I’m often asked about my inspirations for writing Obedience. One of them — and it’s a recent novel, but a gem nonetheless — is Peter Abraham’s fiercely brilliant novel Oblivion.

Oblivion is unlike anything I’ve ever read. Abrahams takes a tired genre — the private detective story — and rips the seams completely out of it. The book is about a man searching for a missing girl, yet his search is complicated when he has an anuerysm. The second half of the novel essentially folds back on the first, as Nick tries to piece together things we as the audience know to be true but he has forgotten due to his brain trauma.

A truly original, fascinating story, any fan of the mystery genre would do well to pick this one up.

Obedience is on the shelves today!

Feels great. Feels surreal. Feels…like it’s been a long time coming.

 Thanks to everyone who made this day happen, and you know who you are.

As anyone who has taken high school history knows, there is a long list of serious novels written by American presidents.

 The least-known presidential novel is probably Calvin Coolidge’s The Orange Boat (1924), a strange and ephemeral little novel about a sailing adventure that goes awry. Coolidge published the novel to modest acclaim under the psuedonym Nicholas Brubaker, yet what’s most interesting about The Orange Boat is the appearance of a young and strapping politican named…Calvin Coolidge. (Coolidge saves the day, saves the boat, gets the girl and the novel’s last line of dialogue. There’s something creepy about it, but you root for him nonetheless.) 

More well-known but still relatively obscure is William H. Taft’s supernatural ghost story Olivia.  Also published under a psuedonym (Taft would have been jailed if his name had been attached to this book), this is the story of a young girl who drowns in the early 20th century and then returns to haunt the town of Barby, Ohio. What is interesting about Olivia isn’t its tropes, which were overdone even then, but the fact that it contains a wicked, almost perverse sexuality. Olivia taunts the townspeople with her ghostliness, her untouchability; in each scene she is described as beautiful beyond belief, yet no one, especially not the town’s sex-crazed beuracrats, can touch her. There are two scenes in this book where men actually have accidental sex with machines (a johnboat, a push lawnmower) in frenetic attempts to have their way with the title character.

 One would be remiss not to mention the forgettable novels written by presidents, of which there are many. There is Theodore Roosevelt’s Fire!, an adventure story about a New York City fireman who rides a white stallion everywhere and speaks every single line (seriously, every one) as an exclamation. There is Rutherford B. Hayes’s Jerry and Dave, a semi-comic tale about two men who talk to one another across the walls of a TB hospital. There is Benjamin Harrison’s The Strange Case of Martin Beggarman, Satanist, which is a complete and unabashed knock-off of a Poe tale. Finally, there is Bill Clinton’s Frosty Mugs, which is a quasi-serious volume published by Oxford’s underground Barnaby Press. FM is the story of a fraternity brother who drinks a lot of beer and chases a lot of skirt. The end.  

My favorite presidential novel is probably George H.W. Bush’s Stick in the Eye. It is a coming of age story about a man who has a stick plunged into his eye as a child, but he goes on to great things. Published under his own name, it is the only presidential novel that holds up. The New York Times called Stick “engrossing” and “mesmerizing,” and it is easy to see why. The book contains all of the 20th century’s great themes–war, love, death, disease, corporate jackbooting–and it is by all accounts a masterpiece.  

From time to time on WillLavender.com, I’m going to give you some books or films or albums that not many people have heard about.

My first comes from the genre-bending master Rupert Thomson. It’s called THE BOOK OF REVELATION, and it’s about a man who is blindfolded and kidnapped by a group of masked women, who treat him as their sexual slave. Original, terrifying, and brilliantly written, this novel is one of the finest (and strangest) I have ever read. Check it out.

Page 248 of a novel is generally regarded as its most important page.

In James Davies’ seminal work on the novel form, Flow Chart: Building a Novel From the Ground, he argues that 248 is not only an essential “volta” for the book, it is the lynchpin that the entire textual foundation rests upon.

Page 248 is a quirky thing, no doubt. Its dimensions are different, for one thing. The 8 1/2 X 9 format (developed by Marty Cohen of Knopf in the mid-50s) has stumped writers and publishers for years. Cohen’s idea was that 248 should be designed so that it was “advertised” or “stressed,” and this has created situations where a word will sometimes end in mid-syllable and then pick up again on 249. The cut of 248 does indeed make it stand out in the common book, as Cohen hoped, but the difficulty becomes making the page bend into the narrative itself. There are ways around the Cohen Cut: Stuart Crosby came up with the ingenious idea of “wrapping” the text by using arrows from 248 to -49; the critic Rebecca Hahn suggested folding 248 into 249, making what she called an “envelope situation” inside the book, so that the pages unfurled when turned and the narrative almost became a volitional thing during the act of reading. Some writers, such as the essayist Natalia Gilbert, have suggested defacing 248 in protest (with ink, with saliva, with liquid paper). This tack, in this writer’s opinion, is unwise.  

Many writers have thrown out the analogy of 248 being a kind of precipice, a “shelf” that can act as a resting point for the writer or as a jumping-off point for a new idea. The science-fiction writer George Hope never wrote 248 in English, even though he was born in Knoxville, Tennessee. Every Hope 248 was written in a peculiar alien venacular that lacked vowels.  

Essentially what one must do, if he wants to use 248 in the correct way, is to leave it blank except for the sentences that are supposed to go there. A quick look around at the famous 248’s (Brett Fields’s I Am the Deliverer; Rebecca Dodd’s Sanderson) show how pivotal the page is. To dismiss it as being “just another page” is a potentially deadly move for the writer.

I suggest skipping right from 247 to 249 in the original draft, and then coming back later to fill in 248. The number itself can be intimidating, especially in crime fiction, when the average villain is unmasked in what Daviess calls the “reveal range,” those pages that fall precariously before 248 but remain carefully outside of its punishing vortex.

Boxes on the porch yesterday.

On the side of one: Random House New Releases, February 19th.

And inside, of course, 35 copies of Obedience.

It’s odd seeing a stack of your book. So much work, so much waiting…yet it really was a thrill to look at that stack and think, “I did that.” 

I made a note to myself to remember these little moments. My son hugging me after we pulled all the copies out. (He INSISTED on getting two copies for himself.) The feel of the boxes, the way they looked unopened, how the books were resting inside them so inconspicuously. All of these things need to be remembered, I told myself. There will never be another revelation like this one.