't just an academic exercise, she said. Taking a broad perspective, humans' impact is large, but our place in history is easily erased with time.
"Global warming is already presenting us with alarming signs of the end of the world--at least the world as we humans know it," she said. "It's useful to look at the evolution of the Earth and its inhabitants in terms of eras spanning millions of years.
"A billion years from now, some other life form will be king of the hill. If there's still a hill to be king of."
For more about Jensen and THE RAPTURE, visit her Web site, www.lizjensen.com.
Contributing editor Gerry Doyle is the author of numerous short stories published in the United States, abroad and on the Internet. His first novel, From the Depths, was released in November 2007 by McBooks Press. He worked for nearly a decade as an editor and a reporter for the Chicago Tribune; he currently is an editor at The National newspaper in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. He's also OK at ping-pong and has had cocktails on four continents. He doesn't put much stock in astrology but just in case: He's a Leo.
