Shortly after New Year’s, I told my friend Greg about the trailer I’d been putting together for a new thriller that would be published in February. “A hell of a good novel,” Stephen King called it. Already, comparisons to Cormac McCarthy had cropped up in two reviews. “The writer lives in Seattle,” I explained. “It’s his first book. Urban Waite.”
“Is that a pen name?”
“Not that I’ve been told.”
The Terror of Living tells the story of a drug runner near the Canadian border and two men who are desperate to find him after a shipment of heroin goes missing. The book’s epigraphs pull from Richard Ford and Milan Kundera, which should give some indication of its literary pedigree.
“I think I read the first few pages,” Greg remembered. At his office, more books vie for attention than he can possibly read. “It’s about a kid that we meet in a bar, or something like that?”
“That’s the book, but the kid’s dead before you know it. Someone’s hired to kill him. Not the main hired killer in the story, not Grady but another guy.” Greg nodded. Once there’s one hired killer in a book, odds aren’t so bad of finding another.
I said, “The publisher is banking on that audience to generate early word-of-mouth, hired killers who read.”
“What?”
“I made that up.”
Lots of footage for the trailer was captured here in Portland: under the Hawthorne Bridge; on North Interstate Avenue; at Tyron Creek State Park; and at Kelley Point Park, where the Willamette River empties into the Columbia. I shot the State Penitentiary in Salem, on the way home from Silver Falls State Park. Between one approaching plane and the next, outside a chain link fence at Scappoose Industrial Airpark, I played fetch with my dog. The driving scenes show Klickitat, Washington, and Route 503 east of Woodland.
Once a rough edit had been assembled, Adam Selzer and his friends Rachel Blumberg and Cory Gray watched it play on a loop, experimenting with treatments on piano, bass, and drums. Eventually they recorded the soundtrack’s bed. To spook it up, Rachel added vibraphone and Adam two notes of electric guitar.
The four voice-over bits come directly from Urban Waite’s text. Sweaty Sean McGrath did the reading. [click to comment]
Wordstock is a year-round Oregon nonprofit that works to promote writing in the classroom. And once a year, the 