Perfect Little Town by Blake Crouch Read Free Book Online Page A

and dying or dead already, and we have mostly acclimatized to the absurdity of daily life in the fourth decade of the twenty-first century, although occasionally we regress and rant.
    To journals.
    Our fellow dinosaurs.
    To our children who bring their children to visit us in nursing homes.
    We go on about how it used to be—the extinct and glorious slowness of life and other artifacts:
    The pleasure of eating real food, seeded and grown out of ground proximate to your own doorstep.
    Decency. 
    Community.
    Respect for the old traditions.
    We tell all who will listen, but mostly ourselves, that we once lived in a perfect little town in a perfect little valley, where life was vivid, rich, and slow. 
    And once in a while, someone will ask why it can’t be that way again, and we tell them sacrifice.  There’s no sacrifice anymore.  And they nod with enlightened agreement, that special condescension reserved solely for the old, without the faintest idea of what we really mean.

    Read on for an interview with Blake Crouch, excerpts from all four of his books, Desert Places, Locked Doors, Abandon, and Snowbound, and a bonus excerpt of Serial Uncut by Crouch, Kilborn, and Konrath…

Interview with Blake Crouch by Hank Wagner
    Originally Published in Crimespree, July 2009

    According to his website, Blake Crouch grew up in Statesville, a small town in the piedmont of North Carolina. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2000, where he studied literature and creative writing. He currently resides in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado. Crouch’s first book, Desert Places , was published in 2003. Pat Conroy called it “Harrowing, terrific, a whacked-out combination of Stephen King and Cormac McCarthy.” Val McDermid described it as “An ingenious, diabolical debut that calls into question all our easy moral assumptions. Desert Places is a genuine thriller that pulses with adrenaline from start to finish.”  His second novel, Locked Doors , was published in July 2005. A sequel to Desert Places , it created a similar buzz. His third novel, Abandon , was published on July 7, 2009.

    HANK WAGNER: Your writing career began in college? 

    BLAKE CROUCH: I started writing seriously in college. I had tinkered before, but the summer after my freshman year, I decided that I wanted to try to make a living at being a writer. Spring semester of 1999, I was in an intro creative writing class and I wrote the short story (called “Ginsu Tony”) that would grow into Desert Places . Once I started my first novel, it became an obsession. 

    HW: Where did the original premise for Desert Places come from? 

    BC: The idea for Desert Places arose when two ideas crossed. I had the opening chapter already in my head... suspense writer receives an anonymous letter telling him there’s a body buried on his property, covered in his blood. I didn’t know where my protagonist was going to be taken though. Around the same time, I happened to be glancing through a scrapbook that had photographs of this backpacking trip I took in Wyoming in the mid 90’s. One of those photographs was of a road running off into the horizon in the midst of a vast desert. My brain starting working. What if my protagonist is taken to a cabin out in the middle of nowhere, by a psychopath? What if this cabin is in this vast desert, and he has no hope of escape? That photograph broke the whole story open for me. 

    HW: Why a sequel for your second book? Affection for the characters? 

    BC: It was actually my editor’s idea. I was perfectly happy walking away from the first book. But once she mentioned it during the editing of Desert Places , I really started to think about where the story could go, wondered how Andy might have changed after seven years in hiding, and I got excited about doing it. And I’m very glad I did, because I would’ve missed those characters. Even my psychopaths are family in some strange, twisted