Frequently Asked Questions

I've been living within 30 minutes of the Gateway arch for 95% of my life. There's a lot of inspiration to draw from here. St. Louis is full of fascinating contradictions: a French city—older than the United States—in the American Midwest, a Catholic stronghold in the Bible Belt, and the Gateway to the West standing beside one of North America's oldest urban civilizations. It felt like the perfect place for a story where ancient myth quietly collides with modern life.

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But the biggest reason for setting the novel in St. Louis is because of its proximity to the Cahokia Mounds. Check out my blog article to learn more. Once you climb Monks Mound and look across the river toward the Gateway Arch, it's almost impossible not to imagine the two landscapes speaking to one another. That view changed the way I thought about American mythology—and eventually became the foundation of Suburban Mummy.

My father was a mortician. When he took my siblings and I to see a replica of King Tut's tomb, he pantomimed how the ancient embalmers used hooks to pull the brain out of their Pharoah's nose.  So naturally, when a long-dead pharaoh rose from its tomb in a Spiderman cartoon, I was impressed. 

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During the covid lockdown, we all got very creative and a little weird, didn't we? I started obsessing about mummies, probably out of empathy. How to navigate time in isolation became a very real part of my life. It forced me to take inspiration from two other, very different artforms.

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During the lockdown, I started listening to more metal. (A natural progression, if you ask me.) Mastodon's "Emperor of Sand" made the playlist. If the cover art of their album isn't enough to inspire you, their lyrics will. It's easy to imagine the narrator of their songs wailing at you over the dunes of time.

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When I got quarantined from my family, friends, and all human contact for extended periods I frantically hunted for ways to avoid burying my head in a TV screen. In a subreddit, I met Tim Hutchings, who had just released a solo rpg he named Thousand Year Old Vampire. I was fascinated. The result of the "adventure" is a journal, written from the perspective of the monster as it moved through the centuries. Those first notes written while listening to Mastadon, were the beginnings of our little "Skittles".

Anne is fiction, but loosely based on  an amazing woman. Through a friend-of-a-friend, I'd learned about her story—one where her family looked sterling on the outside, but her marriage had a rotten core. She'd endured a lot of abuse and she was starting her life over. 

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I asked if we could set up a series of virtual interviews and she consented. I learned a lot, seeing divorce through her eyes, and I feel very privileged for the time she gave me.

I work with a lot of gifted people, so I recognized right away that I was outclassed in the IQ department. But she never condescended. She was very personable. We were both going through marital breakups, so our interviews were a little therapeutic. Asking questions and taking notes put me in the shoes of some of my therapists, which I think shows in the novel.

When we were introduced, this woman made me promise never to share any hint of her identity. She was very clear that her ex-husband must never be able trace Suburban Mummy back to her or her family. That's quite scary, and it's important to remember about the book's Anne. She is always making things right, always several steps ahead.

The more we talked, the more I realized that Anne's greatest strength shouldn't be intelligence, but resilience.

There was no need to look toward Egypt. The connection between St. Louis and the Cahokia Mounds was staring me right in the face. I think the more fascinating part of my research was learning how all the tribes of the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (SECC) - which covered about 30% of the total land area of the United States - shared common motifs in their artwork, despite their differences. I also learned the tribes had plausibly been influenced by descendants of Teotihuacan. So if you need pyramids in your mummy story, look no further.  

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Research for Suburban Mummy took me deep into the archaeology and mythologies of North America and Mesoamerica, where I discovered stories far stranger than anything I could have invented.
 

What was really fun for me was drawing the mummy's path through the ages on a map, then learning more about the tribes it might encounter. That influenced the story a lot. 

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That said, I think more educated tribal historians and archeologists are going to have fun looking for holes in Suburban Mummy. You have my apologies in advance, and I hope the novel does not offend you. I did my research, but a lot of the books I bought are still on my nightstand. Inspiration moves a lot faster than research. 

One of the best parts of fiction is that authors have total control over its qualities in order to make a point.  I started the technique of switching narrators a long time ago because there's some delicious ironic tension from that. It lets the reader in on more secrets and they see the same events from different perspectives. 

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For Suburban Mummy in particular, it forces some interesting comparison and contrast between the two narrators. I think this is great fodder for book club discussion.

Yes. I'm currently working on the next novel set in the same world. I think readers will be delighted that it's not going to feel like a traditional sequel.