My Novel Purgatory Came to Me in a Dream

So, how much of Purgatory is real?

This may be a dangerous question to ask me.

Because the answer is: way more of it than you probably think.

Purgatory actually started with a dream, which happens to me more often than is probably convenient for a working writer.

This one was different.

I swear I dreamed the first two chapters like I was watching an episode of some Netflix Appalachian noir mystery.

There was a woman who had woken up in hell.

She had lost her children. She had survived when they didn’t. She was trying to figure out how you start a life over after something like that.

I could hear her internal monologue. I could see her looking through photographs of everything she’d lost. I knew she’d worked for BCI.

And I knew the place was called Purgatory.

Seeley was there, too.

Right there in the kitchen, making pancakes, shirtless in jeans.

I knew exactly who he was the moment I saw him.

And then the dream stopped.

Apparently my subconscious only ordered the pilot and expected me to write the rest myself.

Very inconvenient.

Especially since I was supposed to be working on the next Goode Grace and Camelot, West Virginia books.

But this story would not leave me alone.

And once I started figuring out what happened after my imaginary television episode ended, something else happened.

My real life started creeping into Purgatory County.

That shouldn’t have surprised me. I’ve spent a lot of years reporting crime in southern Ohio, and there have been many days when I’ve looked at what was happening and thought, Nobody would believe this if I put it in a novel.

There was one particular morning in Pike County when two parolees and one very careless mother managed, in the space of about an hour, to give law enforcement a stolen car, a robbery, two police chases and a toddler firing a gun inside Walmart.

One of the parolees had gotten out of the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility that morning.

A friend of mine worked there.

The second chase got so crazy it ended up on On Patrol: Live.

I messaged my publisher:

Well, this is going in a book.

I also remember thinking:

This place is the Wild Wild West.

For the record, those incidents had absolutely nothing to do with each other.

I’m a reporter. I know that.

Unfortunately, I’m also a novelist.

And the novelist immediately asks:

But what if they did?

That’s where trouble starts.

The Rhoden murders were part of the landscape in my head, too. I’ve covered some of the hearings connected to that case, and at one point I was offered the chance to cover the whole thing for a regional news organization.

Purgatory isn’t the Rhoden case.

But the idea of one enormous crime hanging over a little Appalachian county, spawning rumors and theories and questions that never quite go away?

Oh, yes.

That stayed with me.

So did the opioid crisis.

So did the fight over rehab and recovery housing.

I’ve reported the legitimate problems caused by bad operators and what happens when facilities swallow up desperately needed rental housing or bring people with tremendous needs into communities that don’t have the resources to handle them.

I understand why people say, Shut them down.

But then the annoying writer/reporter part of my brain asks the next question.

Okay. You shut them down. Where does everybody go?

The addiction doesn’t disappear.

The criminal record doesn’t disappear.

The housing problem doesn’t disappear.

The people don’t disappear.

Somebody gets whatever happens next.

Human trafficking found its way into that world for much the same reason. The more I’ve learned about trafficking, the more I’ve realized that it often doesn’t look anything like the version people expect. The smooth operators know where vulnerable people are. They know how to make themselves look useful. They know how to offer exactly what somebody thinks they need.

Then there was local government.

Indicted officials. People sitting on paid leave. Leadership vacuums. Redevelopment. Huge amounts of money potentially coming into communities that desperately need investment.

And that fascinating southern Ohio contradiction:

We have spent decades cleaning up what the nuclear industry left behind.

Now we’re talking about bringing nuclear back.

Jobs matter.

So does what gets left behind.

And whenever a lot of money starts moving through a poor county, the mystery writer in me immediately wants to know who’s getting a piece of it.

That’s how I ended up writing this about my fictional county:

“Purgatory County was mostly forest, mostly poor, and just radioactive enough to keep things interesting. They built a uranium enrichment plant here in the fifties, shut it down in the nineties, and had been trying to clean up the mess ever since. Now there was talk of bringing nuclear back, which felt about right for a place like this.”

If you know Pike County, you probably smiled.

Purgatory actually inherited Pike County’s geographical layout.

Coincidentally, it even has the same number of towns.

But crime reports weren’t the only things I stole from real life.

Some of the best parts came from my family.

Mammaw B is a tribute to my late Aunt Joyce, who was one tough lady.

She taught me to love Star Trek, Dark Shadows and scary movies.

She was an amazing cook who made endless pies and pretty much assigned everyone in the family a favorite dish.

But Lord help the restaurant that served Aunt Joyce something she didn’t like.

She could send food back anywhere.

“It ain’t fit to eat.”

That was her mantra.

Mammaw B got a lot of Aunt Joyce’s spirit.

Her school-bus-driving past came from somebody else entirely, because that’s how characters tend to work in my head. I steal a personality from here, a story from there, something somebody yelled across a newsroom 25 years ago, and eventually I’ve built a person.

Even Attie’s name is real.

There was a woman named Attie Ginn who lived next door to my Mammaw.

Except I didn’t know her name was Attie.

My entire life, I thought it was Addie.

Mammaw didn’t allow smoking anywhere near her house, so Mommy and Aunt Joyce used to go next door to Attie’s porch to smoke.

After Aunt Joyce died, I got a bunch of old photographs. One was a picture of her and Attie from the 1960s.

Aunt Joyce had written the name on the back:

Attie Ginn.

I stared at it.

Attie?

I’d heard this woman’s name wrong my entire life.

My second thought was:

That’s a great name.

Which is why Sheriff Attie Ginn gets irritated when people call her Addie.

It’s Attie.

I have absolutely no business criticizing those people.

Then there’s the magic.

There isn’t a lot of it in Purgatory. It’s more magical realism, that place where you aren’t always quite sure what happened or why.

That’s very Appalachian to me.

I grew up in a world where you could believe completely in the Bible and also believe in ghosts, signs, dreams and people coming back to see you before they leave.

Nobody thought those things contradicted each other.

When I was four years old, I woke up one night and saw a woman sitting on the edge of my bed, stroking my hair.

Then she was gone.

I called for Mom.

She told me I’d been dreaming.

And then someone knocked on the door.

We didn’t have a telephone. We were living in a little rundown shotgun house just down the street from Mammaw.

The person at the door had come to tell Mom that her beloved Aunt Melissa had died.

Years later, Mom told me that when she was five, she woke up on Christmas Day and saw her grandmother sitting on the edge of her bed smiling at her.

Then she disappeared.

Soon afterward, somebody came to tell the family her grandmother had died.

Aunt Melissa was Mom’s favorite aunt.

So, in our family, it made perfect sense that she came to see me the same way.

That story became part of little Dreama Avalon in my Camelot books.

And that way of looking at the world followed me into Purgatory.

Which brings me to one of my favorite things about Seeley King.

Besides the fact that my subconscious introduced him shirtless while making pancakes.

Seeley is a tech genius.

He’s also got that particular kind of hillbilly ingenuity where you hand somebody a seemingly impossible problem and they disappear into a garage and come back with something that works.

And I love putting that right next to magic.

Because what’s magic?

Something impossible?

Something we don’t understand yet?

Something your grandmother knew perfectly well was real even if she couldn’t prove it?

Longtime readers will also find some Easter eggs connecting Purgatory with my other books.

I like to say:

Halfway between Camelot, West Virginia and Himmel, Ohio is Purgatory.

It’s actually geographically true in my head.

Camelot is in southern West Virginia.

Himmel is in northwest Ohio.

Purgatory falls right between them in Appalachian Ohio.

It’s stylistically true, too.

And, since Himmel happens to mean heaven in German, the whole thing amuses me far more than it probably should.

I don’t think people outside this region always realize how many different Ohios there are.

There’s Midwest farm country.

There are the old industrial areas.

There are cities like Columbus ringed with wealthy suburbs.

And then there’s Appalachian Ohio.

That’s the Ohio I wanted in this book.

Not as a punchline.

Not as poverty porn.

Not as a collection of ignorant hillbilly stereotypes.

I wanted the place I know.

Funny. Troubled. Resourceful. Infuriating. Beautiful. Occasionally completely insane.

I wanted people from here to recognize it and feel like I got it right.

And somewhere along the way I realized why Purgatory had shoved aside the books I was supposed to be writing.

It’s probably the most personal book I’ve ever written, even though almost none of Attie’s actual life is mine.

Her dark humor is definitely mine.

Her internal GET IT TOGETHER speeches?

Oh, yeah. That’s me.

But more than anything, this book is full of things I’ve reported, people I’ve loved, stories I’ve been told, things I’ve wondered about and things I grew up believing.

It is the most real, most me thing I’ve ever written.

It’s very true.

And the stuff that isn’t true should be.

Purgatory is on sale now. Click here.