The Next Day, Location Unknown

The TV droned on in the background.

“…is Gregory Donaldson, age 56, who was in the news a week ago for assaulting a police officer in Wisconsin. He’s been linked to over fifty homicides going back thirty years, and found hidden in the upholstery of his vehicle was a large collection of Polaroid pictures, apparently showing him viciously murdering numerous victims. The woman chained to Donaldson, as of yet unidentified, is described as a person of interest by the FBI. They’ve just released a statement suggesting that fingerprint and DNA evidence could point to her being a serial killer. A task force has been formed to try and close the books on dozens of unsolved murders spanning nineteen states that this duo may have been responsible for.

“This is the arresting officer in the recent Marshal Otis Taylor case, Chicago Homicide Lieutenant Jacqueline Daniels, who encountered Donaldson eight days ago at a Murray’s truck stop on Interstate 39 in Wisconsin during her confrontation with Taylor.”

The scene on the television changed from the trench-coated reporter standing in front of the hospital to an attractive woman in a pantsuit being mobbed by reporters in a parking lot.

“There are predators out there,” the cop said. “We’ve been lucky to nail three in a week. But there are others. Many others. Recreational killers are incredibly hard to catch, but even the smartest of them screw up eventually.”

Hmm, Luther thought, turning his attention from the television set to the crying, bleeding man hanging from the ceiling.

Jacqueline Daniels… I really should look her up.

For the continuing adventures of Mr. K, read Shaken, the 7th Jack Daniels thriller by J.A. Konrath.

For the continuing adventures of Orson and Luther, read Desert Places and Locked Doors by Blake Crouch.

For the continuing adventures of Taylor, read Afraid by Jack Kilborn.

In Which Blake and Joe Interview Each Other About the Experience of Writing Serial and Serial Uncut.

Blake: I know it must be a great thrill getting to work with me, probably the real reason you wanted to become a writer in the first place. Did the experience live up to the dream?

Joe: I can’t remember where we met for the first time. I think it was Jon Jordan (editor of the Crimespree zine) who gave me one of your books and said, “Read this, this guy is sick like you.” He was right. But to answer your question, yes, the experience lived up to the dream. I’ve collaborated on stories with several authors (Jeff Strand, Henry Perez, Tom Schreck, F. Paul Wilson) but nothing ever came so fast and furious, with so little need for revision. We cranked out almost 8000 words in something like five hours. This might be a good place to talk about our co-writing process.

Blake: You pitched this idea to me in an email: “Now, let’s consider hitchhiking. You aren’t supposed to go hitch hiking, because the driver who picks you up could be crazy. You aren’t supposed to pick up hitchhikers, because they could be crazy. Now if we were to collaborate, I write a scene where a driver kills someone he picked up. You write a scene where a hitchhiker kills the guy who gave him a ride. Then we get these two together…”

I was immediately hooked. As I recall, we each wrote our sections in isolation, and we didn’t share them with each other. When they were as good as they could be, you emailed me 200 words to kick off section 3, and I wrote back the next hundred words or so. You write much faster than I do so you pretty much just harassed me until I would email you back with my scene, or rather, my response to what your character had done. Do you remember the ground rules we came up with for writing section 3 together? I don’t think we had an end in mind when we started. Didn’t we just let it flow organically and hope it came out all right?

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.