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“Writing about the Dead and Bringing Them Back to Life,” by Tom Spanbauer as Guest Blogger for Powell’s Books, April 10, 2014

10 Apr 2014|

In my novel, In the City of Shy Hunters, there were so many dead friends to write about. There’s a line in Shy Hunters: “It’s the responsibility of the survivor to tell the story.” As I was writing the book, I felt the wisdom of that line very keenly. And since I was the one responsible, I had to get the story right. In order to get the story right, I had to go back to the Manhattan of the ‘80s and tell everything I knew that was true about those days, everything that was true about that place. I really became obsessed by it. For many people, the story of In the City of Shy Hunters is just too harsh and too real. There is so much death and it doesn’t let up. But that’s the way it was for me. Everyone was dying and I knew I was sick and nowhere could I find redemption. In many of my books, I go to nature to soften the blows of the hard story I’m telling. But in Manhattan, there was no nature. Even Central Park was designer nature. So there was no respite. The widespread affliction, the calamity, wasn’t just death. The epidemic was also the fear of death. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. That’s what a plague is.

To read the entire blog, go to Powell’s Books.