The Cypress House

by Michael Koryta

  Do you think that adding supernatural elements to your stories gives you more freedom as a writer?

  Freedom, yes, and challenges. Both are wonderful things to have as a writer. There’s a freedom to create some rules of the universe in each story, but with that freedom is a requirement to explain the rules, justify them, and sell them to the reader. That’s the challenging part. There are moments in a supernatural story when I’ll catch myself longing for the inherent logic of the detective novel. So it depends on the day and how well it’s going; I’ll either love the freeing elements or be cursing them roundly. The supernatural stories are a great deal of fun for me to write, but I find them far more challenging to plot.

  The Columbus Dispatch described The Cypress House as “a healthy helping of noir crime novel, a swirl of supernatural horror, a spoonful of historical fiction, a dollop of old-time western, and a dash of finely tuned observation of the natural world.” How would you classify your book?

  I’m quite glad I’m not tasked with the burden of classifying my recent work for the reader. They’re stories to me, plain and simple, and while I grasp the idea of genre differences, I’ve never particularly cared about them as a reader. I can be equally entertained by Elmore Leonard or Stephen King or Pat Conroy. They are all gifted storytellers, and if you’re telling me a good story I’m not particularly inclined to worry about genre.

  Do you think about genre categories and conventions when you’re writing?

  No, which I suppose could be a bit of a problem, but I’m fortunate to have a wonderful publishing team. It’s certainly a greater challenge for the marketing aspect of books than the writing of them. Many readers respond to specific genres. If you called The Cypress House a horror novel, you might lose some crime fiction fans. If you called it a historical novel, you might lose some horror fans. I’d really argue that I’ve never wandered all that far, though. All of the books are mysteries at their core. A supernatural element doesn’t remove that, it just adds a wrinkle.

  How was writing The Cypress House different from working on the books in the Lincoln Perry detective series?

  Well, beyond the obvious differences in time and place, I’d say it’s in the issues of establishing the role of the supernatural in the story, clarifying its limits, and trying to ground the paranormal in realism. That was very important to me in this book, more so than in So Cold the River, which has a looser supernatural thread. I’ve always written Lincoln in the first person, and while Arlen is the lone point-of-view character in The Cypress House I still used the third person. I think if I’d gone to first person and allowed Arlen to narrate the story I might have had a greater struggle preserving the sense of time and place. Maybe I’d have had to battle against his voice sounding too much like Lincoln’s. The Cypress House was also the first time I’ve ever created an entirely fictional setting.

  What can we expect to see from you in the future?

  My next novel, The Ridge, is a ghost story set in Kentucky, and I believe the one that chases on its heels will be a traditional crime novel again, a detective story about two brothers in a small Midwestern town. I like the idea of rotating between stories that involve the supernatural and stories that don’t, but the surest way to force me to redirect is to have me announce a plan, so I’ll avoid that for now.

  Questions and topics for discussion

  1. Discuss the significance of the novel’s setting: 1930s Florida. Did the novel’s setting or time frame affect your ability to identify with the characters or their experiences? Do you think people have changed in the decades since the 1930s? In what ways?

  2. When Arlen reveals that he has seen death on the train, Paul doesn’t believe him at first. Has there ever been a time when you doubted someone who turned out to be telling the truth? Did your skepticism have consequences? What were they?

  3. Rebecca manages the Cypress House at a time when single women did not have the freedom they do now. Is the discrepancy between Rebecca’s particular situation and what’s possible for women today significant? How?

  4. Discuss Arlen’s relationship with his father. How is his father’s gift related to Arlen’s ability to see death before it happens? Almost all children endeavor to set themselves apart from their parents. To what extent are Arlen’s circumstances atypical?

  5. How is Arlen a father figure to Paul? Do you think Arlen tries to distance himself from this role? How does it affect their friendship?

  6. As one of the few women in the novel, Rebecca has to live up to the expectations of several other characters as well as the reader’s expectations. How do the men in The Cypress House react to her? What do the men’s actions reveal about them? Can you identify with Rebecca? In what ways?

  7. Why do you think Arlen pursued Rebecca after Paul expressed his love for her? Do you think Arlen was deliberately trying to push Paul away? Have you ever had to hurt someone in order to help him or her? Were you successful?

  8. Arlen, Paul, Rebecca, and Owen experience moments of denial about their family, friends, and past and present situations. What does each of them deny? Why do you think they do this?

  9. Paul is on the border between childhood and manhood. How does this conflict play out in The Cypress House? Do you think he grows into adulthood by the end of the novel? In what ways does he change?

  10. When Arlen sets out to rescue Paul, he uses Tate McGrath’s love for his sons to manipulate the man’s spirit. Even though Tate is dead, his affection for his children persists. Do you think even evil people have the capacity to love?

  Michael Koryta’s playlist for The Cypress House

  Music is a tremendous inspiration to me when I write, and I search often for songs or artists that capture the mood or atmosphere of the particular piece I’m writing. Below are some songs that never left the rotation during the writing of The Cypress House. Either they matched some critical element—perhaps of time or place—or they hit a special chord with me, and connected in some way to the characters and their journeys. It’s hard to imagine what the book would have been like without them.

  Middleman, by Bright Eyes, from the album Cassadaga

  Down in the Flood, by the Derek Trucks Band, from the album Down in the Flood

  Phantom Rules, by the Pine Hill Haints, from the album Ghost Dance

  Rising Son, by Patterson Hood, from the album Killers and Stars

  Day Is Done, by Ryan Bingham, from the album Roadhouse Sun

  Paths Will Cross, by Josh Ritter, from the album Josh Ritter

  Last Ride Back to KC, by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, from the soundtrack of The Assassination of Jesse James

  Moving On, by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, from the soundtrack of The Assassination of Jesse James

  Down to the Valley, by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, from the soundtrack of The Proposition

  Time to Send Someone Away, by José González, from the album In Our Nature

  Get On Down the Road, by Willem Maker, from the album Stars Fell On

  Appalachian Springs, by the Verve, from the album Forth

  Magick, by Ryan Adams, from the album Cardinology

  The Monument Valley, by the Drive-By Truckers, from the album Brighter than Creation’s Dark

  … AND HIS MOST RECENT NOVEL

  In June 2011 Little, Brown and Company will publish Michael Koryta’s The Ridge. Following is an excerpt from the novel’s opening pages.

  1

  KEVIN KIMBLE MADE THE DRIVE before dawn, as he always did, the mountains falling away as dark silhouettes in the rearview mirror. In the summer the fields below had been rich with the smells of damp soil and green plants reaching to meet the oncoming sun, but now the air was cold and darkness lingered and the scents were of dead leaves and wood smoke.

  It was an hour-long trip through winding country highways, traffic almost nonexistent this early, and he could feel the familiar weight of a sleepless night as he drove. He was never able to sleep the nights before the prison visits.

 
A steady rain was falling when he left Sawyer County, but down out of the mountains of eastern Kentucky and into the fields in the north-central portion of the state the rain tapered off into a thick fog, the world existing in gray tendrils and dark silhouettes. Foreboding, but peaceful and silent. Until his cell phone rang.

  He looked at the display expecting to see his department’s dispatch number, but was instead faced with one he didn’t recognize. He considered letting the call go to voicemail, but it was 5:35 a.m. and even wrong numbers deserved to be answered at such a time, just in case.

  “Chief Deputy Kimble,” he said, putting the phone to his ear.

  “Good morning,” said an unfamiliar and oddly formal male voice. “I hope I didn’t wake you. I had the feeling I wouldn’t.”

  “Who’s speaking?”

  “Wyatt French.”

  Kimble shifted his hand to the top of the steering wheel and swung out into the next lane, away from a semi that was casting a thick spray back into his windshield as it chugged northbound, toward the Ohio River.

  “How’d you get this number, Mr. French?” Kimble knew Wyatt French through one thing only—police work, and it was not as a colleague. He wasn’t in the habit of giving out his personal number to the people he arrested or interviewed, the two roles Wyatt French had occupied in the past. Kimble had done such a thing just once, in fact, and endured eight months of physical therapy after that decision.

  “I have a question for you,” French said.

  “I just asked you one of my own.”

  “Mine’s a little more important.” The man’s voice sounded off, something coming not from a phone speaker but up from beneath rocks or from behind a sewer grate, someplace home to echoes and faint water sounds.

  “You’ve been drinking, Mr. French.”

  “So I have. It’s a legal enterprise, chief deputy. Going on for about eighty years now.”

  “Conditionally legal,” said Kimble, who had arrested Wyatt for public intoxication on three occasions and once for drunk driving. “Where are you?”

  “I’m at home, where it’s absolutely legal.”

  Home. Wyatt French’s home was a wooden lighthouse in the woods. When he wasn’t causing trouble in the Whitman town streets, a bottle of cheap bourbon in hand or tucked into his mouth between a bristling gray mustache and an unkempt beard, the department still had to field complaints about the man. The strange, pulsing light that lit the woods in the rural stretch of abandoned mining country where he lived drew curiosity and ire.

  “You’re on the road,” French said. “Aren’t you? Early for a drive.”

  Kimble, who had things more personal weighing on his mind than this old drunk in the lighthouse, said, “Go to bed, man. Get some sleep. And however you got this number? Delete it. Don’t call my private number again.”

  “I would like a question answered!”

  Kimble moved his foot to the brake, tapped gently, dropping the speed down below the limit. French’s voice had gone dark and furious, and for the first time, Kimble had a sense of real concern over the man’s call.

  “What’s your question?”

  “You’re in charge of criminal investigations for your department,” French said. “For the whole county.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Which would you rather have: a homicide or a suicide?”

  Kimble had a vision of Wyatt as he’d seen him last, weaving down the sidewalk outside a Big Blue liquor store in the middle of the day. Kimble was on his way to buy a sandwich for lunch and Wyatt was on his way back from having attempted to buy a bottle of bourbon for the same. They bounced him out when he tried to pay for a bottle of Wild Turkey with quarters, dimes, and nickels. That had been a few months ago. Since then, Kimble hadn’t seen the old degenerate around any of his usual haunts.

  “Mr. French,” he said. “Wyatt? Don’t talk like that. Okay? Just put the bottle down and get into bed.”

  “I’ll get more than enough rest once I’ve had an answer. It matters to me, Deputy Kimble. It matters a great deal.”

  “Why?”

  Silence, then, in a strained voice, “The question was simple. Would you rather have a—”

  “Suicide,” Kimble interrupted. “There, you happy? I picked, and I was honest. But I don’t want either, Wyatt. I hate them both, and if there’s some reason to this call beyond alcohol, then—”

  That provoked a long, unsettling laugh, the tone far too high and keening for Wyatt’s natural voice.

  “There’s a reason beyond booze, yes, sir.”

  “What is it?”

  “You said you would prefer a suicide. I’m of a mind to agree, but I’d like to hear your reasoning. Why is a suicide better?”

  Kimble was drifting along in the right lane, alone in the smoky fog and mist. He said, “Because I don’t have to worry about anyone else being hurt by that particular person. It’s always tragic, but at least I don’t have to worry about them pointing a gun at someone else and pulling the trigger.”

  “Exactly. The very conclusion I reached myself.”

  “If you have any thoughts of suicide, then I’ve got a number I want you to call. I’m serious about this. I want you—”

  “Now what if,” Wyatt French said, “the suicide victim wasn’t entirely willing.”

  Kimble felt an uneasy chill, the car’s speed dropping off even more as he gripped the wheel in one hand and the phone in the other and wondered why in the hell he’d picked it up.

  “Then it’s not a suicide,” Kimble said.

  “You say that so confidently.”

  “I am confident. If the death was not the subject’s goal, then it was not a suicide. By definition.”

  “So even if a man killed himself, but there was evidence that he’d been compelled to in some way—”

  “Wyatt, stop. Stop talking like this. Are you going to hurt yourself?”

  Silence.

  “Wyatt?”

  “I wanted to know if there was any difference in the way you’d investigate,” the man said, his words clearer now, less of the bourbon speaking for him. “Do you pursue the root causes of a suicide in the same manner that you would a homicide?”

  Kimble drove along in the hiss of tires on rain-soaked pavement for a time, then said, “I pursue the truth.”

  “Always?”

  “Always. Don’t give me anything to pursue today, Wyatt. I’m not joking. If someone has been hurt, you tell me that right now. Tell me that.”

  “No one has been hurt yet.”

  Yet. Kimble didn’t like that. “If you’re thinking about suicide, or anything else, then I want—”

  “My thoughts aren’t your concern, Deputy. You have many concerns around you in Sawyer County, some of them quite serious, but my thoughts aren’t the problem.”

  “I’m going to give you a number,” Kimble said again, “and ask you to call it for me, please. I’d appreciate it. You called me early, and on a private line, and I’ve given you my time and respect. I hope you’ll do the same for me.”

  “Certainly, sir. If there are two things I’d hope you might continue to grant me in the future, it is your time and respect.”

  French’s voice was grim, absent of mockery or malice. Kimble gave him the number, a state suicide prevention line, and he could hear scratching as Wyatt dutifully wrote it down.

  “Take care of yourself,” Kimble told him. “Get dried out, get some rest. I’m worried about the way you’re talking.”

  “What you should be worried about, Kimble, is that I’ll choose to live forever. Then you’d really have your work cut out.”

  It was the first time any of Wyatt’s traditional humor had showed, and Kimble let out a long breath, feeling as if the worst of this strange call was past.

  “I’ve dealt with you for this long,” he said. “Wouldn’t be right not to keep at it.”

  “I appreciate the sentiment. And Deputy? You be careful with her.”

  Kimble was sil
ent, lips parted but jaw slack, and didn’t realize he’d let off the accelerator again until a minivan rose up into his mirror with an accompanying horn, then an extended middle finger as the driver swerved around him. Kimble brought his speed back up and said, “Who do you mean, Wyatt?”

  “The one you’re going to see,” Wyatt French told him. “Be very careful with her.”

  His voice had the low gravity of someone speaking at a wake. When Kimble finally got around to responding, offering up an awkward question, a sad attempt at denial, he realized that the line was dead.

  There was no time to call him back from the highway, because the exit for the women’s prison was just ahead, and Kimble had no desire to hear the old drunk’s strange voice again, anyhow. Let him sip his whiskey inside his damned lighthouse in the woods. Let his disturbed mind not infect Kimble’s own.

  He set the phone down and continued up to the prison gates.

  2

  A LONG, SINISTER BRICK STRUCTURE, the women’s prison had been built back in 1891, a hundred and twenty years before it would house an inmate of interest to Kimble. Approved adults could begin arriving at 6:00 a.m., but the parking spaces were empty when he pulled in. Kimble was always the first one in the door. He liked to be alone in the visiting area, and he liked making the drive in the dark.

  They checked him in with familiarity and a quiet “morning, Deputy” and then escorted him into the visitation room. He was afforded privileges here that others were not, a level of privacy and trust that others were not, because he was police. And because they all knew the story.

  She was alone in the room, waiting for him at the other end of a plastic table, and when he saw her his breath caught and his heartbeat stuttered and he felt a fierce, cold ache low in his back.

  “Jacqueline,” he said.

  She rose and offered her slim, elegant hand. Warm, gentle fingers in his cool, callused palm, and he found himself, as he always did when they touched, wetting his lips and looking to the side, as if something had moved in the shadows at the edge of the room.