The Camaro Murders follows a man straddling the line between two worlds who is tasked with gathering murdered souls and subsequently uncovers the identity of a young girl’s killer. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

Music was a huge influence for this story, and so there were a lot of vibes and abstract ideas floating in my head that gelled in unexpected ways based on what I was listening to at the time. One of the primary examples is Coheed and Cambria. Their albums are concept albums, and the lyrics tell a story, but only part of the story. And sometimes seemingly small/inconsequential parts of the story, relatively speaking. There was a forum at the time where fans would try to piece the story together based on what they could glean from the lyrics, and I found the whole thing really interesting. And so, my goal with The Camaro Murders was to invoke a similar experience with the reader where they get most of the story but have to fill in some of the connective tissue with their own imaginations. But there was also a lot of my childhood in the story: the podunk town where my grandparents lived, the Knight Rider motif of a lone crusader and his car, the Biblical narrative of Cain and Abel, things like that. I would also call out Sheriff Bell from Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men as an archetype for Sheriff Hildersham’s character.

How long did it take you to imagine, draft, and write the world your characters live in?

The writing process was largely organic, and if I recall, took place over the course of about a year and a half. I was working mostly by impulse and with abstract ideas–impressions, if you will–and developed some basic ground rules for the world I was creating before piecing together the events of two winters, twelve years apart. It was the first long-form thing I’d done even though it was only 30,000 words, and so probably took longer than it would if I did it today.

I particularly enjoyed the technique of using four different narrators and perspectives. Was that a challenge to construct?

Thanks. I wouldn’t say it was a challenge per se, but it was a lot of fun at any rate. I really like getting into a character’s head and trying to speak and think the way they would. That said, it’s always easy to accidentally slip into your own voice, or sometimes cross wires on characters, so if there is a challenge in balancing multiple first-person POVs, that would be it. You want each character to have their own motivations and way of looking at things… The one nuance about The Camaro Murders is that the story is told out of sequence from a chronological perspective, and so I had to be cognizant of how the characters thought, spoke, and behaved at different times of their lives–in one case, this meant the difference between a seven-year-old and a college student.

Can we look forward to more work from you soon? What are you currently working on?

I’m currently writing the third book in my Reeve series, which is a Gothic Western, alternate history type of thing. The title is Riders of the Black Cowl. My goal is to have the first draft finished by the end of summer. That means I should have a final manuscript ready to go by the end of the year, but we’ll see. The interesting thing about this installment is I’m writing it completely organically. I haven’t done that since writing The Camaro Murders–I’ve employed an outline for every book since. So, there might be some more intense revising this time around.

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