​Jude
Joseph
Lovell
WRITER - FATHER - HUSBAND - BIBLIOPHILE 

 

It is a weird coincidence that on the very day I was finishing the initial draft of my newest novel, Wherehouse,  the third installment in what I am calling the “Night of Fear Trilogy,” there came an announcement out of the blue from one of my literary heroes, Stephen King. It was about how he had just written the third and final installment of a trilogy he hadn’t known he was writing either. At least, not when work began on the first novel. Of course, that is where the similarities end. Stephen King announcing he has finished a new novel and your humble scribe saying the same thing - these don’t exactly generate the same sort of ripple effect, I’m afraid.  

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Oh well. But they do both say something about the creative process, I guess. Or the wiles of the muses. About how a writer never really can know where his or her or creativity is going to lead them. Or what kind of “life” or longevity a single idea can ultimately sustain. 

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King’s announcement was about a new novel coming out later this year called Other Worlds Than These. It is the third volume of a trilogy he began in the early 1980s - a long time ago - with the late Peter Straub, another horror novelist, when they collaborated on a dark horror-fantasy story called The Talisman (1984). Coincidentally, its publication date was my 14th birthday. They followed this up almost 20 years later with a second novel called Black House (2001). 

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According to King, at some point after that book, Straub had emailed him with the bones of an idea for a final installment of a trilogy. King claims he lost the email, but retained enough to keep a hold of the premise. Then Straub died tragically in 2022. King determined he would press on, “channeling” Straub to produce a third and final volume. 

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Their trilogy has nothing to do with the one yours truly has just completed, except to say that the last volume of my own is a “collaboration” (wink-wink) between two authors, myself and “Foster Mullins.” More on him later. But I do think it is pretty cool that there are a few other connections between the Talisman novels and the Night of Fear trilogy. Well, not really, but sort of. 

 

King, as I have said, is one of my own writing heroes, and I’ve already cited him as a big influence on the first novel of my trilogy, DeliverMe (2018). His work was also a “big driver,” so to speak, behind the new novel, Wherehouse. Anyone who is familiar with me or my own writing knows that King has made, and continues to make, a big impression on my approach to creative storytelling. 

Anyway, it was fun to learn that I was toiling to complete a “surprise trilogy” at the same time one of my heroes was doing the same thing. For whatever that is worth. 

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I keep talking about the trilogy I’ve written (or helped to write?) as a surprise, saying that I did not know it was coming, and all of that. I even say as much on the jacket copy of the forthcoming Book 3. In short order I am going to write for a while about how the first two novels happened and what led to the idea that there could someday be a third. But first I need to tell you about an old friend of mine. 

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I can still remember sitting down at the dining room table in the crappy little apartment I lived in in Columbus, Georgia, back in the mid-1990s. I don’t remember quite what year, but I’d guess ‘94 or ‘95. I had a spiral notebook and some automatic pencils, more or less the same setup as the one I am working with at this very moment, more than thirty years on. I scribbled in capital letters across the top of the page FOSTER MULLINS WITNESSES A TRAGEDY. Then I attempted to write a story about this aimless dude walking down a street in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, near an old church in the middle of a sunny day, and witnessing the church suddenly explode for no good reason. 

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That image, the exploding church in the middle of the day with this guy walking past it, was the only thing I had in my mind. That, and I think I had some notion that this character, “Foster Mullins,” was a guy roughly my own age at the time, but whose physical characteristics differed from my own. He was tall, bony, gangly; where I was not any of those things, and unfortunately, I’m still not. 

 

The point is, I didn’t have much more to work with on that day long ago, and I did not really understand yet how to fire up my imagination and develop a story out of one or two fragmented mental images. But, if I can say anything about my storytelling chops over the three decades that followed that day, I can say that I did gradually build up the ability to generate stories and novels out of small sparks. I’m not saying the results are good, but I got better at doing it. Back in the mid 1990s, I simply didn’t know how the job was done yet. It took a million more false starts and endless hours of reading fiction and even nonfiction to learn how to get even one decent story off the runway. 

 

This is a long way towards saying that this first story with a character I had named “Foster Mullins” flamed out on that runway before it picked up any momentum. But, for mysterious reasons, the name Foster Mullins lived on in my memory. 

 

Fast-forward to sometime around 1999 or 2000. My life was entirely different. I lived in Nutley, New Jersey, in another crappy little apartment - in fact it was smaller - and I was in a totally different line of work, too. I was commuting to New York City every day, an office building that was located directly across the street from the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center. I know, right? Talk about “witnessing a tragedy.” Except I did not, as my fate would have it: I stopped working there in August of 2001. That’s no lie! 

 

Anyway, while working in that office by day, I was enrolled in Creative Writing courses as an MFA candidate at The New School by night, which was located uptown in Greenwich Village. I desperately wanted to write my own stories. So I was doing what I thought was needed to advance my ability to do that. Since I was in the “Fiction” concentration of this program, each semester students would join a workshop with other aspiring writers. We had to bring either short stories or portions of a novel and share it with our fellow students for feedback, critiques, etc. 

 

Somewhere in this period I wrote a short story called “Foster Mullins, U.N.M.A.N.” At least this time I finished it! In my own head, the protagonist, “Foster Mullins,” was the same guy that had taken up residence there since I tried to write the earlier story about the exploding church. And in spite of the fact that I never really executed that story or even fleshed out the character much, I knew what he looked like, and I knew that I wanted him to be an aspiring fiction writer - like me. 

 

The new story was about his adventures trying to become a fiction writer and a group of his boneheaded pals who were pursuing the same thing. It was modeled a bit on the very experiences I was having “IRL,” as the kids say. I guess I was doing that thing where you “write what you know,” but at the same time I also was learning to mine my creativity for better ideas that were more ambitious than simply what I knew from my own experience. 

 

Anyway, in my story, Mullins decides that he’s going to start his own literary organization called “Unpublished Novelists Masquerading As Novelists,” or U.N.M.A.N., that he would lead. If that isn’t cringe-worthy enough, he also has a ridiculous idea for a novel he swears he will write. He decides to launch his own “book tour” for that novel, which he hadn’t yet written - putting the horse before the cart, big time - so he travels to Florida, then simply disappears at the end of the story. 

 

This story was pretty goofy all around, and it was never published anywhere until I put it in my own self-published collection called Crowning a number of years later (it’s also in my larger volume of “selected” stories called Door in the Air). What can I say? I thought it had some fun elements and a few decent ideas. One of which was the term “U.N.M.A.N.” and the questions it raised for me about writing and the pursuit of one’s literary dreams and all of that. I was asking myself stuff like: if a young man spends years and years trying to learn to write stories well, as his primary’s life’s work, but he can’t ever find publishers for them and as a result nobody ever reads them, until he is no longer a young man but a middle-aged or even an old man - was he really a “man” at all? Can you call yourself a man, for real, if you never truly fulfill your vocation? 

 

That is the sort of thing I was playing with mentally, psychologically, maybe even spiritually. A little bit insufferable, I get it. Woe is me, says the tortured writer, no one ever reads my stuff! But then again, if you are serious about your work and you put a great deal into it and you can’t get it in front of readers and no one particularly cares - for the artist, these struggles are real. And they hurt. 

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Anyway, I did get a slightly more “real” character for my pains, and even if he was sort of weak and weird, he was still kind of my dude. My “baby,” so to speak. He went off to do his thing in one corner of my mind, having disappeared off the coast of Florida anyway, and I had no reason to believe that Foster Mullins would ever rear his slender form again. 

 

So I pressed on and I kept trying and trying - and trying - to write fiction. I did get better at it - though still almost nobody would ever publish it, let alone read much of it. I really loved working at it, though. Along the way, the whole industry changed, and while it never got any easier for me to get published, self-publishing became a viable alternative over time. My general thoughts about that were down the lines of, It’s better than nothing? 

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In late 2012 I started writing a novella about my experience as an officer in the U.S. Army, which ultimately grew into my first completed novel. I finished this book in 2013 and self-published it under the title Blue Six. To this day I still think of this as one of the most important achievements of my life, even though not too many people have read it. It was an enormous step for me. This was the first time I had ever finished a novel, but I had been trying to figure out how to do that more or less since the year 1990. So, twenty-three years. I felt extremely proud of this book and I still do. I think it holds up. And I never gave up. I still believe that is something. 

 

After that, I knew I could write stories and novels. So I kept going. I was sure I had other stories to tell and I felt motivated to pursue these and get better. For better or worse, that’s what I have been doing pretty much nonstop ever since. I wrote and self-published many other novels, stories, and even a number of nonfiction books. They’re all out there on Amazon, search for Jude Joseph Lovell. End of commercial. 

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In 2017 or so, I was working on a few other things a little half-heartedly when I had this phone conversation with my big brother. It was just a regular check-in at the time. He was telling me about how he had recently started a second job on the side delivering packages for Amazon on a part-time basis in order to make extra money. He was a single Dad with two kids living at home at the time - his third child had moved out as a young adult. He told me that the whole job was conducted through the use of an app, and that even while he was going through the hiring process, he had barely been required to speak to anybody human. 

 

That exchange triggered off an idea for a new story. It was one of these “what if?” questions that writers contemplate while trying to come up with new ideas. I wondered what would happen if I wrote a story about a middle-aged Dad in a similar position to my brother’s who got a second job in which his “boss” was literally an app. When he goes out to conduct his first shift to deliver packages, somebody asks him to do them a small favor: take a package from him and deliver it to someone else in the next building. And by doing that one small thing, the Dad gets sucked into this whole nightmare that lasts all night, drawing him into a world of danger, crime, and chaos. 

 

As soon as that concept dropped into my head, I felt on the hook to write it. Here was a chance for me to try my hand at a kind of dark, twisty thriller, a novel that hopefully would be relatively short, combustible, propulsive, fun, etc. etc. In theory, I was thinking, a story like this one could make for a good movie (I’m still waiting for someone to pick up the film rights at a hefty price). I also thought it had the benefit, or it could, of having a kind of likeable protagonist, who had stumbled into the whole nightmare inadvertently, but who was driven to outlast it all by the fact that he was trying to do “whatever it takes” (a key phrase in the resulting novel) to do right by his daughters. 

 

So, without even telling my brother (not right away) about what his noble toil had set off in my mind, I started to write the book, which eventually became the novel DeliverMe. [The novel is dedicated to Luke Lovell, the brother mentioned.] To this day it is among my favorites of my books, because I think it achieved what I wanted it to: it “delivered” a relatively short, fun, crazy kind of thrill-ride with a lot of surprises and twists and turns, and with a sense of humor. 

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Ultimately, the whole story really doesn’t make a lick of sense, in ways I would not want to explain here in case anyone who sees this wants to take it on a test-run (!). But even at the outset of writing it, I remember not being very concerned about its plausibility. I had reasons for wanting this book to part ways with reality. I wanted it to be nuts, weird, not very rational. Many of my most admired writers - such as Stephen King and the Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami, or even such influential figures such as Franz Kafka or Philip K. Dick - frequently wrote wild novels that didn’t make much sense either. They just made them work. And I love those kinds of books. I knew there was a path to producing a novel like DeliverMe which would be totally crazy, but fun enough and well-written enough to keep a certain kind of reader engaged anyway. That was my ambition for my own novel. 

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Besides, what did, and what does, a writer like yours truly ever have to lose? Nothing he is not already lacking. That’s how I saw it/see it.  

 

With DeliverMe, not to be immodest, I think I got that job done. It is the story I was hoping to write. When I got rolling on it, I was just ripping along and having a great time, and that really is what it’s all about. Even Stephen King would say that. I got really excited, too: the book was practically writing itself, and it seemed to be ushering in a whole new chapter of my creative journey. That feels good! 

I had never written a ripping, potential movie-type of story before. I was pretty much having the time of my writing life. Shout-out to my big brother! 

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But it didn’t stay that way. Working on this novel taught me one of the toughest-earned lessons of that whole “creative journey” so far. And it’s the one thing I remember best from the whole period I worked on DeliverMe. 

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What happened was, I got about halfway through the story, up to a point where my protagonist, an average single Dad-type with the milquetoast name of “Dave Porter” (“Porter” a play on his job status), gets knocked unconscious by these bad guys while standing in an unfinished basement of a strange house. The thugs drag him behind a piece of drywall, nail another panel into place, and leave him there literally trapped inside the wall. I remember titling that chapter, “Not In The House, But In The House.” That’s the kind of story I was writing. 

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Here’s the problem: having gotten Dave stuck in that wall, I did not know for the life of me how I would get him out. I had been writing the novel organically, which was a deliberate choice. I had just the initial premise, but no other road map. Part of the challenge was figuring out what would happen to this guy next, even if it was crazier than everything that happened before (often it was), and seeing what my character would do about it. Also, of course, a huge part of the fun and another hefty challenge of such a book was trying to see if I could “land the plane,” so to speak, whenever I got to the end. But at this point in the story, I got Dave stuck inside a wall, and then the writer, me, basically slammed into the same wall. 

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The entire book ground to a standstill. The plane crashed. I knew my story was not finished, or close to being finished, but my mind sort of lost its mojo. The days started ticking by. I started to believe the entire experiment was going to be another failure. That was a terrible feeling, because it was such an ignoble end, potentially, to what up to that point had felt like a watershed moment. 

 

When I write that I “slammed into the same wall,” that’s exactly how it felt. I couldn’t figure it out and my whole vessel was crumpled with steam coming out from under the hood. I ended up setting the book aside with great reluctance and steeling myself for the fact that it was going to end up one of my biggest disappointments. I think several months flew by. I can’t really remember how long exactly it was, but I know I resolved myself. I tried to start thinking about other projects. It had happened to me many times before. 

 

But something was actually different this time. After a number of months went by, I could not come up with anything new to try. And I kept thinking about how much fun I had been having while writing DeliverMe and how motivated I felt by the idea of me putting out even a self-published, dark thrill-ride of a story. So I literally forced myself to go back and pick up the trail again. What is that famous movie line? “Failure is not an option.” 

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Could I do it? That was the new challenge. 

 

I finally had a thought down the lines of: what if Dave could blast his way out? But he didn’t have any weapons; he was also injured. What was he really doing there? I didn’t quite know. But I suddenly had two weird ideas: 

 

First, I would have Dave slowly discover that he was not alone inside the wall. Something or someone was trapped inside the wall with him. I began working on that part, and while I did, something else occurred to me. It was pretty simple: Dave didn’t have a weapon; therefore there was no way he could blast himself out. But the guys who had put him in there, on the other side - they had plenty of weapons. So what if somebody on the outside blasted him out? Maybe they could have a conflict or a disagreement, one that escalates, and ends up in a shoot-out….

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That was the ticket, I realized. A shoot-out in the middle of this book was exactly the sort of thing I wanted in the story anyway. That’s the kind of book I had been trying to write: everything kind of rested on a trigger-pull, and all bloody hell could break loose at any time. 

 

It worked. Dave encountered a strange presence inside the wall; meanwhile, his captors got in a fight, and in the melee one of them literally shot up the drywall and hauled Dave out again.

 

From there, it was on with the show. I spent a few more months writing, the story got even crazier, but I finished it. And to this day, as I mentioned, it is one of my favorites. I think the book is a hell of a lot of fun. And many readers agreed, happily - not millions, but a lot of the folks who eventually read the book had a good time with it. Which was the only point of the endeavor in the first place. 

 

DeliverMe did not become part of a trilogy until seven years later, but that one driving principle, if I can call it that, ended up being a common thread for all three novels: they were mainly about having a good time; escaping from the rest of the world; going on a crazy journey where you never knew what was going to happen. The entire trilogy was composed in that spirit. 

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After writing, editing, and publishing DeliverMe in 2018, I thought I had pretty much gotten that sort of novel out of my system. So I moved on to other things. I never had a thought about it being part of a bigger project until years later. But then we found ourselves in the middle of a global pandemic caused by something called the coronavirus. 

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I, of course, had always escaped from the pressures of reality by reading books and trying to write them. But now things had become really strange. Everybody was trapped inside their own homes and their own reality all the time. It was hard to escape from anything. And on top of that, people were dying, by the hundreds of thousands, around the world. They were dark times - we all remember. One of the things that this period did for, or to, me was that it slowly increased my desire to try to write something else that was fun. Again, a kind of escape from the real world. 

 

Eventually I found myself between projects and ready to start something new. It was 2020. That June I read a classic noir novel that was also made into a film that, so far as I knew, not a lot of people remembered. It was called In A Lonely Place by a woman named Dorothy B. Hughes. A great book. I’ve never actually seen the film, however. I don’t know if I had the thought that I could try my hand at a noir-type story then, but the book stayed with me. It made my list of Top Ten favorite books of the year from 2020. 

 

Fast-forward almost a whole other year. I had spent time noodling around with some short fiction and gathering them up into my collection of “New and Selected Stories” called Door in the Air in early 2021. Some time in there I remember reading a really crappy, drug store paperback thriller called The Warsaw Protocol by a guy named Steve Berry. It was a really stupid book, but I remember the way it was structured in an almost (maybe not even almost) manipulative format just to keep a bored reader flipping pages. That stuck with me too. I thought about writing another “fun” book that kept you turning pages over, but hopefully would be better executed. Could I try that again? 

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But the real kicker for me was a book I read a few months later. It was a 3-in-1 omnibus paperback containing two novels and one story collection (highly unusual right there) written by a mostly forgotten writer by the name of Cornell Woolrich. He was also considered at one time a real master of the noir genre, which got me thinking again about In A Lonely Place. Woolrich was no longer a well-known name if he’d ever been one. But one of the stories in the volume I read that year was called “Rear Window,” which had been turned into a very famous film by Alfred Hitchcock. Most people have at least heard of that movie, which starred Hollywood legends Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly. I had seen it a couple of times myself. 

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Anyway, after reading that whole volume, and being primed by the global lockdown and the dark mood of the times, I was prepared to try something new and in the spirit of a “fun read” once again. A rather vague idea came to me down the lines of: could I take a shot at writing my own noir-esque story? This was followed quickly by a second thought: if I did write a noirish novel, what would it be like if I made the protagonist, instead of being some sort of a gumshoe or down-on-his-luck P.I., a down-on-his-luck writer? A novelist? A guy just trying to write a new book? 

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That was the start of what finally became Book 2 of the Night of Fear Trilogy, a novel called time o’clock. Only, at no point while I was working on this book did I think of it as a part of a trilogy. That idea did not come to me until well after the book was finished. I also decided during the writing of this novel that it wasn’t even really “me” writing the book at all. I’ll explain those things shortly. But for the time being, Spring of 2021, I started working on what I thought of as my shot at a noirish novel with a hapless writer in the lead. 

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As with DeliverMe, I did not intend to plot out or outline time o’clock in any way. Perhaps in this thought was the seed of what eventually led to those two novels being grouped together in a larger project. Who knows? I knew that books of this sort, if I were to try to write them, needed to unfold in an organic manner. So I did this: I gave myself a kind of prompt:

 

What if there was a youngish, kind of underdog, obscure writer in a small apartment somewhere - let’s say New York City - sitting at a desk or table in the middle of the night trying to write something, when suddenly there’s a knock on the door. Surprised and curious, the guy goes to open up, and—cue a slow, languid, sexy saxophone—there in the doorway, perhaps in silhouette, is a gorgeous, curvy woman, leaning against the jamb. This woman has heard that the guy is a writer, good with words, and wants to know if he would help her to “tweak” a “Dear John” letter she’s in the process of writing. A damsel in distress, in a way. She slinks into his apartment. Would the guy everybody knows is a writer be willing to help a girl out….? 

 

That was it: that was the whole idea. It was somewhere around this early stage when I saw something about this crazy idea connected it to DeliverMe. It was in the set-up. All I had was this basic concept - the rest was completely up to me. For DeliverMe it was: a guy takes a second job delivering packages in which his “boss” is an app. He goes out to take on his first shift, and almost immediately it goes off the rails. For this new novel, it was a writer alone in the middle of the night in the big city, trying to work, when a beautiful girl shows up out of nowhere, looking for the kind of help only he can give…

 

I didn’t have more to go on, but because I had written DeliverMe successfully, I guess I had the chutzpah, or maybe confidence is a better word, to think that I could do it a second time. Sometimes that’s all you need. I recognized the feeling at the start: the crazy set-up, the fact that it didn’t really make a whole lot of sense, but if I were to accept the gauntlet and go forward, with a reckless disregard for whatever the “rules” were for writing novels, maybe I would write another darkly fun tale. 

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From that point on I began to think of DeliverMe and time o’clock as not exactly connected stories, but sort of related ones. My term for it while I was writing time o’clock was that the two novels could be “cousins.” 

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Things progressed from there. But there’s one other important fact to point out about Book 2. That is: as soon as I imagined the first scene, with a guy trying to write a novel in a really small, shitty apartment, I suddenly recognized the guy was. It was Foster Mullins, the hapless, somewhat fearless “U.N.M.A.N.” from the story that had been named after him. This was that guy, and the apartment was the same one described in the earlier story. That meant that he was writing in a subletted apartment in the Bronx, New York. It also meant that this new story would take place around the turn of the millennium, around 1999-2000. 

 

I set to work. Some other ideas were coming into my mind, and yet a general “plot,” if there even was one, was tough to figure out. But the concept was to write something new and fun, my own take on an old genre, but to use my imagination and try to add some unique elements into it. That is how two important, other ideas came to me, also early in the writing process. .

 

One was the book’s title, “time o’clock.” To this day I am not completely sure where that phrase came from. I think I was mulling over another idea that could tie this book to DeliverMe, at least in my own head: the fact that the story took place in mainly one night. I remembered that there is a fancy term that indicates when a story or a movie takes place in one night. But I had to look it up. The term is circadian. It is really a biological or scientific word, meant to indicate one full, 24-hour cycle. But I had heard it used to describe the kind of story I wanted to write. An early Martin Scorsese film called After Hours is a good example of a circadian story, if you are looking for one. Or see Haruki Murakami’s short novel called After Dark. (Maybe my novel should have been called after o’clock.) 

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So I now understood I was writing a second story that was sort of thematically or stylistically related to DeliverMe, but it had its own plot. While I continued riffing in my mind on the general idea that it would be a circadian story (technically, time o’clock goes outside of this parameter, because it does contain flashbacks, but the main story takes place over one night), at some point I was thinking about what are sometimes called “the small hours,” i.e., the dead of night, between, say, 12 midnight and 4:00 a.m. I imagined that this period of a 24-hour cycle was Foster Mullins’ “wheelhouse” - the time of the day/night when he felt he did his best work. (This was the opposite from his creator, me, who always has done my own best work after four in the morning, but definitely before 9 a.m.) And somewhere in the early stages I came up with a quasi-mysterious name for this time of the cycle: “time o’clock.” I don’t know where it came from. But I liked the sound of it and I thought it was unique. No one else had given it to me.  

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That is my title, I concluded, and it stuck. 

 

Anyway, that is how time o’clock got rolling, and once it was, I was eager to keep it going. Then I had the second of my two important ideas. I realized that not only was Mullins the main character; he was also telling the story. He was the captain, steering the ship with his own hand on the wheel. Jude Joseph Lovell? That guy was secondary. 

 

That is when I thought back to the guy referenced early in this narrative: “Uncle Stevie,” i.e., Stephen King. I already had him in the back of my mind while working on this book, just as I had while writing DeliverMe. This was because one thing I had learned from reading King’s novels was that a writer’s only limit is his own imagination. If you could dream it up, you could set it down - and nobody I had ever read before adhered to that core idea more than King. 

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I recalled that early on in his own career King had written some crazy novels that were eventually published under a different name. A pseudonym, or a nom de plume, to use an even snootier term. And I remembered too that early in the eighties mass market paperback versions of some of those books that were published under this other name included this grainy, old photo of King himself on the back. The name of the “writer” on the front cover was Richard Bachman, the last name of which King had stolen from a rock band in the seventies called “Bachman Turner Overdrive.” Hilarious! 

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When I discovered that Foster Mullins was driving this puppy, time o’clock (I still do not know either why it has to be written in small letters - but Mullins insists to this day that it does), I thought I could do the same thing King had done. I had never considered for one moment before publishing anything under a pseudonym. But when I understood that Mullins was in charge, it seemed that it was the only way this book could be published. Foster Mullins was not only the central character. He was also the author. 

 

That whole aspect of time o’clock was never planned. But I had learned after a lot of long years of trying to write fiction to allow things to develop as they will - to keep it a fluid and organic process. Once I knew it was Mullins’ book, it took on a very different character and a momentum all its own - at least, in my own mind. 

 

That does not mean it was easy to write. Would that it were! I got going in the winter of 2021, February or March, and I worked heavily on it into the summer. The “plot,” term used loosely, was convoluted and weird, and I’m pretty challenged with plotting to begin with. It was also in the middle of the pandemic, where everyone was only venturing out with masks on, and there was this heightened sense of isolation, paranoia, etc. Although I feel now, looking back on it, that that particular aspect of life in the “real world” helped with this novel more than it hurt. Either way, time o’clock was a lot of fun to write, for sure, but it was also a challenge. It was kind of a bear every step of the way. 

 

time o’clock was one of the few books of mine that I actually finished writing while away from home. I was close to completion (or rather, Mullins was), and had gone on a mini-reunion with almost my entire family on my own side. We were all staying in a big house in a nowhere town called Etters, not far from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. There were maybe 30 of us - me and my own family, all five of my siblings and most of their children, and my mother. I woke up very early one morning before anyone else in the big group was awake, made some coffee, and knocked out the final pages. I remember how exhilarated I felt to finish the book even in such a strange circumstance. Foster Mullins would be so proud of me, I joked with myself. 

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Now I had written two dark, crazy, twisted thrillers that in my own head seemed hazily connected. I never would have believed even five years before that I could have pulled something like that off. And in the middle of a pandemic on top of it. I am not very good at celebrating my own personal milestones, but I did feel proud of this accomplishment. That never lasts very long, by the way. I edited and revised the book as best I could, set it up for publication, and pushed it out into the world, where it perished quickly. Most of my books do, little foundlings as they are, orphaned and left out in the cruel forest full of tigers with nothing to eat. 

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Between that time, summer of 2021, and now, late winter of 2026, I wrote six other books, believe it or not. Two short story collections, two nonfiction books, and two novels, to include the final book in my trilogy just completed. If you ask how I might have written five other books in the five years between time o’clock and Wherehouse, I surely do not know. It’s just what I do. 

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My writing life since the first complete novel I wrote in 2013 has always felt, to me, like making up for lost time. I am not someone who wrote their first book in their twenties or even their teens. For more than twenty years before Blue Six, from the early 1990s through 2013, I had produced a couple of book-length attempts, but had not been able to figure out how to complete a fiction or nonfiction book from soup to nuts. I am a self-taught author for the most part, in spite of my Master’s degree. I had to hack through the jungle on my own. But once I did, I saw it as my purpose to keep doing it. That’s what I have tried to do, and I love doing it, and I have no desire to stop doing it. 

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That brings me to Wherehouse. How did the two “cousins” finally become a full trilogy? This accomplishment, the writing of a complete trilogy of novels, is a new milestone for this writer. Back in 2014, when I wrote my fantasy novel for younger readers called Obsidian, I envisioned that book as the first installment of a possible trilogy. I even had really cool titles for the other two books. I tried at least twice over the intervening years to get writing on a second novel in the imagined series, a prequel that I called Ram’s Blood. But in spite of a few months’ worth of labor, this novel never really happened, and I think it is unlikely now that it ever will. Never say never, but…

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The point is, writing a trilogy of novels is no easy task, and I was never quite sure I had that in me. But having recently finished the new novel, I do have a feeling of pride in reaching that milestone, however fleeting. In fact, I can feel it fading already. But that’s ok, I am used to that. 

 

I know I am going on and on here about my own story. But who cares? Is anyone reading this anyway? I doubt it very much, but if you are, thank you for the interest and the indulgence. You are one of an exclusive club - that I can tell you! 

 

There was a moment, I vaguely recall, within only a month or so of setting down those last words in Etters, PA of time o’clock, when out of nowhere a single word popped into my head. I knew this mystery word was related somehow to DeliverMe and time o’clock but I did not know how. The word was “wherehouse.” 

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I’ll tell you the Lord’s truth: I did not know what that meant, much less where it came from, and far less than that - why? But I did know that it was related to the whole “universe” or “situation” I had cooked up specifically around DeliverMe. I know I wrote it down somewhere, but it would now be a needle-in-the-haystack situation trying to find it among all my discarded notebooks. No matter. The word stuck in my mind. I figured I had, now, a title for a possible third book in a series that had begun with DeliverMe and sort of tangentially - not even - “continued” with time o’clock. 

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I also did not question in my mind the origins of the word, or the why, very much. I have learned not to do that.  Inside a writer’s mind, things happen subconsciously. I have frequently told people that when you actively write novels or fiction, I firmly believe that even when you step away from your work in progress, your mind keeps “writing.” It is a strange thing to say, but I think it’s real. A creative writer’s mind labors at untying imaginary knots in their brain even while they are doing other things. You basically train your mind to do this. This is what writers are going on about when you hear them say things like, “I have some of my best ideas in the shower.”  

 

Anyway, that is about as far as that idea went in the 2021-2022 timeframe. Fast-forward again to the spring of 2025. I had just completed work on a non-fiction book - my second, in fact - about my favorite band in the world, RUSH. (The book is called Pause, Rewind, Replay: take note, Rush fans.) I was in that all-too-familiar place where I am flailing around for something new to write. But first I thought I should take a break. I forced myself to take a rest for a period of three months, between May and August. 

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Why did I do that? I’m not completely sure. I looked back on the previous three years specifically, and knew that I had written three new books right in a row: Beyond the Shadow, a novel that is still not published because I have been trying (unsuccessfully) to find a traditional publisher; Noh Exit, a new collection of short stories; and then a 400-page book about Rush, just mentioned. 

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Those books required a lot of work, and I thought it might be prudent to impose a rest period. To this moment I am not so sure about that decision. I don’t know that it did much for me. But I stuck to it with what for me was pretty good discipline. I ordered myself not to write any new stuff during that time, and I did not. It was something that I had never done, at least not for a good twenty or twenty-five years, since the time I wrote the first Foster Mullins story in 1999 or so. So if nothing else I guess I know that I can stop, if necessary. 

 

But I did not enjoy it. Quite the opposite. I wanted to be working. I jotted notes almost daily - 97 entries total - in something I was calling “The Non-Writing Project Diary.” I considered this to be “not working” on a project, but since writing is kind of what I do by habit, technically I was still doing it. But I hated this period, and all the notes are pretty mundane. The one noteworthy and sad thing about them is that I happened to lose two people I was close to during that time, both to the scourge of cancer. One was my mother-in-law, Kathie, which obviously was a huge loss for my entire family, especially my wife. The other was my good friend of 37 years and former college roommate, who lost his battle and passed away at 55 years old on July 21. That was a heavy blow that still hurts. 

 

Anyway, I made it through that period, but was thrilled when it was over and I felt I could give myself “permission” to start a new project. One of the things I was concerned about was whether I could start up again. I found out soon enough that I could; yet it was not easy. There was some rust that had to be knocked off. But regardless, I was eager to start working again. 

 

For whatever reason, in order to feel like things are “right” with me, I need to have a writing project going. I have tried to explain this to people at various times, about how real and necessary it is for me. But it really cannot be explained. Some folks seem to get it. Others definitely do not. No matter - as Flannery O’Connor once observed: the truth does not vary, at all, according to our own understanding of it. 

 

Sometime along the way during my self-exposed exile from creative writing, there was a part of me that was anticipating the work for when the exile was over. At one point, I’m not sure when, the word “Wherehouse” came back into my head, and I thought, maybe it would be a good time to at least attempt to conceive a third book in what I now imagined, for the very first time, could someday be a trilogy. I scribbled down a page or two of random thoughts about what I remembered from the first two books, vague ideas - nothing substantial. Then it occurred to me that while I had said to myself I could not write for a while, there was never, and would never be as long as my eyes and brain still function, a period when I would not read. That will never happen. 

 

I had a thought that what I could do is go back and re-read DeliverMe and time o’clock both, in succession, and take notes. Even though I had read both novels maybe a hundred times each! This time, though, I would be trying to consider them anew (practically impossible for the author) and just try to open myself to any new ideas. 

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So I did that, and I took notes. I don’t know how fruitful this process really was, to be honest, but it did lead me to one thing: a title for the full trilogy. When I was in the process of writing DeliverMe, at some point I stumbled over a poem written by Alfred, Lord Tennyson called “In Memoriam, A.H.H.,” a very long work. I did not read the actual poem, which goes on all day. But I saw it quoted somewhere, a source that I no longer can remember. This couplet from the poem jumped out at me: 

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And all is well, tho’ faith and form

Be sunder’d in the night of fear.

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“A.H.H.,” incidentally, stood for Arthur Hugh Hallam, an English poet and writer who had been engaged to Tennyson’s sister. He had died suddenly at the age of 22, and Tennyson composed a gigantic epic inspired by this untimely tragedy. 

 

But I didn’t know anything about that. I just saw the quote somewhere completely by accident, and I liked how it sounded. I laughed to myself that I could use it as an Epigraph at the beginning of my dark thriller, DeliverMe, because I knew the story would take place over the span of one night. I also thought it was so preposterously pretentious to use a quote from a great poet like Tennyson at the front of what I envisioned as a “fun” and sort of frivolous novel - but “frivolous” in the best way, I hoped. So I used it in that book and I always liked the ominous sound of the phrase “night of fear.” 

 

Leaping ahead, when I was starting to mine the first two novels for some ideas to use in a third book, I was trying to think of a good name for the whole trilogy. I struggled with this for a long while - the best one I had previously was the “Strange Corridors Trilogy,” because there was to be at least one weird hallway in each novel, strangely. But this sounded pretty lame to me - until I found the Tennyson couplet. I thought about how one connection between all the books could be that they were all circadian stories, to be set in one night. Or, in the case of Wherehouse, one day or one night pretty much at the same time. (Trust me: it gets confusing.) That’s when the idea of calling it the “Night of Fear Trilogy” hit me, and I liked that a lot. 

 

So now I had a cool name for the third novel - Wherehouse, which I still really like and I think is unique to me - and I had a cool name for the whole trilogy. Great. What I did not have was a good idea or even much of a premise for the new novel. But I was determined to read both earlier books, take notes, and let my mind work on it for a while. I trusted my own creative process, because it had worked a number of times before. 

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I knew that I did not require a fully-fleshed out story yet. All I needed was a prompt, an initial idea. So I took notes, read other books, and I waited for something to come along. If I had any thought or idea, or even a fleeting fragment of a visual image, or a song lyric, or something cool from a film - anything - I wrote it down. And I don’t need to say I kept reading, as I always do, far and wide.  

 

It took me a few months–but eventually I did come up with a vague concept. What I wanted to do was write a new story that somehow wove elements from both of the first two novels together. This was tough because, as I have made clear, both of them were written separately, with completely different stories. While I did, as I explained, feel during the writing of the second book that it was vaguely related to the first - almost more in spirit than in substance - there was no natural way to connect the novels. But now I liked the challenge of that thought. The danger around it was that the third book might end up seeming “forced” into existence, like the writer was trying too hard to make a trilogy where there really wasn’t one. 

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Just to be completely transparent, I am not sure as I write this now if the new novel, now written, exonerates itself of that potential charge. But I figure that is for readers to decide, not me. I hope that somebody out there someday casts a verdict on that either way. 

I knew, though, that was not my concern starting out: my job was to accept the challenge and try to find a way to bring it all together, sort of, in a third novel. So I set out to do that. It was now the summer of 2025. 

 

The whole key to the new story, I imagined, was in the character of Foster Mullins. This was an instinctive thought. I’d always seen him in my mind as a bit of a wild card, the “Joker in your deck,” as I would write in Book 3 (or maybe he did - !). So I wanted to find a way to bring him into the third story. In the very beginning, I did not intend to immerse him in it in the way I eventually did. But I certainly wanted him to be a part of it. Eventually I came up with a loose concept. 

 

What if, my imagination suggested, we went back to Dave Porter, the Dad from the first novel, and sent him back in to work on a second shift with the DeliverMe app - going out to test it again. But this time, his employer has tweaked the program a little. He would be trying an updated, “2.0” version. 

 

What might be different about the second shift? The first time, I noted, Dave had tried out the system on his own. But what if there was a way he could try it in a second test with someone else - a partner? And since the whole gaming system tapped into a user’s brain, and brought in variables from their memories - what might happen if the second time around, it brought in elements from two brains? With, of course, totally different lives? 

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I liked that idea. So I paired Dave up with an individual who only came in at the tail end of DeliverMe, a younger, black woman named Chantelle. When I first wrote DeliverMe I never had any thought that this woman would become a larger character in the whole saga. But I enjoyed the idea and the inherent challenge of trying to see if I could create a buddy-type novel, and trying to develop a rapport between this guy Dave, a character who was not so far off from my own self, and Chantelle, a different individual not at all like me. 

 

When I am tasked to create a new character, particularly one not based on me, I will try to think of some individual, occasionally more than one, that I either knew or was acquainted with at one point or another earlier in my life. I will try to “model” the character after that person, but loosely: it’s a weird process. I will have that person in mind while imagining my character, but at the same time I won’t see the character as that person. So I did that with Chantelle: my mind went to a youngish woman I worked with for about two years once, and whom I really liked. I based Chantelle on this lady, and told myself to just go with it. 

 

I felt that there was enough to start with now. So I settled in to work. But now the issue was that I didn’t have a way to weave in Foster Mullins, when I instinctively still believed he had to be the real driver, somehow, of Book 3. Then I had an idea about seeing if there was a way that Mullins could somehow “hack” the system, the DeliverMe app that Dave and Chantelle were testing, in order to insert weird stuff from his head into the general mix. How would that work? I had no idea. 

 

Furthermore, Foster Mullins, remember, was a writer himself, a fiction guy, among other things. He made things up, on the regular. So what if he was not only putting things into the system from his own life, but also putting in stuff that he literally made up? While poor Dave and Chantelle had to deal with whatever weird stuff was coming at them? 

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I did not know how any of that would or even could work. But it was all recognizably, to me, crazy enough to try. Additionally, I knew this concept sort of opened up the “rule book” - or maybe a better way to say it is, it helped to dispense with it. That felt right. 

 

Then I had my last idea for Book 3, which to me seemed like the cherry on top of everything. I had written Book 1 “myself.” “Foster Mullins” had “written” Book 2. Therefore, the only way to “write” Book 3 and do it right - which after all was intended to be a follow-up to both stories - was to have the third novel be “co-written” by both of them. Now that, I believed, was some crazy fun.

 

This thought was also so nuts to me that I started getting knotted up about how it might all “work.” But once I thought of it, it was the only way to go. I was sure that if I could write a book in that way, almost deliberately giving myself a kind of temporary schizophrenia, the result would be a really weird, weird, crazy book. One that might be difficult to follow and could throw those few readers who have read the first two books right off the tracks. But it would be really fun to try. And a very tough challenge. 

 

So, my row to hoe, as it were, now lay before me. And as Dave Porter says in the final novel, “The Lord hates a coward.”

 

I started writing Wherehouse on August 15, one day after my youngest son’s 13th birthday (also the Feast of the Assumption, a nod to my Roman Catholic upbringing), and I finished composing it on February 10. And here we are now. The novel, which will be published on April 1, has been set down; the full “Night of Fear Trilogy” is, at this writing, nearly complete. 

 

What else is there to say? I have written a very long essay about a trilogy of novels few people will ever read. But if you want the truth, at this moment, I am happy about it. I did something I did not think I could ever do. I wrote a whole trilogy of novels. I may not have an agent, or a publisher, or a contract; let alone a whole “apparatus” behind what I do, or a burgeoning Army of devoted readers. But these books are mine. I wrote them, and I am proud of them. No one else could have produced them. 

 

To anyone who has come this whole way, thank you again, and one final word: 

 

I wish you a very fun time escaping from reality for a while, should you choose to enter the Wherehouse and/or experience the entire Night of Fear Trilogy. 

 

Oh, and by the way, although I do not have any idea where he is, I know that Foster Mullins sends his regards. 

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Jude Joseph Lovell

February 21, 2026

Parkville, MD