Serial Uncut - J. A. Konrath [49]
Joe: We had no ending planned, and we weren’t allowed to get into our character’s thoughts. It was a straight third-person observational point-of-view, with no head-hopping. Sort of like a screenplay. The action had to be on the page.
Blake: What made this so fun for me was that it was like playing chess with words. I created my very evil character and gave her a certain MO. You created the vastly demented Donaldson and gave him an MO, however as we began to email back and forth the text for section 3, we didn’t know anything about each others’ characters. In fact, I tried to get my girl to sit in the backseat, but you wouldn’t let her. You insisted she sit up front. I didn’t know why, but I knew it couldn’t be good.
Joe: It was like we were really trying to kill each other. Which was fun to do with you, because you’re just as twisted as I am. You were writing LOCKED DOORS at the same time I was writing RUSTY NAIL, and we both wound up with a similar gimmick independent of one another; all serial killers have families.
Blake: You and I share a similar sensibility in the darker side of fiction. There have been other instances when we were working on projects that had similarities. Like in AFRAID and SNOWBOUND when we both wrote scenes with wolves and bear traps. We also both love beer.
Joe: I’m about eight years older, so I’ve loved beer longer than you have. Might be worth doing a brief bio here, for those who haven’t read us before. I write thrillers under the name JA Konrath, about a cop named Jack Daniels who chases serial killers. The books have some laughs, but also contain a lot of dark, scary parts, very much like the Taylor section of this novella.
Over the years I’ve gotten a fair amount of mail from fans, asking if I would ever do a scary book without any jokes. AFRAID was the result. Because it’s no-holds-barred horror, I used a pen name, Jack Kilborn.
Blake: My first two books featured suspense writer Andrew Thomas, who gets pulled into a nightmarish world even worse than the ones he writes about. My latest book, SNOWBOUND, is coming out June 2010. It deals with human trafficking, a missing mother/wife, the Alaskan mob, and an elite Mexican ex-paratrooper group who are muscle for the drug cartels (they’re real and they are so freaking terrifying I don’t even call them by name in the book). Want to talk about all the negative reviews SERIAL has gotten?
Joe: Man, people sure are vocal in their hatred of this story. There have been hundreds of negative reviews on Amazon, Sony, B&N, and Apple, saying how sick and disgusting the story is, and how we’re both monsters for writing such a thing.
First of all, it’s a horror story. Horror is supposed to push boundaries and freak people out. What did they expect downloading a story about serial killers? Dr. Seuss?
Second, SERIAL was free, for heaven’s sake. It’s not like anyone was ripped off by us. They get it for nothing, then tear it to shreds because they don’t like horror. If I didn’t find it so funny, I might be a little hurt.
Blake: There have been some classic negative reviews. Clearly, a large group of people just downloaded SERIAL because it was free, without reading the explicit and redundant warnings you and I both went out of our way to post. The woman who wrote that she wanted to have a priest bless her Kindle and sprinkle holy water on it after it had been infected by SERIAL was my personal favorite. Did you notice that a new word was created in some of the reviews? I noted several people wanted to “unread” it.
Joe: I also liked those who said that “free was too much money” and “I wish I could rate this lower than 1 star.” I’d love to watch some of