Writing THE BLOOD MESA

When Lee Goldberg asked me to be part of the Dead Man series that he and William Rabkin created, I didn’t hesitate to say yes.  For one thing, I’ve been an admirer of their writing for a long time, since well before I knew them, and I was excited about the opportunity to work with them.

For another, I thought they had come up with an intriguing concept and a great protagonist in Matt Cahill, the man who should have died but didn’t and now wanders the world battling against evils that only he can see.  This is a perfect set-up for a series, because the writers can take Matt almost anywhere they want to and tell a wide variety of stories.

And I was excited as well by the chance to tackle a different sort of yarn from what I usually write.  Even though I started out as a mystery writer and had sold more than a million words of mystery fiction before I wrote much of anything else, there’s no doubt that I’ve been best known for most of my career as an author of historical fiction, using settings and time periods ranging from biblical times to the Vietnam War.  But the Dead Man series is set firmly in our own time, even though THE BLOOD MESA has some historical background to it, and it’s nice to get back to something contemporary.

Not only that, but it has strong elements of horror and the supernatural, and for the most part this is unexplored territory for me in my work.  True, I’ve done a few Westerns that had mild supernatural elements (often of the Scooby-Doo variety!), but THE BLOOD MESA is the first real horror novel I’ve written, even though I’ve been a reader and fan of horror for many, many years.

But most important of all for me, writing THE BLOOD MESA was fun, just as I thought it would be.  I had an absolutely great time with it, for all those reasons I’ve talked about, and I hope the readers can tell how much I enjoyed it.  If they can, then chances are that they’ll be entertained by it as well.