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September 12, 2007

The Return of the Weirdly Pale-Pink Novelist

Soooo... a couple of weeks back, I posted a link to The Olive Reader, the excellent weblog for my publisher Harper Perennial, and a section of a little promotional video they made for me. Well, now they've now posted two more pieces from that video interview on both their site and on YouTube. In the excerpt below--in which I'm unfortunately still looking as pudgy and pale-pink as a piglet--I give a somewhat stammering overview of the plot of my forthcoming novel.

(If that description sounded a little too vague, then how about this: below is the copy from the current Harper catalog, the words that will most likely be on the back cover of the eventual published book.)

WE DISAPPEAR. "A teenage boy is found murdered in a field near a small Kansas town—an event that sparks a dark obsession in a hard-luck woman named Donna. Recently widowed and battling cancer, she persuades her son, Scott, to help her find out more about “disappeared” people. Battling demons of his own—including addictions to methamphetamines and sleeping pills—Scott is barely holding on. Yet throwing himself into his mother’s desperate hunt offers a taste of salvation and helps him see past his own skin. Posing as writers, mother and son criss-cross the Midwest from small town to small town, interviewing families and friends of these disappeared. But Donna’s compulsion takes a dark turn when she kidnaps a teenage boy. Calling him Otis, she handcuffs him and locks him in the basement while Scott, his addictions growing worse, tries to cover up her crime. As his mother’s health deteriorates, Scott begins to notice eerie similarities between Otis and other missing teens, and even more, to his own childhood self."