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An Interesting Setting for a Story
Black Tank follows a grieving former infrastructure specialist whose routine stop at an RV dump station spirals into a reckoning with his wife’s death, a buried professional failure, and the limits of keeping guilt contained. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
The original idea actually came to me while my wife and I were camping. I was emptying the black tank on our RV and thought it would make an interesting setting for a story. My mind tends to wander when I’m doing mundane things I’ve done a thousand times, and emptying the black tank is certainly one of those things. I started thinking about what kind of story could take place entirely at a dump station, and from there the idea gradually became Gary and the forty minutes that make up BLACK TANK.
How did you develop Gary’s highly technical voice without letting the engineering language distance readers from his emotions?
The technical language works because it is Gary’s emotional language. He understands the world through systems, measurements, procedures, and tolerances, so I didn’t want to separate that part of him from his grief. The more emotional something becomes, the more he retreats into technical language because that is where he feels in control. It gave me a way to reveal what he is feeling without having him explain it directly.
Were the maintenance tips between chapters part of the book’s structure from the beginning, or did they emerge as you developed Gary’s character?
The maintenance tips came out of the outlining process. Once I had the story arc mapped out, I created the tips to accompany it. Each one is framed as a technical principle about maintaining and managing systems, but it also reflects where Gary is in the story and what is happening to him at that particular point.
The tips became an important part of the structure because Gary approaches nearly everything in his life as a system that can be monitored and managed. As the story progresses, the maintenance tips move alongside his arc, and the principles he relies on professionally begin to describe what is happening to him personally. The language of systems and maintenance becomes another way of telling Gary’s story.
What did you want the final gesture involving Claire’s camp chair to suggest about Gary’s ability to move forward?
For me, the camp chair represents the difference between observing a life and actually inhabiting it. Gary has spent four years moving through the world without really being present in it. Claire was the opposite. She could simply sit somewhere, experience it, and allow a moment to exist without needing to measure or manage it.
The final gesture isn’t meant to suggest that Gary is suddenly healed or that his grief and guilt are resolved. It is much smaller than that. He is finally willing to stop managing the moment and be present in it. Taking out Claire’s chair is his first real movement toward living with what happened instead of continuing to build procedures around it. That distinction is established earlier when Gary realizes that knowing the light as Claire knew it would require the camp chair, sitting down, the willingness to be inside the moment rather than observing it.
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He drives the RV he was supposed to share with his wife, Claire, moving from campground to campground and dump station to dump station. At every stop, he follows the same carefully controlled routine. He monitors the park. Measures the variables. Empties the black tank.
And makes certain the procedure never quite finishes.
Now Gary has arrived at Ridgeline State Park, the place Claire circled twice in their road atlas and marked with a star. As afternoon light moves across the landscape exactly as she once described it, a failing valve traps him at the station longer than his protocols allow.
Minute by minute, the systems Gary has built to contain his past begin to break down. Memories of Claire surface alongside the truth of an environmental contamination scandal, eleven years of falsified reports, and the choice that paid for the vehicle carrying him across the country.
While strangers in the campground quietly begin to recognize what Gary has been doing, he must decide whether to repeat the managed departure that has kept him moving for four years or finally complete the procedure.
Set almost entirely over forty mounting minutes, BLACK TANK is a literary psychological suspense novel about grief, moral injury, complicity, and the unbearable distance between knowing the truth and acting on it.
Black Tank
Wade Prull’s Black Tank is a tightly focused literary novel about Gary, a former infrastructure specialist who has spent four years traveling alone in an RV after the death of his wife, Claire. The story unfolds during roughly forty minutes at a state park dump station, where Gary performs a maintenance routine he’s repeated more than a hundred times. He studies every person, sound, movement, and mechanical reading around him, partly out of professional habit and partly because constant observation keeps him from confronting what he’s carrying. As the procedure begins to fail, memories of Claire, his former career, and a contaminated public water system rise into the present. What starts as an oddly tense account of emptying an RV tank becomes a confession about grief, guilt, and the exhausting work of keeping painful truths contained.
The novel’s most distinctive feature is Gary’s voice. He translates nearly every emotion into the language of gauges, pressure, chemistry, capacity, and system failure. That language can be funny in its extreme precision, especially when he calculates trail times or classifies ordinary campground behavior, but it also shows how completely he’s built his life around avoidance. The maintenance tips between chapters deepen this effect. Each one seems to describe equipment while quietly explaining Gary’s emotional condition. Prull commits fully to this structure, and the repetition gives the book a steady, pressurized rhythm. Small actions, such as a camper opening a door or Gary shifting his foot, carry the suspense of major events because we experience them through a mind that treats uncertainty as danger.
Gary reminded me of Stevens in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. Both men hide inside professional competence, speak in controlled and specialized language, and gradually reveal that their loyalty to procedure has helped them avoid moral responsibility. Stevens uses dignity and service to organize his memories, while Gary uses engineering logic and maintenance protocols. Prull’s approach is more physically immediate, with the malfunctioning tank and hose turning Gary’s inner life into something he has to hold in his hands. Like Ishiguro, Prull trusts the reader to notice the emotional truth before the narrator can say it. Gary’s eventual use of Claire’s name feels powerful because the entire book has shown how carefully he’s kept that name outside his operating system.
Black Tank is ultimately about a man discovering that grief can’t be processed like waste and guilt can’t be managed through motion. Gary’s technical language remains central to the end, but its meaning changes as he begins to listen to his own internal gauge. The final image of him releasing the hose and preparing to retrieve the camp chair Claire packed gives the novel a moving sense of completion without pretending that one honest moment repairs years of damage. Prull turns an unglamorous maintenance task into an intimate study of accountability and survival. It’s a strange premise, handled with remarkable seriousness and control, and the result stayed with me long after Gary’s forty minutes at the station were over.
Pages: 157 | ASIN : B0HBLJWWRW
