WILL IT GO ROUND IN CIRCLES?

I spent most of this Saturday editing a massive horror novel my brilliantly talented husband has written, thus bringing up the subject of professional jealousy in our household. And I'd say it was rampant.

 

I've been Bruce's first editor from the time we met. He, on the other hand, seldom reads anything I have written. By myself, that is. Often we write together, which means mainly we plot together and he does the actual writing, though not always. 

 

Frankly, I hate to write. I just happen to love what I have written, and often it comes out of the blue anyway and it's like reading it for the first time. The advantage to being Bruce's first editor is that I get to read his stuff before anyone else does. The disadvantage is, when I'm editing Bruce's book, I'm not writing my own.

 

You'd think that professional jealousy would not rear its ugly head between two people as crazy about each other as we are, but it's plagued us from the beginning. We often had to work in different fields just to avoid it. And when we do work together, there's always the question of who wrote what and which one of us came up with what idea. It gets pretty ridiculous sometimes, since Bruce has no memory for that sort of thing at all and I remember every little detail. 

 

Our writing is actually nothing alike, though I can do a pretty fair imitation of Bruce's style and have on occasion. But we both grew up on sci-fi and mystery stories, Shirley Jackson, and Alfred Hitchcock films, so we have a lot in common as far as our pop culture vocabulary goes. Nowdays it's easy to tell the books we own apart; Bruce likes to read male writers and fiction, and I'll read anything except a romance novel.

 

I've always been Bruce's biggest fan. I've often wished he were mine. That spot is taken by my daughter Akisha, an enormous April booster and someone who has read my screenplays and attempts at novels over the years. As it is she and I often have exactly the same book, we like the same things as far as reading goes, and I trust her implicitly.

 

Bruce still doesn't read my writing, exactly the way Richard Matthews in my book, LIE LIKE A WOMAN, does not read the novels Bree, his wife, writes. You could say it was art imitating life...

 

LIE LIKE A WOMAN: A Bree and Richard Matthews mystery 

 

Review of THE AUCTIONEER by Joan Sampson

The Auctioneer by Joan Samson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

THE AUCTIONEER is a strange, subtle, beautifully written book about how evil comes slowly and insidiously to the small New England farming town of Harlowe in the form of Perly Dunsmore, a charismatic, handsome middle age traveler who has taken the town to his bosom, declaring it the epitome of old-fashioned values and morals.

The main couple, Mim and John Moore, are hard working farmers with a generations old farm that both of them cherish. They live with John's elderly crippled mother and their five year old golden locked daughter Hildie--though they live simply and work endlessly, they are happy. Without warning Perly, along with the local sheriff Bob Gore, come by to pick up an item for their fundraising auction one Thursday afternoon. Mim and John give gladly, and are surprised when Perly refunds them part of the money he made selling their object. But soon Perly and the new "deputies" are coming every Thursday to collect, and the objects the Moores are forced to relinquish become more and more necessary and precious, and in an unpredictable twist John is driven by the final "auction" to either desert his ancestor's homeland or take a violent stand.

Writing in the best Shirley Jackson tradition, that is, that evil lurks just behind a neighborly smile, Joan Sampson wrote this book in the seventies when urban dwellers in the Northwest were rushing the farmlands, trying to buy a piece of simplicity as a counterpoint to their crime-ridden cities. This book reminds me of THE CHILD BUYER, without its sardonic slant. In its own way it is a tale of horror though the horror exists in the human soul.

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