We chat with debut author Pat Kelly about Rifle Season, which follows a game hunter who is in a race against time to save his family from the most dangerous predator on earth—other people—in this high-stakes thriller in the vein of Jack Carr and Peter Heller.
Hi, Pat! Can you describe Rifle Season in five words?
Revenge is an icy bitch.
What can readers expect?
A granular, ballistic ride through the wilds of Western Colorado. Or put another way, a DIY guide to finding out what you’re made of when survival odds are zilch.
Where did the inspiration for Rifle Season come from?
My rural Colorado home of 29 years and the annual October invasion of armed strangers looking to fill freezers with elk meat and adorn their dens with racks. A ritual defined by scads of firearm-challenged greenhorns running around with loaded rifles struck me as the ideal venue to settle a score and get away clean.
Were there any moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
Professional killers being surprised by the guts and resilience of the amateur. The looks I imagined on their dying faces made me very emotional in a good way.
Did you face any challenges whilst writing? How did you overcome them?
Being a former screenwriter who enjoyed a long and lucky run, the act of daily writing was not a problem. But that craft is much more skeletal and supervised than a novel. The plotting for Rifle Season was the initial big challenge for sure. Whenever I got stuck, I’d lean on my, dare I say molecular familiarity with the world the book lives in, to jog my imagination and that usually worked. The real challenge, the existential challenge for me personally, was letting go of my own reins. Letting my inner life and language run to hell and gone, come what may.
Quick lightning round! Tell us:
- The first book you ever remember reading: I blossomed late as a reader. Middle and high school were novelistic droughts. While attending CU Boulder, I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Hunter Thompson became my Tony Robbins. After that, I moved to NYC and read novels on the subway to work and back. When I found Gravity’s Rainbow it was game over and Thomas Pynchon had blown my mind out the window onto the tracks.
- The one that made you want to become an author: Couple disparate books. The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy and Dispatches, a memoir by Michael Herr. Both made any other realistic life plan unworkable.
- The one that you can’t stop thinking about: The Moviegoer because of my interpretation of its cruel but gentle thrust. That we might actually have a choice between living in authentic awareness or despair.
This is your debut novel! What was the road to becoming a published author like for you?
Easiest question of all. The road was head-down pounding and grinding and accepting the long-shot nature of the quest while lying my ass off to my family about being just fine if the manuscript sinks or swims.
What’s next for you?
A sequel which is nearly in first draft shape. After that maybe another.
Lastly, what books are you looking forward to picking up this year?
My future reads are fairly random. They usually come through friend recommends and reviews.
