Guest Post: John Milliken Thompson, Author of The Reservoir

Today I’m excited to welcome John Milliken Thompson, author of The Reservoir! Since learning about this book at BEA (Book Expo America) I’ve been shouting about it from the rooftops.  It has everything I love in a thriller, plus it’s set in Virginia. How could I not love it? Anyway, I digress! Without further ado, please welcome John!

 Thanks for inviting me to write a guest post. I’ve noticed that you have a lot of horror fans reading your blog. While my new novel, THE RESERVOIR, couldn’t be called horror, there are elements of the gothic and the creepy about it. The story starts with the discovery of the body in Richmond’s old reservoir in 1885; the body is that of a pregnant young woman. And so a mystery begins, a chase ensues, and the story builds to a sensational trial—it’s all based a true case. The novel crosses several genres—historical, Southern, literary, mystery. Not horror, but I bring it up because I have to admit a weakness for the genre and for being influenced by that early master of the macabre and inventor of the modern detective story, Edgar Allan Poe.

I spent quite a bit time in Richmond researching THE RESERVOIR, and I discovered that Poe lived about a third of his life there, more time than anywhere else. Though he died 36 years before the events of my novel took place, I knew I was going to have to work him into the story. I’ve long felt a spiritual kinship with the great writer, having been born on his birthday—his sesquicentennial to be exact. And who doesn’t love those weird, intense, hypnotic poems and stories—“The Raven,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Cask of Amontillado.” I started digging into Poe’s life and work, and ended up writing an article about the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond for the Washington Post.

Poe’s strange relationship with his cousin, whom he married when she was 13 and he 27, was especially fascinating, and I thought I might try to write a novel from her point of view. She died at age 24, two years before his own mysterious death. But that was no problem; in fact, it seemed perfect—I’d have her haunting his consciousness, a ghostly Annabel Lee, and so the story could remain first person all the way up to and even beyond Poe’s death. Yes, I was already thinking of my next novel while writing THE RESERVOIR—most writers have lists of books they probably won’t ever get to. The book I’d more or less envisioned came out not long ago: The Raven’s Bride, by Lenore Hart. It happens. Ideas aren’t your own unless you get there first.

But I did work Poe into THE RESERVOIR. Tommie, the young suspect—who, by the way, was in love his cousin, the victim—reads Poe and is even haunted by a line of his poetry. Poe wrote that the death of a young woman is the most fit subject for poetry, and you can certainly see how he was evermore using that subject in his writing. In his words (from his essay “The Philosophy of Composition” analyzing “The Raven”): “The death, then, of a beautiful woman, is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world—and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.”

Poe was known as a harsh critic, but I would love to take my novel back in time for a review from the master.

John Milliken Thompson is the author of America’s Historic Trails and Wildlands of the Upper South, and coauthor of The National Geographic Almanac of American History. His articles have appeared in Smithsonian, Washington Post, Islands,and other publications, and his short stories have been published in Louisiana Literature, South Dakota Review, and many other literary journals. He has lived in the South all his life. This is his first novel.