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We're thrilled with the find, and I tell Orson to hold the lizard down. With a smile on his face, he does, and I extract a magnifying glass from my pocket. The sun is bright, and in no time, there is a small, blinding dot on the lizard's slimy skin. The light burns through, and Orson and I look at each other and laugh, enthralled as the lizard squirms to get away.

"It's my turn!" He shouts. "You hold him."

We spend the entire afternoon torturing the poor creature. When we're finished I throw it into the grass, but Orson insists on taking it with him. "I own it now," he says. "It's mine."

I can see the skyline of mountains rising above the trees as plainly as if it were day. The ice fields and patches of snow in the high country glisten in the yellow light, and I'm thinking that I may stay in this country for quite some time. There's something about the openness here that draws me. The East is claustrophobic, so dense with trees that you often miss the sky. But here, the sky is unavoidable. From horizon to horizon it extends. It's bigger than anything, and if you need to, you can lose yourself in it.

DESERT PLACES ALTERNATE ENDING

I've let it slip in a number of interviews that there were major alternate endings to both Desert Places and Locked Doors, and over the years, I've gotten quite a bit of email from fans wanting to read these original endings.

I completed my first draft of Desert Places in the winter of 2000, working with my writing professor at UNC Chapel-Hill, the great Bland Simpson. At the time, I thought I had just finished the best novel I'd written to date. The ending was a gutsy, surprise mindfuck if there ever was one. I got an agent with this draft, but when she tried to sell it, a number of editors had issues with how the book ended. Maybe it was a little too ambitious. After a lot of hand-wringing, I decided to rewrite the last hundred pages of the book (that rewrite went on to become my first published novel and the version of Desert Places with which all of my readers are familiar).

One of the beautiful things about ebooks is that I can now share the original, uncut ending of Desert Places.

This picks up at the moment when Andrew Thomas is hiding in Orson's house in Woodside, Vermont. He hears a Lexus pull up, and watches Orson get out of the car. In the original ending, Andy sees someone else, and it takes the book in a completely different, much darker direction (the last two chapters are stunners).

I'm still very proud of the original ending, and it's a substantial chunk of text, clocking in at 22,000 words, or roughly 100 printed pages. This alternate ending has never been edited, proofread, or copyedited. It is in the same raw, uncut, unpolished state from which I downloaded it off an 11-year-old, 3.5-inch floppy disk.

I hope you enjoy this exclusive look at a Desert Places of a different feather.

# # #

The alternate ending takes its turn into left field in the existing Chapter 24, following this paragraph:

The low shudder of a car engine pulled me to the window. I split the blinds with two fingers and watched a white Lexus sedan turn into Orson’s driveway. I waited, my stomach twisting into knots. If Orson came in through the back door, he’d see the broken glass...

ALTERNATE ENDING

The slim figure of a woman, between forty and fifty, with frosted hair that may have once been jet black, walked up the sidewalk towards the front porch. She wore a long, navy trench coat that dropped to her ankles and carried a brown briefcase in her right hand. The sky darkened fast behind her, and as she ascended the steps and disappeared from view, my mind turned to chaos.

When I heard the deadbolt turning, I ran from the study, through the living room, and past the staircase. I turned right into the dining room and stood by the open passageway which connected it to the kitchen. From here I could watch the sunroom where I'd made my entry, and make sure she never saw the broken glass.