Douglas Preston may be most well-known for his bestselling fiction — both his solo projects and the series he co-writes with Lincoln Child — but the prolific author is also a renowned journalist and established nonfiction writer.
With his latest book release, Preston introduces readers to this side of his writing, pulling together 13 of his most popular essays and articles in a collection called The Lost Tomb.
“What I was looking for was the dark stories,” he says, in an exclusive interview with BookTrib. “Stories of murder, mass death, cannibalism, unsolved mysteries, and serial killers. I’m fascinated with the nature of evil.
“Goodness, passion, and empathy are all very easy to explain,” he adds. “They’re simple. There’s no mystery about it. But when you deal with a serial killer, or a mass murder, etc, there’s a mystery there — we want to know…why? We want to try and understand the fundamental themes of evil.”
This collection doesn’t disappoint, giving readers delicious insight into some of the most gruesome — or downright terrifying — encounters Preston has had throughout his distinguished career. One of the most significant is the story of “The Monster of Florence,” an investigation into a serial killer that ended up getting Preston and Italian journalist Mario Spezi arrested, and Preston temporarily banned from Italy.
“I didn’t seek out to confront the police,” he says. “I won’t see the investigation was corrupt, but the Monster of Florence case had been terribly derailed. The police had a crazy theory about the killings being part of some satanic cult. Unfortunately, the case is still unresolved, though God knows it may be resurrected by an ambitious prosecutor some day.”
As with all of the unsolved mysteries in the book, Preston will keep his eye out for any updates about the Monster of Florence, though he doesn’t anticipate publishing another collection of his non-fiction stories anytime in the near future. He didn’t want these essays to be forgotten, but he also saw the book as a way to introduce fans of his fiction to his non-fiction work and show the connection between his writing forms.
Many of Preston’s journalistic endeavors have provided the inspiration for a good chunk of his fiction — Dead Mountain and Riptide come quickly to mind.
“There is a long history of fiction authors turning nonfiction into fiction,” he says. “Even Shakespeare based a lot of his stories on allegedly nonfiction things. Although writing fiction and nonfiction are different, the same storytelling principles apply. They’re both difficult, but in nonfiction, the facts have to be absolutely accurate. In fiction … there are infinite possibilities.”
Preston is busy exploring some of those possibilities with his upcoming projects. He and Child have turned in their latest Pendergast novel, which makes up the third book in a thrilling trilogy, and Preston admits he is enthusiastic about his contribution to a collaborative literary experimental book called Fourteen Days. The book, scheduled for release in early February, is set in the early days of the COVID lockdowns, and each of the characters has been secretly written by a different and well-known author, including Margaret Atwood, Celeste Ng, Nora Roberts, Diana Gabaldon, R.L. Stine, and dozens more.
“It’s a truly unusual and gripping literary experiment,” he says. “It’s like nothing that has been done before, and the advance reviews are great. People are saying it’s unputdownable.”
A welcome addition to Preston’s truly gripping and impressive body of work.
About Douglas Preston:
Douglas Preston has published 36 books of both nonfiction and fiction, of which 29 have been New York Times bestsellers. He is the co-author, with Lincoln Child, of the Pendergast series of thrillers. He writes about archaeology and anthropology for the New Yorker Magazine, and he worked as an editor at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and taught nonfiction writing at Princeton University. He currently serves as President of the Authors Guild, the nation’s oldest and largest association of authors and journalists.
(Photo Credit: Deborah Feingold)
