Writing AT THE QUIET EDGE
I never imagined I’d write a book told partly from the point-of-view of a twelve-year-old, but Everett is the perfect conduit for AT THE QUIET EDGE, a story that originated with my own son. The idea for this suspense began when my teenager drove a young coworker home after their shift at our local pizza joint. My son mentioned in passing that he’d dropped this boy off across the highway at a self-storage center where he lived with his family in an attached apartment.
It had never occurred to me that people lived in storage buildings as on-site managers, but once you start looking, you’ll see the clues: a small bathroom window stacked with shampoos not too far from the facility’s office. A child’s bike next to the entrance gate. A kiddie pool on a small patch of grass during the summer. Nothing about that is spooky, of course, until you imagine night falling.
Like a lot of storage facilities, the place in our town is in a business park isolated from the usual neighborhood comforts. During the day it’s busy with the cars of hundreds of strangers coming and going. But at night it’s a ghost town. Miles of streets and parking lots, hundreds of buildings and lightless windows, but only that one isolated family living in the middle of the lonely darkness. There’s no one else around, and if there is, it’s someone who shouldn’t be there.
If that’s not a perfect location for chills, I don’t know what is. My mind immediately began churning, imagining what circumstances would turn that kind of isolation from unsettling to downright scary. Bumps in the night? Of course. The return of a nefarious ex-husband? Yes. How about a storage locker filled with secret information about women who’ve gone missing from the area? Because we haven’t even touched on the units themselves yet!
I know this is my writer’s imagination, but I wonder about those storage units every time I pass them. 99% of them are surely filled with a few household treasures packed in with the normal detritus of everyday lives. But what about that other 1%? What kind of secrets might they hide? And what if the person living on site got curious about those strange curiosities?
So that was where I placed this small family from AT THE QUIET EDGE, a woman with a fugitive ex-husband and a twelve-year-old boy bored enough to go poking around where he shouldn’t. I had a blast writing this setting where something dangerous could be lurking around any corner…and the number of corners are endless! Mother and son are stuck together on a couple of acres of dead-end streets and deserted alleyways bristling with hundreds of doors that could be hiding anything… or anyone.
As I was working on the book, my husband and I would make a point of routing a weekly walk over the highway and around the business park. The day I spotted kids jumping on a trampoline inside the gated perimeter of a storage place, it felt like a celebrity sighting! And honestly, it seemed like an idyllic working arrangement for a parent. No commute, you’re always home when the kids get off the bus, you’re right there while they work on homework. But of course, there are no neighbor kids next door and no friends to drop in on.
In the book, Lily Brown is doing her honest best to raise a son at the edge of a town that hates his criminal father, but honesty always has its limits. She truly believes that keeping secrets about his dad from Everett is the best way to protect him. But Everett has secrets as well, secrets he discovered in a storage unit, and they just might be more dangerous than his mom’s. I hope you enjoy this journey through this strange setting as much as I loved writing it!
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Bio: Wall Street Journal and Amazon Charts best selling author Victoria Helen Stone writes critically acclaimed novels of dark intrigue and emotional suspense. Aside from her latest work, At the Quiet Edge, she has also written Problem Child, Half Past, and the chart-toppers Jane Doe, False Step, The Last One Home, and Evelyn, After.
Victoria writes in her home office high in the Wasatch Mountains of Utah, far from her origins in the flat plains of Minnesota, Texas, and Oklahoma. She is passionate about desserts, true crime, hiking, and her terror of mosquitoes, which have targeted her in a diabolical conspiracy to hunt her down no matter the season. Find out more about Victoria at VictoriaHelenStone.com.
Follow her on Twitter https://twitter.com/victoriaDahl
AT THE QUIET EDGE
A young mother has done everything possible to put the past behind her, but it might not be enough in a gripping novel of suspense by the Amazon Charts bestselling author of the Jane Doe novels.
Abandoned by her fugitive ex-husband, Lily Brown is rebuilding her life on the edge of a Kansas town that still feels the sting of his crimes. Lily lies low, managing the isolated storage facility where she lives with her twelve-year-old son, Everett, and planning a better future for them both. That requires keeping secrets. Everett has them too.
After breaking into a storage unit, Everett finds photographs and news clippings of five girls missing for decades. For Everett, it’s an adventure and a tempting mystery to solve. But digging further into a stranger’s obsession is putting Everett and his mother in the crosshairs of a killer.
Then Lily’s ex resurfaces from the shadows. Just as suddenly, an attentive new man enters Lily’s life. And a suspicious detective, responding to reports of a prowler, watches every move Lily makes. It’s getting harder for Lily to know who to trust―or whose secrets pose the most frightening threat of all.
Category: On Writing
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