“It was a scary story to write, but I think I’d have to pull out of the Author’s Guild if I were afraid to take risks.”
After 85 novels — 74 of them New York Times bestsellers — Sandra Brown has certainly earned the right to be fearless. But with her latest novel, Out of Nowhere — an emotional powerhouse that deftly tackles one of our current society’s biggest controversies and tragedies — Brown admits she feared the topic might alienate readers, even some of her long-standing fans.
The story kicks off with a mass shooting at a Texas county fair. Unfortunately, this isn’t an occurrence that only happens in fiction — there have been more than 200 in the U.S. this year so far — and Brown worried it might hit too close to home for some.
“It was a subject I would normally rather avoid,” she says, in an interview with BookTrib. “I strive not to editorialize about anything on any subject, especially gun control, and I didn’t want this story to be about death. So when I started to shy away from the subject … the characters, they said, ‘no, you have to share this story.’”
As expected, Brown listened.
The novel is told through the eyes of three points of view. Children’s book author Elle Portman, corporate consultant Calder Hudson — and the killer. That too, Brown says, was a bold choice. So much so, it didn’t even make it into the first draft.
“I’ve written prologues when I was 10 or 12 chapters in before,” she says. “But in this case, I’d written the entire book and then started wondering if I needed to go a bit deeper and get inside the mind of the killer. I wrote it in first person so we can really see how deranged he is.”
That’s putting it lightly. Those scenes are particularly chilling, and in addition to being the truly terrifying “big bad” in the book, the killer being on the loose — unlike in most of real life, where more than half of the mass shooters die during their attack — lends the book its page-turning tension. It also provides a perfect common goal for Elle and Calder: to catch him before he strikes again.
Of course, this is a classic Brown novel, and so while we are steeped in suspense, we are also immersed in a burgeoning love story.
“In this case, writing the romance was harder,” Brown says. “There are always things I need for the romance to work — attraction, desire, and a sense of forbiddenness of course, but I also need the characters to be in a shared space.” In this case, the more authentic path would have been to separate them as they each dealt with the aftereffects of the shooting. Brown makes it work.
Then there’s the characters themselves.
Calder and Elle may seem like unlikely companions — he’s arrogant and self-centered, she’s a single mom with eyes only for her two-year-old son — but their relationship mirrors what appears to be happening more and more in today’s tumultuous society. Bonding over trauma.
Can it sustain itself?
That’s the question Brown’s characters and readers want an answer to as well — but they’ll have to wait for it, because before any real romance can happen, there’s danger. And plenty of it.
Not that we can talk about, or even tease any of it here. In typical Brown style, Out of Nowhere is packed with enough twists and turns to give you whiplash. It’s the perfect balance to the novel’s underlying themes. She never writes with a “message” in mind, but as someone who has gone through her own year of emotional upheavals and transitions, it was important that rather than blood and guts and guns, the story focused on survival and healing.
And perhaps convey the idea that love — much like tragedy — often comes … out of nowhere.
About Sandra Brown:
Sandra Brown is the author of 73 New York Times bestsellers, including Blind Tiger, Thick As Thieves, Seeing Red, Sting and Mean Streak. Writing professionally since 1981, Brown has published over 75 novels and has upwards of 80 million copies of her books in print worldwide. Her work has been translated into 34 languages. Her episode on truTV’s “Murder by the Book” premiered the series in 2008. She appeared in 2010 on Investigation Discovery’s series, “Hardcover Mysteries.” Television movies have been made of her novels French Silk, Smoke Screen, and Ricochet.
Brown holds an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Texas Christian University, where she and her husband Michael Brown have instituted the ELF, a scholarship awarded annually. She has served as president of Mystery Writers of America, and in 2008 she was named Thriller Master, the top award given by the International Thriller Writer’s Association. Other honors include the Texas Medal of Arts Award for Literature and the Romance Writers of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2011 she went on a USO tour to Afghanistan.
