Warning: This article contains spoilers about Samantha Downing’s new novelHe Started It.
If you think that sounds hellacious, you’d be right.
But it’s also perfect fodder for a thriller namely,Samantha Downing’sHe Started It.
Credit: Jacqueline Dallimore; Penguin
Where did this idea first come from?
hey tell me your road trips are better than this.
I just put the two together and came up with this.
I was going to say sibling relationships are complicated, but this is next-level.
Do you have siblings?
Were you inspired by them?
Have you really been to all these places, or how did you choose them?
No, I actually did a lot of research online for it.
There’s some really bizarre roadside attractions out there.
You play with the idea of what a heroine is and who she is in this book.
Do you have a definitive answer to who the heroine is here?
And those are what are acceptable in pop culture generally.
Is there a heroine, or is there not?
Is it is it impossible to have a heroine that doesn’t fit the stereotype?
The example I always use because everybody knows it is Don Draper inMad Men.
He was a horrible person.
This has perhaps the greatest diary fake-out sinceGone Girl.
Where did you get the idea for that twist?
My original idea was that it was going to be Nikki’s diary.
I don’t plot my books.
I write them organically.
Things change a lot as I write.
That’s where that came from.
It was just trying to think outside the box.
There has to be misdirection in thrillers, otherwise you never get away with the twist.
Otherwise you’re just telegraphing the twist the whole time.
Beth does something utterly shocking about 75 percent of the way through.
I didn’t know that happened.
That’s all I knew.
I didn’t know who would be left standing.
I didn’t know how it was going to happen.
All I saw was like massacre in the desert in my head.
I had never written a synopsis before.
I did it, and I came up with an idea.
My editor and I fine-tuned it a little, and then I wrote the book and it was terrible.
We literally threw the entire book out.
I wrote a book in between this andMy Lovely Wifethat we threw out.
It turns out when I plot books, I telegraph them.
It was completely predictable, and it clearly did not work out.
I wrote this one instead.
What I like about not plotting is not knowing what comes next.
I discover the story the same way a reader will discover the story.
So you had this hazy image of a desert for the ending.
Did you ever plan anything more or less definitive than what is there in the final version?
It all ties back to that in the end, that Krista was the problem the whole time.
Beth didn’t know it at the time, she was just saying it because she was annoyed.
So I killed them all.
I thought the ending was very clear that Beth dies.
Of course she dies the woman had just shot her husband and Portia.
So yes, she shoots Beth.
The story was about the siblings, and when all three siblings are dead, the story’s over.
What happens to Krista is irrelevant.
I’ll be honest, this ending surprised me so much I almost threw the book across the room.
Does hearing that sort of thing delight you?
I have heard from several people that they screamed or threw the book across the room.
