The Narrows

COLD-FIRE EYES AND SHOWER-STALL SAUNAS: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE NARROWS

I want to write a vampire novel, only I don't want to put any vampires in it."

This was a statement I made some time in the late spring or early summer of 2011, during a period when Barack Obama was enjoying his first tour of the White House, and I was similarly enjoying a surge of creative profusion that was nearly euphoric. In the span of two years, I had written and published four novels with three different publishing companies-Snow with Leisure Books/Dorchester Publishing, The Ascent and Floating Staircase with Medallion Press, and Cradle Lake as a limited-edition hardcover with Delirium Books (also later published in paperback with Medallion). I believe I first uttered these words over a lunch with a former editor who had taken on a new gig and was looking to bring over some of his old clients.

Because I thought he either hadn't heard me or hadn't understood, I repeated the sentiment with a bit more emphasis: "I want to write a vampire novel, only I don't want to put any vampires in it."

The editor smiled then languidly shook his head. "Yeah? And how does that work?"

"It could work. Of course it could. What I mean is, I like the tone of a vampire novel, the sensibilities of them. I like the atmosphere, and you know I'm all about atmosphere. I like to get my readers drunk on atmosphere. I just don't want to write about vampires."

"Then what will the book be about?"

"Oh, about four hundred pages, give or take."

"That's it," he said. "I'm cutting you off. No more vodka tonics with lunch."

"Come on, hear me out. What I really want to write about is the death of Small Town U.S.A. presented through the allegory of something . . . horrific . . . that has come to bring about the town's final death blow. It's about blue-collar folks and shuttered storefronts and a storm that has come and ravaged all that remains of this town. It's just teetering there on the brink of existence."

"Go on," said the editor.

I didn't really know where I was going, but I motored on just the same: "But it's not just about the town, right? It's about the people in the town, these last vestiges of humanity clinging to whatever is left of the place where they grew up. And the thing, of course, that has come to bring about their demise."

"And what's the thing if it's not a vampire?"

I shrugged then waved the waitress over to order another round of drinks. Once she'd left-and afforded me a sufficient amount of time to formulate a response-I said, "I'll make up my own thing. Maybe something that, throughout history, people may have mistaken for a vampire. A myth hiding behind the guise of another myth."

"You shouldn't have ordered that last round," my editor friend said.

"What do you mean last round?" I replied, cocking an eyebrow.

*   *   *

I spent the rest of that summer and part of the fall working on the novel that would eventually become The Narrows. I owed much of the storyline to an old manuscript I'd written back in high school, an exercise in juvenilia for sure, but it had good bones, and anyway, the story had never really left the back of my mind after all those years. (Easter egg: that high school version of The Narrows was originally titled Dread's Hand. It was a title I attempted to use several years later for another book but was summarily-and justifiably-roadblocked by my editor at the time. In the end, I settled for using Dread's Hand as the name of the haunted Alaskan town in my 2018 novel Bone White.) I had settled on my cast of characters, I could close my eyes and see the fictional town of Stillwater as if it were a true place, and I even understood the dark thing that had come to my dying little town-a creature whose mission was to siphon the last vestiges of life and humanity from an already dying world. I could see it, even if it continued to try to hide from me whenever I looked.

*   *   *

Warning: you're about to judge me . . .

*   *   *

The final few chapters of the novel were written in a one-room cabin on the edge of a wildlife refuge somewhere in the wilds of West Virginia. It had been my intention to go out there and garner some peace and quiet to finish the novel, but fate seemed intent on disrupting my plans: the cabin was oddly, bitterly cold for so early in the fall, the food was horrendous, and every night I'd hear all manner of nefarious cryptids muscle their way through the thicket outside my cabin's solitary window. Moreover, the accommodations were not ideal for writing-there was no desk in the room, only a small round table that wobbled no matter how many coasters from the bar down the street I managed to wedge beneath the table legs, and I was straining my back muscles trying to type on a laptop while propped uncomfortably in bed. So I did the only logical thing: I went into the bathroom, set the laptop on top of the closed toilet lid, cranked the shower to create a sauna-like effect, and finished the novel cross-legged right there on the bathroom floor.

I remember the moment I finished the novel. I stood from the bathroom floor, my legs aching and wobbly, the laptop monitor glistening with a sheen of wetness from the shower-stall sauna. My reflection in the steamy mirror was part Slender Man, part vaporous revenant. There was a beer bottle jeweled with condensation on the toilet tank and empty Slim Jim wrappers lay scattered about the tiled floor like sloughed snakeskin.

I was trembling.

Every novel has weight, and I carry that weight for the duration of the writing process. It falls off my shoulders and drops to the floor, heavy as chainmail, the moment I write that last sentence. Experience has taught me that the weight does not return during the editorial process-there's a clearheaded athleticism I somehow employ when editing that feels like the polar opposite of the trudging-through-quicksand process of writing.

I moved out of that bathroom, light as a feather, careful not to trip myself up on that chainmail lying in a heap on the bathroom floor. I went to my suitcase and yanked out a set of fresh clothes. I shucked off my damp old clothes and crawled into the new ones. The metaphor of metamorphosis was not lost on me.

It was then that I froze.

A pair of pale blue eyes gleamed luminously from the other side of the cabin window. That corner of the cabin, I knew, was situated on a sloping hillside, which meant that whatever was standing on the other side of that glass in the darkness peering in at me was very, very big.

But this wasn't a horror novel.

I went to the window, expecting the owner of those cold-fire eyes to flee. But the thing held fast, its gaze laser-focused on me. A few more steps (it was a small cabin) and I was at the window, so close my breath was fogging up the glass.

Those eyes . . .

I reached out and tapped a finger on the windowpane-tink tink tink.

The owner of those eyes cocked its head at such a precise angle that I first jumped backed, then instantly realized they belonged to an owl-a very large owl-a moment before the massive bird took flight, leaving me breathless and admittedly rattled.

I stood there for a moment longer, until a nervous laugh juddered up the vent of my throat. But then I went silent. My body went still. Because the sight of those eyes made me think of something else-something that should be in the new novel-and I literally walked backward into the bathroom, my gaze still hinged on the window. The shower was still running, the mirror still fogged. I swiped a hand across the moist screen of the laptop as I hunkered back down before it. And as I began to write, I could feel that heavy chainmail crawl up off the bathroom floor, creep up my back, and drape itself once more over my shoulders.

*   *   *

There is no denying that The Narrows was written by an ambitious and somewhat naive author who, to some degree, was still trying to find his footing. It's clearly one of my more "monstery" novels, though, just as Publishers Weekly had commented upon the book's release, I think it serves well as an allegory of small-town life in the face of visceral horror. The book was published the following year, in 2012, by a publishing outfit that is now defunct. My editor friend who had purchased the novel read it quickly and had minimal notes. Later, when we discussed the book over the phone, he said, "Well, I guess you pulled it off-a vampire novel with no vampires. But you do realize that people will still think of it as a vampire novel, right? The things in the story are so-"

"Stop," I told him. "It's fine. People will think what people will think."

"People will," he agreed. And he was right.

The prologue to the novel, titled "The Boy in the Lot," was released as a free e-book-only download in an attempt to garner interest in the novel prior to its release; that prologue...