The Evolution of the Driver
Readers may find the Driver to be a conflicted character, and rightly so. He’s dead in the classic sense, yet lives on in the Upper Territory—an in-between place where time spent fuels his desire to immerse himself in the living. He dutifully carries out his charge as a member of Abel’s Fold, but not without straying onto tangents where he interferes with the natural way of things. He seeks solitude and isolation, though often carries on a semblance of friendship with aborted fetuses who wander the Territory. And now that he has appeared in two novellas, the Driver has taken up permanent residence in my mind. He matters to me as a character…but this was not always the case.
The Driver began as a device, an instrument. He was never meant to be something as flimsy as a symbol, but rather a concrete method by which I could tell the flip side of a murder mystery—The Camaro Murders. He didn’t even need a real name; he was only a shadowy figure who slipped in and out of the living and provided glimpses into what happens after a murder. His voice was no more important than the other characters’ voices.
My intent had always been to write The Camaro Murders as a multi-character, first person story. I was listening to a lot of Coheed and Cambria as well as The Prizefighter Inferno at the time, both of which tell multifaceted stories with multiple narratives and subplots. With only the lyrics to help piece together the backstory, I as the listener felt compelled to delve into the online forums to understand more about how this world worked. In turn, I wanted to achieve a similar effect with The Camaro Murders: tell a story from different perspectives as well as leave room for the reader’s inquisitive mind to piece things together.
So I started with the force that would propel the rest of the characters—the Driver. I wrote the last chapter, “The Wicked and Despair,” first. Even though it occurs early in the story from a chronology perspective, I wanted the Driver’s defining moment to serve as the finish to the story. However, in doing so, I realized I had very easily set myself up for future stories with him. The question of whether he ever finds his ghost and what might happen up until that point was too interesting to pass up.
Enter “Lady in Flames.” We see an “older” Driver, arguably more mature and wizened from an experience point of view. We assume he’s seen it all by now. And yet he resembles his reckless self from fifteen years prior. He looks the same as when he died and he’s still motivated by his own sense of right and wrong. The trappings of his role of retrieving murdered souls afford him opportunities to meddle in the physical world just as he did in The Camaro Murders. And he still shoulders guilt for his part in Ezra Mendelssohn’s death.
You see, the Driver needs saving just as much as the people he tries to help. He’s adrift in his own sea of obsessive tendencies which keep him in constant conflict with the purpose of Abel’s Fold. He knows he cannot be whole until he finds his ghost, yet despises himself for wanting to find it. He rails against the injustice of the murder of innocent people and in some desperate way hopes he will be able to earn salvation with his good intentions.
The Driver is a character with which I could potentially grow old. I don’t know whether he’ll stick with me for that long, but someday I would like to see him find redemption of some kind. So if you’ll forgive me the pun, I’ll ask that you ride along with the Driver to see where the road takes him.
The Driver began as a device, an instrument. He was never meant to be something as flimsy as a symbol, but rather a concrete method by which I could tell the flip side of a murder mystery—The Camaro Murders. He didn’t even need a real name; he was only a shadowy figure who slipped in and out of the living and provided glimpses into what happens after a murder. His voice was no more important than the other characters’ voices.
My intent had always been to write The Camaro Murders as a multi-character, first person story. I was listening to a lot of Coheed and Cambria as well as The Prizefighter Inferno at the time, both of which tell multifaceted stories with multiple narratives and subplots. With only the lyrics to help piece together the backstory, I as the listener felt compelled to delve into the online forums to understand more about how this world worked. In turn, I wanted to achieve a similar effect with The Camaro Murders: tell a story from different perspectives as well as leave room for the reader’s inquisitive mind to piece things together.
So I started with the force that would propel the rest of the characters—the Driver. I wrote the last chapter, “The Wicked and Despair,” first. Even though it occurs early in the story from a chronology perspective, I wanted the Driver’s defining moment to serve as the finish to the story. However, in doing so, I realized I had very easily set myself up for future stories with him. The question of whether he ever finds his ghost and what might happen up until that point was too interesting to pass up.
Enter “Lady in Flames.” We see an “older” Driver, arguably more mature and wizened from an experience point of view. We assume he’s seen it all by now. And yet he resembles his reckless self from fifteen years prior. He looks the same as when he died and he’s still motivated by his own sense of right and wrong. The trappings of his role of retrieving murdered souls afford him opportunities to meddle in the physical world just as he did in The Camaro Murders. And he still shoulders guilt for his part in Ezra Mendelssohn’s death.
You see, the Driver needs saving just as much as the people he tries to help. He’s adrift in his own sea of obsessive tendencies which keep him in constant conflict with the purpose of Abel’s Fold. He knows he cannot be whole until he finds his ghost, yet despises himself for wanting to find it. He rails against the injustice of the murder of innocent people and in some desperate way hopes he will be able to earn salvation with his good intentions.
The Driver is a character with which I could potentially grow old. I don’t know whether he’ll stick with me for that long, but someday I would like to see him find redemption of some kind. So if you’ll forgive me the pun, I’ll ask that you ride along with the Driver to see where the road takes him.
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