Paul Tremblay appears Wednesday behind ‘Disappearance at Devil’s Rock’

June 27, 2016 12:01 am • Last Updated: June 27, 2016 2:07 pm

By Rick Koster
Day Arts/Features writer

Dark novelist Paul Tremblay to discuss, sign 'Disappearance at Devil's Rock'

Even though it’s June, summer is typically a busy time for high school math teacher Paul Tremblay, who lives with his family outside of Boston. For one thing, he’s boning up on Calculus BC for a new course he’s leading in the fall. Plus, his kids have baseball and the myriad vacation activities that happily clog the season.

But that’s not all.

Tremblay is a rapidly ascending star in the world of dark fiction. He’s out on the road behind his just-out novel, “Disappearance at Devil’s Rock” (William Morrow), and he’ll discuss and sign the book at 6 p.m. Wednesday in Westerly’s Savoy Bookshop & Café.

The new novel is centered on 13-year-old Tommy Sanderson, who vanishes one night in Borderland State Park in Massachusetts near the apocryphally haunted Devil’s Rock. The two friends he was with, Josh and Luis, can only offer vague details about what happened. As time passes and no one can find the missing boy, Tommy’s mother Elizabeth and sister Kate begin experiencing increasingly eerie events that suggest supernatural forces. In many ways, the novel is about the relationship between mother and daughter in the context of fear and grief — but there’s also a decided and escalating menace to the story of what happened to the boy.

Tremblay is absolutely superb at ratcheting up tension and spinning a fog-like sense of dread, and his ability to tightrope between the horrors of the real world and the possibilities that something lies beyond are almost maddeningly great.

For years, Tremblay has been well known in the world of horror publishing. He’s a multiple Bram Stoker Award nominee with several titles to his credit, including a two-book series from publisher Henry Holt that cleverly featured a narcoleptic detective named Mark Genevich. But, though critically lauded, the books didn’t do well commercially, and Tremblay’s next several works came from small presses.

It wasn’t until last year’s “A Head Full of Ghosts” (William Morrow) that Tremblay’s career rocketed beyond niche appreciation. A postmodern book about an exorcism in a modern family, “A Head Full of Ghosts” examined the nature of supernatural Evil through the concept of demonic possession and ritual exorcism — and filled readers with genuine fear. That includes folks like Stephen King, who said “(This book) scared the living hell out of me, and I’m pretty hard to scare.”

Tremblay, in a phone conversation last week, acknowledged that, while he’s never met King in person, he has “exchanged a few emails with him.” Tremblay says this with a charming tone of uncertainty, as though he’s afraid someone will pop up and announce a hacked email account — that it wasn’t King at all.

No worries! It was indeed the Master, who has now come out in praise of “Disappearance at Devil’s Rock” via a Tweet that calls the new book “uber creepy” and adds, “don’t miss this one.”

Mega-bestseller Michael Koryta also chimed in, saying “Disappearance” is “dark, smart and fantastic. Think Dennis Lehane meets Dean Koontz.”

“I’m on cloud nine,” Tremblay says of this adulation from on high. “I’d have never believed it.”

But read “Disappearance at Devil’s Rock” and “A Head Full of Ghosts” and you’ll understand why Tremblay is at the forefront of a resurgence in horror fiction. Here are excerpts from last week’s conversation with Tremblay.

On any perceived pressure — from within or from his agent or publisher — to deliver in big fashion after the success of “A Head Full of Ghosts”:

“Oh, yeah. Not from my agent or editor — they were great through the entire process. But definitely from myself. I haven’t experienced a lot of success. I was very frustrated by what happened with the earlier novels, and at a certain point I assumed I’d never get back to a major publisher. And I gave up worrying about it — and suddenly I was able to write ‘Ghosts.’ In terms of the story, it did what I wanted it to, and I was happy, but I didn’t expect the success.

“And then I had to follow it — and immediately got in my own way. I kept thinking, ‘This isn’t “Ghosts,” and how are people going to react to it?’ Maybe that anxiety was good in that it kept me on my toes.”

On the impetus for “Disappearance at Devil’s Rock”:

“Unlike ‘Ghosts,’ where the idea just came to me, I had to sit down and think about what the new novel would be. I was sitting in a grove of trees outside my house, which is not normal for me, and I was sketching out a few ideas. I thought, ‘What scares me?’ Several things but, as a parent, a missing child. But setting also played a big part. Borderlands State Park is a real place, and you can go visit Split Rock, which is in the novel. I hike and walk and mountain bike there, and I love that place — so it’s only natural that I’d make it into something scary with something that frightens me the most.”

Though plenty of things happen in “Disappearance” to suggest a supernatural presence, the pure horror in the book happens in real-world situations orchestrated by one character — who shall remain unnamed so as not to spoil the plot. On delving into the nuances of a character like this, and whether a particularly dark scene involving this person was difficult to write:

“Once I knew that scene was going to happen, it became a sort of carrot at the end of the stick for me. If I could just get to that carrot, I’d be fine. ‘Devil’s Rock’ actually has a few of those scenes. I wouldn’t say I enjoyed writing them, but you get there and zone out and I can lose myself in them. You know, (the unnamed character), in a lot of ways, is still a mystery to me. I didn’t want to get too close to him. I don’t sympathize with him, but I did want to empathize with him. I worked out a lot of background history for him that didn’t make it into the book and never was supposed to be in the book. But it helped me understand him and why he’s the way he is.

“You know, my wife always ask me, ‘Why do you write those things?’ Well, it interests me. It’s not a case of ‘How could something like this happen?’ because stuff like this DOES happen. It could happen to us.

Readers of Tremblay’s works can have a hard time figuring out if, in fact, anything supernatural DID happen.

“I try to approach the supernatural in a realistic but skeptical way. If something weird happened in front of me, I’d have a hard time believing it. Would I even recognize it as supernatural? Because if something very obviously supernatural happened, it would fry our circuits. That doesn’t mean dark basements aren’t scary or that odd things don’t happen. That’s what’s intriguing about it. I do think there’s more of an answer in ‘Devil’s Rock’ than maybe in ‘Ghosts.’ I wanted the supernatural presence to be a lingering atmospheric feeling. The horror of the book is what happened in the real world. But what gets into Elizabeth and Kate’s heads — and hopefully the readers — is the ambiguity about supernatural things that may or may not have happened. And how that resonates.”