It is interesting that both Nelson and his character are unsure of what to do—how to react to the pandemic. Back in March of 2020 it was all new in terms of how to confront the disease, whether it was going to be short term and over in six months or long term and be with us for a long time. Some of the characters don’t seem to care—and that’s still true. …
The world is portrayed as gray, as a world after the apocalypse—stores closed, streets empty of cars and people. All that adds to the fact that the protagonist works the night shift. …
As a side note, Raymer adds, “Writing about the pandemic while it is going on was a bold challenge.” For those interested, I described this challenge a while back in “Why I wrote a novel about COVID-19”.
The first chapter of my novel Man in the Middle opens a year ago today.
It’s an odd anniversary to observe, the setting of a book. I didn’t start writing it a year ago today. That came later, after a bit of soul-searching if I really wanted to write a novel about the pandemic during the pandemic.
In some ways, though, I did start writing the novel a year ago. I began keeping a daily diary last March when it grew apparent that the spread of COVID-19 was going to be more than a particularly nasty flu season. The first entry on March 14 is a little over a week before the book’s time-frame. I set the novel’s opening chapter ten days later, March 24, to coincide with the timing of California’s statewide order to lockdown and shelter-in-place. I was tempted to open the book earlier, as my entries on the 21 and 22 both demonstrate the alarm rising within me, as the hard realities of the pandemic started to loom.
The early diary entries show me obsessing over the peculiarities of the then-present moment. Those were days of keeping John Hopkins University COVID-19 map open in a persistent browser tab, so I could check it every few hours. The red dots across the forty-eight contiguous states gave the effect of an America with a case of chicken pox; later I would call it a “creeping horror.” The buses running across San Francisco were suddenly empty, and in a few days most lines weren’t running at all. Downtown San Francisco businesses boarded up their windows, even the storied hotels, which normally operated with doors open twenty-four hours a day. After a trip to Costco for supplies, and witnessing panic-buying first-hand, me and several other beleaguered shoppers took the elevator down to the parking lot. A woman in the back began singing “There’s no way out of here.” At least people still had a sense of humor.
Dog running down a near-empty Geary St., San Francisco on March 17, 2020. I lived near the intersection the dog is approaching. Normally the traffic would be bumper-to-bumper. In a few days, the windows would be boarded up and the streets even more deserted.
During this time period, I jogged down the center line of Montgomery Street at 4:30pm on a Thursday—the heart of San Francisco’s Financial District, normally thronged with stockbrokers and bankers, suddenly looking like the set for a zombie movie. I also recorded having an on-again-off-again cough and running nose, which left me reeling between paranoia and chiding myself for being paranoid.
The nucleus of Man in the Middle is buried in my diary entry for March 22: “It would be funny if we emerge from our shelter-in-place hibernation four months from now and discover the rich and powerful have rewritten all the rules to further favor themselves.” (Four months from now. Ha.)
So many failures of those early weeks have been tossed down the collective memory hole. Multiple times I noted news reports of government officials from both sides of the aisle claiming broad martial law powers during a pandemic. Social network users were suggesting it was time for “appropriate” shaming of people for wearing masks—you read that right—while the media sought to pretend it never downplayed the coronavirus over the flu, or ever referred to COVID-19 by the city it was first detected in.
Months after the first vaccine was greenlighted for the general population, and after a year of lockdowns, fervent hand-washing, and face masks, COVID-19 numbers are still ticking the wrong direction. Or, they’re not. Maybe there is no way out of here.
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Perhaps the solution is to just skip ahead and set everything in 2025, safely away from the horror that is this year …
In 20 years or so, this point will probably be moot. By then, we’ll be ready to curl up with an escapist historical novel set in 2020; we’ll have gotten enough social distance from masks and lockdowns and toilet paper shortages.
My perspective on all this is colored by the fact that I wrote a novel set during 2020, and it centers around the pandemic and quarantines that have affected us all.
To clarify the chronology, I started writing the book in June (or so) and published it last month. Man in the Middle is set in the first week of California’s shelter-in-place, and although March was not so long ago, paging through my diary entries of those early weeks while preparing the novel reminded me just how otherworldly the world became overnight.
That’s a key point about the book’s development: I started keeping a diary when the pandemic surged in America. For the first few months, I wrote daily, almost religiously, dumping my despair and puzzlement onto the page. When the world opened up and grew less tense, I thumbed back through my notebook and discovered a voice I did not quite know. It was me, but it was not a me I easily recognized.
Certainly I harbored many reservations before I set out to write the first draft. Was the world to be swamped with a flood of coronavirus thrillers? What if a cure is discovered tomorrow? One writer friend warned me off the project entirely. From other people, there’s been a split-brain response: On one hand, writing a book now about the pandemic is “obviously” a commercial money-grab on my part, right? On the other hand, the market for such a book has a tight, closing window, once the vaccines arrive, eh? It’s one of those social situations where they think I’m not seeing the obvious, when in fact I’d gone down those thought-paths several dozen times.
I don’t write fiction to make money. Fiction is freeing for me. No one tells me what to write or how to write it. I set my deadlines. I make my own challenges. I also happen to believe there are readers in this world who, once they’re exposed to my writing, will enjoy it as well. That, more than anything, motivates me to keep writing.
Laskowski relates a comment from her agent:
“If something is set this year and is about the quarantine experience, sort of like a locked-room crime, maybe,” she says. “But a medical thriller about covid? Nope.”
A medical thriller is exactly the kind of novel I told myself I would not write: The beautiful epidemiologist racing the clock to develop a cure; a cold-hearted technocracy blocking her progress at every turn; and her unconscious child in a hospital isolation unit hooked up to a respirator. But the reason not to write a medical thriller about coronavirus is not because we’re living through it—it’s because that thriller has been written many times over, only with different strains of disease of different origin, with different symptoms and different cures.
While I didn’t write a locked-room crime book, I knew early on I wanted it to be a novel of isolation and suspense. The year that is 2020 has been a year of unthinkables. It is also a year hosting a major, tumultuous presidential election set against a backdrop of accusations of foreign and domestic intrigue. Swirled together, these ingredients sent me back to the great political and conspiracy films of my youth (Three Days of the Condor, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 12 Monkeys). In January, when COVID-19 was a curiosity mentioned occasionally in the news, I was reading Orwell’s war diaries, which also left a strong impression upon me. In March, when the shelter-in-place orders came down, I reread Camus’ The Plague with fresh eyes and a fresh appreciation.
Out of all this arable soil grew a claustrophobic, paranoid book about an isolated security guard who can’t tell if he’s detaching ever-so-gradually from reality. Podcasts, experts, and so-called experts fill his ears with contradictory takes on the world’s sudden course correction. That voice from my diary was now his.
Why wouldn’t I write that book? Whether or not Man in the Middle succeeds on its merits, I’ll let the readers decide. But how could I just set this inspiration aside and write about any year except 2020?
To return to the original question, no, I don’t believe people should have to read about the pandemic right now. I understand why anyone who reaches for a book today would want to read about any subject other than pandemics. Subconsciously, though, the question naturally bleeds into the territory of, Should writers be writing about the pandemic now?
As an answer, consider re-framing the original question as “We’re living through the Great Depression. Must we read about it, too?”
Imagine if the writers of The Grapes of Wrath, The Day of the Locust, The Road to Wigan Pier, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, John Dos Passos with his U.S.A. trilogy—and more—decided not to write about the worldwide economic collapse because people were living through it, so why would they want to read about it? For many of those authors ninety years ago, they viewed writing about the Great Depression as a responsibility.
Man in the Middle isn’t an act of personal responsibility, but I did write it for good reasons, even if they’re only my reasons.
(Probably unnecessary disclosure: Tara Laskowski is an editor for Smokelong Quarterly, which published one of my stories years ago. I don’t know if she was an editor there at that time.)
A quick note to announce that my latest novel, Man in the Middle, is now available!
This novel of suspense follows a security guard who, during the first week of the pandemic lock-down, begins to see things he suspect he’s not meant to see: Men working underground on Internet data lines in the dead of night. Neighborhood patrols enforcing the shelter-in-place order. And a conspiracy to steal millions of dollars in BitCoin.
Meanwhile, he is left to wonder if he’s contracted COVID-19, and whether he will have to submit himself to hospital quarantine.
Man in the Middle is now available in Kindle and paperback editions. Kindle Unlimited subscribers can read it free. The Kindle edition is still on sale for 99¢, but not for long, so get it now.
Long answer: As mentioned briefly in my interview with GSMC Reading podcast, I do have plans for a fourth book in the Bridge Daughter series.
The question has been posed a few times to me, and so I thought I would answer it here.
I hate pre-announcing books, especially a book I’ve not started, but I do have a tentative outline for a fourth novel that looks, to my eye, a solid addition to the series.
What I don’t have is a solid time frame when it will be available, or for that matter, when I’ll start working on it. It’s not that I don’t have interest in writing it—quite the opposite—but I’ve been eager to develop other projects that I’ve grown excited about (Man in the Middle, my next book), and I wanted to strike while the iron was hot.
If you’ve not caught up on the Bridge Daughter series, there’s no time like the present to start. The third book in the series, Stranger Son, was released earlier this year. And if you’re looking for the full series up to now, the first three books of the Bridge Daughter Cycle are now available in a Kindle box set edition.
