Chris Bohjalian's Blog, page 37

72 hours

‎72 hours and change to "The Night Strangers" Let's-Keep-It-Dark, Rock and Roll Book Tour. Hoping hotels don't lose my underwear. Hoping I have the common sense to restrain from eating a Gritty Cat Waffle before boarding turboprop in a thunderstorm. And hoping to see or meet many of you on the road!

It all starts Monday, October 3rd. Here is the full schedule.

Thank you -- as always!

October 3
Middlebury, Vermont
Town Hall Theatre
Hosted by the Vermont Book Shop
Reading and Signing
7:00 p.m.

October 4
S. Burlington, Vermont
Barnes & Noble
Reading and Signing
7:00 p.m.

October 5
Nashua, New Hampshire
Barnes & Noble
Reading and Signing
12:30 p.m.

October 5
Framingham, Massachusetts
Barnes & Noble
Reading and Signing
7:00 p.m.

October 6
Boston, Massachusetts
Barnes & Noble Prudential Center
Signing Only
12:30 p.m.

October 6
Portsmouth, NH
Writers in The Loft
Hosted with the River Run Bookshop
Reading and Signing. Call the Music Hall for tickets.

7:00 p.m.
October 7
Wayzata, Minnesota
The Bookcase
Reading and Signing and Lunch
12:30 p.m.
Call for tickets and details: (952) 473-8341 or visit the store's website.

October 7
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Magers & Quinn
Reading and Signing
7:30 p.m.
To learn more, visit the Magers & Quinn website.

October 8
Grand Rapids, Michigan
Schuler Books & Music AND the Grand Rapids Public Library
111 Library Street NE
Reading and Signing
2:00 p.m.
For more information, here is the library's website.

October 9
Tulsa, Oklahoma
Book Smart: The Central Library
400 Civic Center
Reading and Signing
2:00 p.m.
(918) 697-9042
Or, visit the Book Smart site.

October 11
Lake Forest, Illinois
Froggy's French Cafe
Hosted by the Lake Forest Book Store
Reading and Signing and Lunch
11:30
Details? Visit the Lake Forest Bookstore website.

October 11
Waukegan, Illinois
Waukegan Public Library
128 North County Street
Hosted by the Lake Forest Book Store
Reading and Signing
6:00
For more information, visit the library's website.

October 12
Portland, Oregon
Powell's (downtown store)
Reading and Signing
7:30 p.m.
Details on the Powell's calendar.

October 13
Denver, Colorado
The Tattered Cover
Reading and Signing
7:30 p.m.

October 15
Nashville, Tennessee
Southern Festival of Books
War Memorial Auditorium
Reading and Signing
10:00 a.m.

October 17
South Hadley, Massachusetts
The Odyssey Bookshop
Reading and Signing
7:00 p.m.

October 18
Easton, Pennsylvania
Lafayette College
Oechsle Hall
Celebrating the Easton Public Library
Speech and Signing
7:00 p.m.

October 19
Norwich, Vermont
The Norwich Bookstore
Reading and Signing
7:00 p.m.
For more information, visit the store's website.

October 20
Queensbury New York
SUNY Adirondack Scoville Learning Center Auditorium
640 Bay Road
Reading and Signing
7:00 p.m.

October 21
Jeffersonville, IN
Sheraton Louisville Riverside Hotel
700 W. Riverside Drive
Presented by the Jeffersonville Twp. Public Library
7:00 p.m.
(812) 285-5635

October 22
Cincinnati, Ohio
Books by the Banks
Details to come -- a daytime event
(513) 731-7770 (ext. 1740)

October 27
Carmel, Indiana
The Guilded Leaf Book & Author Luncheon
Presentation, Book Sales, and Signings
9:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.
Ritz Charles
Reservations: (317) 814-3905
rnisenshal@carmel.lib.in.us

November 3
Saratoga, New York
New York Library Association Conference
National Museum of Dance
99 South Broadway
Speech and Signing
4:30 p.m.

November 10
Concord, New Hampshire
Gibson's Bookstore
Reading and Signing
(603) 224-0562
7:00 p.m.
Learn more at the Gibson's website.

"'The Catcher on the Pot' not for sale

Well, it looks like I am never going to own J.D. Salinger’s toilet.

Just for the record, the word “toilet” appears five times in Salinger’s masterpiece, “The Catcher in the Rye,” usually in the context of “toilet articles.” Twice it is modified by “crumby.”

Earlier this month, what may have been the Salinger toilet was being auctioned on eBay for$1 million. That is the equivalent cost of 4,386 standard-issue Kohler toilets at Home Depot. It is also, in all fairness, about $999,000 more than I would have paid for it, and I like Salinger’s work a lot. But it doesn’t matter because the auction was halted before I could even put in my two cents. The man behind the toilet sale was Rick Kohl of www.webuytreasure.com, which is headquartered in Kernersville, N.C.

Kohl told me that the toilet came from a house the late writer had lived in a quarter-century ago in Cornish, N.H. He said that not long after the auction went live on the Web, “The family of Salinger put pressure on me and on the family who sold me the toilet. They said I wasn’t entitled to it.” And so he called off the auction.

Kohl has tracked down a lot of interesting memorabilia in his career, including Elvis Presley’s first guitar and Green Bay Packer Hall of Famer Paul Hornung‘s championship rings. He claims he has letters from convicted serial killer, Son of Sam, though he has no plans to sell them: “I’m not much for exploiting weird people,” he says.

Salinger’s toilet, however, was a first, even for him.

Nevertheless, there may be something of a tradition of artistic porcelain among our nation’s literary luminaries. Years ago, when my wife and I visited Ernest Hemingway’s house in Key West, we saw a urinal on the ground that was serving as a water bowl for the house’s dozens of six-toed cats. Apparently, Hemingway had brought the urinal home from his favorite bar, Sloppy Joe’s.

Kohl did not necessarily expect to get a cool $1 million for the Cornish commode, but he thought there was a chance the bidding might climb to six figures — which is not bad for a run-of-the-mill toilet that was nearly 50 years old and, according to Kohl, “had some stains.” As Kohl asked rhetorically, “How special can a toilet be?”

Indeed. Its value, he explained, was driven by the fact that Salinger was such a renowned recluse. Kohl likened the writer to Neil Armstrong, the first man to walk on the moon. While Armstrong is not a recluse, he is known for going to great lengths to prevent his autograph from being sold. The result is that Kohl has sold five of Armstrong’s high school yearbooks that include the astronaut’s signature, and each one went for at least $10,000.

Now, I have a literary executor who will be in charge of managing my estate when I am dead and gone. In other words, she will be responsible for making decisions about if and where my work should be published, and which unpublished work should never be sold. Dead writers have these executors since, obviously, they are not especially accessible. (You think Salinger was a recluse? Just trying getting a straight answer from Virginia Woolf or William Shakespeare.) I can’t imagine a toilet of mine would ever be worth anything, given that I am not in the slightest bit reclusive. Also, unlike Salinger, I have written a lot of work that is (let’s be kind) not memorable. In fact, I wrote the single worst first novel ever published, bar none.

But when I made the list of all the things that should never be sold, it never crossed my mind to include bathroom fixtures. So, consider this column a sincere expression of a postmortem wish: Please don’t sell my toilet.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on September 25, 2011. His next novel, “The Night Strangers,” arrives a week from Tuesday — on October 4, 2001.)

I may be coming to your house. Not kidding.

In roughly twelve days, The Night Strangers officially arrives in bookstores, libraries, and on eReaders -- and we kick off the Rock-n-Roll Book Tour.

The novel begins with a plane crash in Lake Champlain and ends with a locked door in a basement.

Here, however, is why I’m writing today: I may be coming to your house.

Not kidding.

It doesn’t matter where you live – so long as it’s in the continental U.S. (Apologies to my readers overseas.)

How? Random House and Cabot Cheese are sending me to a book club to discuss The Night Strangers. And it might be yours. Simply click on this link to enter to win:

http://read-it-forward.crownpublishin...

There are other prizes, too, including collections of my books for your public library.

In the meantime, fasten your seatbelts low and tight around your waists. The Night Strangers is almost here.

Thank you -- as always -- for your faith in my work.

All the best,

Chris B.

"Put a haunted man in a haunted house. . . and you have a Halloween hair-raiser. But it's more than that. Bohjalian understands how long it takes to recover from unimaginable pain."
—Tim Clark, Yankee Magazine

Justin Cronin, author of The Passage, reviews The Night Strangers

Big, big thanks to Justin Cronin for his thoughtful, spirited review of “The Night Strangers” at www.amazon.com. Given how much I have revered Cronin’s work — going all the way back to his novella, “A Short History of the Long Ball,” and culminating in his magnificent 2010 epic, “The Passage” — this review was a huge gift.

Here is the review in its entirety. Again, a thousand thanks.


++++++++


“To put the matter succinctly: The first chapter of Chris Bohjalian’s The Night Strangers is so riveting, I dropped the book in the tub.

“I spent the next half-hour running a hair-dryer over its soaked pages. By the time the task was complete the book was as swollen as a Reuben sandwich. It was clear to me that if the first twenty pages were any indication, I’d better read the rest somewhere safe and secure, with neither water nor fire, and while I was at it, some good soundproofing, lest I freak out my children by shrieking like an acrophobe on a roller coaster.

“I wasn’t wrong.

“Describing Bohjalian’s thirteenth novel isn’t a simple matter. Its dovetailing plots are so seamlessly interwoven–as tightly screwed together as the thirty-nine carriage bolts sealing the mysterious door in the Linton’s (very creepy) basement–I don’t want to give too much away.

“But it’s also a challenge to summarize because The Night Strangers is so many novels at once, as all good novels must be. It’s a psychological thriller. It’s a domestic drama, the story of a family coping with the aftermath of dislocation and disaster. It’s a book about a specifically American locale, in this case a small town in a remote corner of New Hampshire. It’s a classic New England ghost story, and a hell of a good one. (It also won’t make you want to get on an airplane anytime soon, though there I go, telling too much.)

“I’ve been following Bohjalian for some time. Always I’ve come away from his novels replete with admiration–and not a little envy–for his skill and versatility, book after book. His psychological acumen is downright Flaubert-esque, most notably (and remarkably) in his creation of female characters. But Bohjalian is a reader-friendly writer, too. His novels are compulsively discussable, the kinds of tales that employ specific human dramas to probe larger ethical issues. They make you think. They are, in every sense, “what would you do?” books, and the answers are never simple.

“If there’s a core to Bohjalian’s work, though, it’s the cultural divide between the modern scientific world and–for lack of a better term–the spiritual world and its ancient practices. His novels are populated by the likes of dowsers (Water Witches), the practitioners of traditional female-assisted birth (Midwives), homeopaths (The Law of Similars), even a shape-shifter (Trans-Sister Radio).

“The Night Strangers follows this tradition, but with a dark twist. The witches of Bethel, New Hampshire are decidedly of the sinister variety—albeit more likely to sell real estate and wear stylish leather skirts than fly around on brooms and don pointy hats. Beneath the town’s charming rural surface of gingerbread Victorians, maple sugarhouses, and fiery foliage lurks a conspiracy of evil reminiscent of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown.” How evil? Suffice it to say that when somebody drops by to welcome newcomers to the neighborhood with a plate of vegan brownies, they should think twice before taking the first bite.

“But to say anything more would be to reveal too much. Fans of his fiction, as I am, will know The Night Strangers is pure Bohjalian. Newcomers will come away wanting more. And if you read it in the bathtub, consider yourself warned.”

(Justin Cronin is the bestselling author of The Passage, as well as Mary and O’Neil, which won the Pen/Hemingway Award and the Stephen Crane Prize, and The Summer Guest.)

Yankee burrito worth that second mortgage

Last month, I took out a bank loan to buy a burrito at Yankee Stadium. It was not just any burrito, of course, it was a “Yankee burrito.” In other words, even the beans were arrogant.

I am a serious binge eater at ballparks, whether it’s a Lake Monsters game in Burlington or a Yankee game in the Bronx. Suddenly, I have the fiscal responsibility of a toddler in a toy store. At that Yankee game, I consumed Carvel soft-serve ice cream with rainbow jimmies in a plastic bowl that resembled a batting helmet; a poodle-sized bag of Cracker Jacks; the aforementioned “Yankee burrito;” Twizzlers; a soda cup filled with french fries; and a $5 bottle of Pepsi (diet, because I had just consumed 840 calories of Cracker Jacks). The game, I should note, did not extend into extra innings. I strapped on the feedbag and accomplished this gastronomic orgy in a mere nine innings and batting practice.

Now, why was a serious Mets fan eating like a Roman emperor at Yankee Stadium? My good friend, Adam Turteltaub, was celebrating his birthday and he and his wife, Rhea, invited my wife and me to join their family at the ballpark. It was an irresistible invitation and we savored every moment. I’m not sure I have ever gone to a baseball game and not had a wonderful time and — in some cases — witnessed something just a little magic.

Exhibit A is the 1971 Topps baseball card for Yankee first baseman and outfielder, Curt Blefary. I’m on it. Not kidding. So are my older brother and my father. We were sitting beside the third base dugout at a Yankee game in 1970 and are in the background of the photo of Blefary as he’s leaving the batter’s box in the following year’s card.

Exhibit B is a Yankees game I went to in 1982 with my girlfriend (now wife) and my father. To make the game interesting — since she had absolutely no idea what was going on — she decided she’d follow every move of the Twins’ catcher, Ray Smith. She noticed him in batting practice and thought he was cute. Sure enough, in the fifth inning, he sent her a foul ball: Bounced it right off the armrest of her seat. Another fan recovered it, but she is confident it was Ray’s way of letting her know that he appreciated her interest.

And Exhibit C occurred at the end of August, while I was eating my french fries in the Bronx. My buddy Adam’s two boys, Max and Ross, had brought their gloves to the game. Ten-year-old Ross had come close to getting a batting practice baseball that A’s outfielder Coco Crisp tossed into the stands an hour before the game started, but a grown man had elbowed Ross out of the way and snagged it. Both boys were disappointed, but gamely waited for the next opportunity.

It came in the bottom of the eighth. Yankee outfielder Nick Swisher poked a three-run homer into the Yankee bullpen. Perennial all-star reliever Mariano Rivera tossed the ball into the stands — and directly to Adam’s 13-year-old son, Max.

I’ve been to a lot of games in my life, but never have I come closer than an 18-wheeler to a home run. And so it was perfect to see Mariano toss Max that baseball.

Even now, despite the stratospheric cost of everything from seats to sodas, there is something a little moving about the ballpark experience. “For baseball is continuous,” wrote poet and essayist Donald Hall, “like nothing else among American things, an endless game of repeated summers, joining the long generations of all the fathers and all the sons.”

I may root for the Mets (the best minor league club playing this year in a major league park), but it was still poignant and powerful for my wife and me to watch the Yankees — and the Turteltaubs. It was, in fact, worth every calorie in those Twizzlers and french fries and Cracker Jacks. Thanks, Adam!

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on September 18, 2011. Chris’s next novel, “The Night Strangers,” arrives on October 4.)

Three Books for the TRULY Frequent Flyer

I was just on NPR's "All Things Considered," offering three books for the truly frequent flyer.

If you have a moment, follow the link and listen -- and, if you are so inclined, leave a comment on the page there. (You can even recommend it on facebook.)

http://www.npr.org/2011/09/16/1398576...

Thanks so much!

A comparison to "The Shining"

In its October 17 issue, Family Circle reviews "The Night Strangers."

The verdict?

"Shades of 'The Shining' make for a haunting tale...A modern-day ghost story worth losing sleep over."

Big thanks to the magazine.

The novel arrives on October 4.

Good Housekeeping calls The Night Strangers "good 'n' spooky."

The review is in the October issue of the magazine:

"After losing passengers in a forced landing, a pilot seeks respite by moving his family to New England. But the house is haunted and local witches won't leave them alone. Good 'n' spooky."
-- Good Housekeeping

The novel arrives on October 4.

Never forget? Not possible.

We all know where we were ten years ago today when the planes hit the towers. In my case, I was at Denver International Airport, standing at my gate and waiting to fly to San Francisco on a 7:15 a.m. flight – 9:15 in the east. I would learn more after I had boarded the flight, as all of us tried frantically to get information on cell phones that seem primitive now, frustrated that already it was impossible to reach anyone in Manhattan. It was my wife, home in Vermont, who kept me informed as best she could. Years earlier, she had worked on the 104th floor of Two World Trade. She knew that building well.

Among my memories? The cerulean blue sky over Denver that afternoon, where I would be stranded for a week. I wandered around aimlessly, staring up into the heavens that were oddly silent. There were, after all, absolutely no passenger jets in the skies by then.

Everyone has a story like that. The most poignant and powerful, of course, are those shared by people who lost family and friends on the four planes or in the mountains of rubble.

Likewise, we all sense how much the world has been transformed. In my own small, insular corner, the most noteworthy changes involve reading: The way the eBook and the digital newspaper are saving a lot of trees and wrecking a lot of attention spans. That sounds glib and I understand well that the digital genie is out of the bottle. The fact is that while I am still likely to read the print version of this paper, thanks to the digital age I read more of “the New York Times” than I did in the 1990s. And while I still prefer the paper book to the eBook, my wife reads novels both the old-fashioned way and on an eReader – and quite happily.

My point is simply this: Years from now when historians examine the first decade of the twenty-first century, my sense is that the way our brains assimilate and digest information in the digital age will be as noteworthy as a decade in Afghanistan, the war on Al-Qaeda, or the Red Sox ending their long World Series drought and winning the big prize twice.

September 11, 2001, however, the awful day itself, will always be at the core of our thinking. Make no mistake: 9/11 was a wrenching game-changer. People died. And they died horribly.

And then there are the American soldiers and members of the National Guard who have since given their lives nobly in Iraq and Afghanistan – and the many thousands more who have been crippled or traumatized or scarred. There are the New York City firefighters and rescue workers whose heroism has left them chronically ill. They have all served selflessly and we should be proud.

Which brings me back to memory. The two words, “Never forget,” are associated with 9/11. On some occasions, they have been the basis for the sort of xenophobia that makes for an offensive t-shirt or – far worse – this year’s demeaning Congressional hearings on the “radicalization” of Muslims. But most of the time, the two words have anchored deeply affecting tributes. I have always found it interesting how the sit-com, “Friends,” approached 9/11. The series was set in the West Village, at the corner of Bedford and Grove Streets. The fictional characters could have seen the towers pancake into the earth; they would have been draped in the tsunami of dust that followed. But the producers chose not to mention the attack in the episodes that aired in 2001 and 2002. (They even deleted a scene in which Chandler Bing jokes about blowing up a plane as he passes through airport security.) But there is one episode in which Joey Tribbiani wears a t-shirt with the Fire Department of New York logo and the name of a firefighter who died that day at Ground Zero. I find the understatement of that gesture moving.

Where will we be ten years from today? (Please, not Afghanistan.) Your guess is as good as mine. But I assure you: None of us will have forgotten where we were on 9/11.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on September 11, 2011. Chris’s next novel, “The Night Strangers,” arrives on October 4.)

This was no mere zombie plague

I spent the hurricane that savaged our state on the 29th floor of a hotel in midtown Manhattan. Now, that makes me sound like either an adrenaline junkie who had to be in the midst of the expected worst or — given what would occur here in Vermont — a rat who couldn’t get off a sinking ship fast enough.

I’m neither. I was actually just being a dad.

My daughter was scheduled to move into college in the city on Monday, August 29. Originally, it had been planned for Sunday, but the school postponed it a day because of the teeny-tiny detail that a hurricane was approaching. And because we did not want to be driving into Manhattan in the midst of a natural disaster, we battened down our house in Lincoln and then the three of us set off for New York on Saturday morning.

As my family and I studied the Hurricane Irene tracking maps or listened to forecasters predicting an Armageddon-like catastrophe in Manhattan, we prepared for the worst in our hotel room: My wife made sure that we had plenty of bottled water, we knew where the stairways were in the event we lost power, and where we would go if the windows blew out. (Answer to that last one? Under the beds.) I took care of the important matters: I learned from the concierge that if we experienced a complete system shut-down of the in-room entertainment system, the hotel would be showing movies in a windowless conference room on the first floor and they had brought in a cinema-quality popcorn maker.

Then, late Saturday afternoon, we wandered aimlessly around Times Square, staring at the incoming storm and savoring the strangeness of the closed stores. There were people, but not many, and no vehicles except for police cars and cabs. But the massive video screens were still functioning, and so it felt merely like a giant zombie plague had hit the city and wiped out a sizable chunk of humanity.

And we worried about our beloved Vermont. . .but not greatly. After all, the tracking maps showed the center crossing central Connecticut and New Hampshire. Lincoln, Vermont was barely inside the conical storm swath that (cruelly, in hindsight) resembled a horn of plenty.

In the end, Hurricane Irene would be largely a non-event in Manhattan, while Vermont would be devastated. As some of you have seen, the road to Lincoln was destroyed in precisely the same fashion as it was in the flood of 1998: It looked as if a giant Cloverfield monster gouged out a 40-foot-long, 20-foot deep section of pavement beside the river, leaving the gnarled guardrail hanging loosely in the air like a rope.

My wife and I got a sense of how badly the Vermont infrastructure was ravaged when we drove home on Monday. We left our daughter in Greenwich Village at lunchtime, and arrived at our house in Lincoln at 10:30 at night. What is usually a six-hour drive took almost ten hours, because we were detoured five times.

Now, Vermonters are no strangers to floods. Witness how we coped with the Lake Champlain flooding this year. Recall how Montpelier has learned to live with the Winooski River: A peaceful neighbor some seasons, and a psychopathic one others.

But this is different. I think we will all be haunted for a very long time by the cows dead and alive we saw floating downriver, and the caskets that were raised from the ground and left upended amidst the sediment and silt. By the covered bridges we saw smashed into kindling. By the towns, stranded like islands, that had to have food airlifted into them.

We will recover, because we are a hardy bunch. (We all owe our road crews, utility workers, and firefighters big, big thanks for what they have accomplished already.) But make no mistake: This was no mere zombie plague. This time we will take all the help we can get.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on September 4. Chris’s next novel, “The Night Strangers,” arrives on October 4, 2011.)