The Amazon Charts bestselling author of Unspeakable Things and Bloodline explores the darkness at the heart of the rural Midwest in a novel inspired by a chilling true crime.
We chat with author Jess Lourey about her latest book release, Litani, along with its inspiration and challenges, as well as writing and book recommendations!
Hi, Jess! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
For sure! I’m a cross-genre writer, a teacher, and a native Midwesterner with the overdeveloped guilt muscle to prove it. My first book, May Day, came out in 2006. It’s a romcom mystery with a very dark inspiration, which I speak about in my TEDx Talk. I went on to write eleven more books in that series as well as two books in a thriller series, a nonfiction how-to write book, the first in a young adult trilogy, a magical realism novel, and several true-crime inspired suspense novels, including the Edgar-nominated, Anthony-winning Unspeakable Things, and Litani, which is out October 19.
As the year draws to a close, how has 2021 been for you?
Oof—save us from living in interesting times, right? On the one hand, I’m healthy as are those I love, and I’ve been able to get a lot of writing done. On the other, 2021 continued the tradition started by 2020 of me needing to address my part in perpetuatng toxic systems in my family, community, and country. It’s overdue, but it’s also hard, unsettling work.
When did you first discover your love for writing?
I received 423 rejections before I landed my first agent. Not very good odds, but I’m running with them. My love for writing—and so my willingness to push through this amount of rejection—started when I was six. I wrote this Minnesota haiku for my grandpa:
Grandpas are full of love
Grandpas are full of tickles
But grandpas are especially full of pickles.
My family loved it. My poetry skills have not evolved since that day, but the love of writing and the way it could affect people stuck with me.
Quick lightning round! Tell us the first book you ever remember reading, the one that made you want to become an author, and one that you can’t stop thinking about!
My parents did a great job encouraging reading at a young age, and they let me read whatever I could get my hands on. The first book to stand out for me was actually a collection of short stories, Stephen King’s Night Shift. The stories were terrifying, but more visceral was how they made me feel like I was there, inside the book, as I read.
Your new novel, Litani, is out October 19th 2021! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
1980s Satanic Panic. Terrifying. Hopeful.
What can readers expect?
The story follows Frankie Jubilee, whose dear father has died suddenly and who’s forced to move from LA to tiny Litani, Minnesota, to live with a county prosecutor mom she barely knows. There, to fit in, she’s asked by the other kids to play something called The Game. She soon discovers that the entire town is built on a web of deception, and that once you play The Game, you’re never the same again.
Where did the inspiration for Litani come from?
Like Unspeakable Things and Bloodline, Litani was inspired by a chilling Midwestern true crime. Specifically, in the mid-‘80s, Satanic Panic was sweeping the U.S. It was the fear that children were being corrupted by Satan, and by people who worshipped Satan. The result was TV shows and music being censored or banned and parents, teachers, and daycare providers being arrested for allegedly harming the children in their care in the name of Satan.
One of the most extreme and well-known examples of what would come to be called the Satanic Panic happened in tiny Jordan, Minnesota, in 1983-84. There, in a town with a population of only a few thousand people, 24 adults were accused of sexually abusing dozens of children.
These 1980s “witch hunts” have been attributed to a perfect storm of sociological factors (women entering the workforce and the subsequent rise of daycare facilities, which led to fears about children being raised by strangers; a feminist and a conservative outcry over pornography moving from the theater to the home thanks to the growing popularity of VCRs; Freud’s theory of repressed memories experiencing a renaissance; and a judicial “tough on crime” approach, a backlash to the supposed lawlessness of the 60s and 70s) and civic expediency (largely at the hands of politically ambitious prosecutors). This storm was stoked by unscrupulous or at times improperly trained psychologists, police officers, and attorneys. The result all across the nation was families no longer trusting one another, neighbors turning on neighbors, and communities destroyed.
As a sociologist, I find this dark chapter in American history both fascinating and heartbreaking. But as a writer, and as a woman who grew up in a home and a community where the unspeakable regularly happened, I’m struck by the voices notably missing from the witch hunt narrative: the children who lived through this terrifying time.
Theirs is the story that matters to me, and the one I aim to tell in Litani.
Can you tell us a bit about the challenges you faced while writing and how you were able to overcome them?
My primary challenge was in respecting the privacy of the children as well as the adults who were wrongfully accused, which is why I did enough research into the outlines of the case to get a picture of what happened but not enough that I knew the specifics of the individuals involved. The end result is fictional characters experiencing true events.
Were there any favourite moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
Frankie Jubilee is an incredible girl—an artist, a budding botanist, curious, and kind—and while it was difficult to send her into the world of Litani, it felt like she lit up every page she was on. There’s also two secondary characters who I grew to love, but I can’t reveal their names without giving awa a plot twist.
What’s the best and the worst writing advice you have received?
The worst writing advice I’ve ever received is anything that starts with “this is how you write a book…” There’s no one way to write, only tricks and tools we can share with one another that may work for a project or may not. The best writing advice I ever got was “Never give up. Never surrender.” I might have gotten that advice from Galaxy Quest. J For more extended good advice, I’ve found that Jessica Brody’s Save the Cat Writes a Novel is an effective source for creating structure in any project, and these days, structure feels like what I need the most.
What’s next for you?
The world of writing is a year ahead of the world of publishing, so while my next book comes out any day now, I just turned in the book that’ll come out next August. It’s tentatively titled The Quarry Girls, and it’s true-crime-inspired fiction about that time in the ‘70s when there were multiple serial killers operating in my hometown. The next book I’m going to try writing is a passion project completely outside of my wheelhouse—a feminist retelling of the Medusa myth. I don’t have a publisher for it, but it’s been calling to me for a while, so I’m going to take a detour to write it before returning to my first love: crime fiction.
Lastly, do you have any book recommendations for our readers?
Yes! I recently read and loved Rachel Howzell Hall’s These Toxic Things, S.A. Cosby’s Razorblade Tears, Lori Rader Day’s Death at Greenway, and for a nonfiction twist, Alice Miller’s The Body Never Lies.
I’m reading Litani right now, 35% in, after having read, in order, Unspeakable Things, Bloodlines (which was extraordinarily creepy), and The Quarry Girls. They were all tense, thought-provoking novels. To be honest, The Quarry Girls should’ve been named Unspeakable Things. While I don’t yet know what “The Game” is, I’m anxious (and a little scared) to find out.