The Shadows - Alex North Audiobook

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• 
  AmeliaRidgeway
  July 14th, 2020
  

  

  Thank you!

  The Shadows - Alex North
• 
  tpstps
  July 14th, 2020
  

  

  Thank you very much!!

  The Shadows - Alex North
• 
  thebigbadpie
  July 20th, 2020
  

  

  Reading his first book. Thanks for this.

  The Shadows - Alex North
• 
  AJF
  July 21st, 2020
  

  

  Alex North, author of The Shadows

  Goodreads: Summarize your new book in a couple of sentences.

  Alex North: Twenty-five years ago, two teenage outsiders murdered a schoolmate. They had developed a fantasy world around lucid dreaming, and believed a sacrifice to the mysterious figure they both saw in their dreams would allow them to escape the real world forever. And after the killing, one of the boys disappeared and was never seen again. In the present day, Paul Adams—who knew the killers and their victim—returns to his hometown for the first time in years. Paul thinks the past is over and done with, but the nightmare is about to begin again.

  GR: What research did you do for the book?

  AN: My intention is always to do as little research as possible—the minimum I need to make the story believable—and then to wear it as lightly as possible! For this book, I was fascinated by an attempted murder that occurred in Wisconsin in 2014, where two girls attempted to kill one of their friends as a tribute to the made-up internet character of Slender Man.

  The thing I found most intriguing about the case was how, between them, the two girls had come to believe in something that was so obviously and outlandishly fictional. So I did research that case a little, although the crime in my book is very different—the murder takes place a quarter of a century ago, for example, and the killers are older and boys. I also did some reading around sleep disorders and lucid dreams, but I drew most of the latter from my own experiences, as I’ve been interested in lucid dreaming for years. (Although not to the same extent as the characters in the book, I hasten to add.)

  GR: What’s your definition of a perfect mystery?

  AN: Put as simply as possible, a perfect mystery for me has to raise a question I desperately want answered—and then not answer it for as long as possible. And when the answer is finally revealed, it somehow has to be both surprising and satisfying at the same time. That’s the skeleton of it for me (and it’s one I think applies to stories in general, rather than being unique to the crime genre). Of course, it’s also the bare minimum.

  A perfect mystery is also going to have interesting, well-realized characters and an evocative setting, and it’s going to have ideas and deeper themes going on below the surface, too. But at heart, what I look for in a mystery is the same as I look for in any story: a question that needs answering badly enough for me to keep turning the pages. Albeit with a little bit more murder…

  GR: Who are some of your all-time favorite mystery and thriller writers?

  AN: The danger of answering this is always the same: the risk of leaving somebody out! Like many teenagers, I gorged on books by Stephen King and Dean Koontz, and their works—especially the older stuff I read when I was younger—remain highly influential for me. I’ve always been a fan of horror.

  Some other favorites off the top of my head, and in no order whatsoever, would be Mo Hayder, John Connolly, Sarah Pinborough, Thomas H. Cook, Belinda Bauer, and Tim Willocks. But it’s so hard to narrow it down. And the genre is in such good shape right now that I could probably name a hundred other authors producing great work who will become favorites in the future.

  GR: What are some new mysteries you’ve been enjoying and recommending to friends?

  AN: I’ve found it hard to concentrate during the last few months, and so reading has been difficult. But I’ve been reading a fair bit of nonfiction, and also short stories (not mystery, for example, but I loved Ted Chiang’s science fiction collection Exhalation).

  In terms of new mysteries, there are three I’ve read recently that I really loved. Alex Pavesi’s upcoming novel The Eighth Detective is an ingenious, metafictional love letter to detective fiction: seven apparently separate stories interwoven with an eighth that gradually draws them together into a whole. I haven’t read anything as original or compelling for quite some time, and I didn’t see the ending coming at all.

  I also loved C.J. Tudor’s The Other People, which, after a gripping opening, spins off into a tale of guilt and revenge that carefully straddles the real and the supernatural. I particularly loved the setting here: the liminal world of endless nighttime motorways and service stations. And finally, the latest entry in Steve Cavanagh’s superb Eddie Flynn series, Fifty-Fifty, which begins with two sisters calling the police to report the same murder, each accusing the other of the crime. As a callback to my answer about the perfect mystery, each of these books asked a question I really needed an answer to as I was reading—and in each case, I totally loved both the journey and the destination.

  GR: For someone who hasn’t read a mystery in a while, what’s a good book to lure them back to the genre?

  AN: This is an almost impossible question to answer! One difficulty is that the crime and mystery genre is such a broad church in terms of style, substance, and subject matter that I find it very hard to pick a single work—because how could one book hope to represent a genre that’s capable of doing so many different things?

  And I’m also reluctant to lure anybody anywhere: People should read whatever they enjoy, and if someone hasn’t read a crime novel for a while then I would assume that’s by choice, and I suspect handing them any one book isn’t going to bring them back to the path!

  But if I were forced, I would probably suggest something by Thomas H. Cook. His work is beautifully written and elegantly structured, each book constructed like clockwork—from individual sentences to paragraphs and chapters, and to the plot as a whole. They’re master classes in misdirection. Breakheart Hill, The Interrogation, and Red Leaves are all masterpieces in my eyes.

  GR: What’s your biggest fear?

  AN: I don’t really get scared very easily—I’ve not been properly frightened by a film or a book since I was a child—and I don’t have any particular phobias. But there was an incident in my early 20s when I got caught in a current in the sea and nearly drowned, and even the thought of swimming gives me flashbacks to that. I won’t even go in a pool.

  And of course—an obvious answer, but true—ever since the birth of my son, my biggest fear has been of something bad happening to him. With those two things in mind, it’s fair to say that taking him to swimming lessons was a particularly traumatic experience for me.

  The Shadows - Alex North
• 
  jollyrotter
  July 26th, 2020
  

  

  Thanks for sharing

  The Shadows - Alex North
• 
  Cbg1331
  July 21st, 2023
  

  Seed please.

  The Shadows - Alex North
• 
  hi_im_bored
  September 20th, 2025
  

  reseed please

  The Shadows - Alex North

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