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Moving to a new location is a theme encountered from the
classics to contemporary genre. In a physical move, the hero leaves behind all
that he or she has known. This can include family and friendships, a career and
coworkers, hobbies or volunteer work, and the familiarity of home. That
familiarity can extend to everything that affects a daily life, from the local
grocery to a dentist to places the hero has passed every day without thought.
The move throws the hero into the unknown. Perhaps they move
to a small town in pursuit of serenity, only to discover the house they move
into is haunted—a theme which I used in Vicki’s Key. Moving can be found in
horror, thrillers, suspense—but also in romance and comedy.
Regardless of the genre, the hero encounters the unexpected
and may go through trials and tribulations before emerging on the other side,
better for the experience they had undergone, because in the process they discovered
strengths and talents and even renewed purpose.
My mother was born in Spring Hill, Tennessee long before the
auto plant was built that caused the tiny town of 416 citizens to swell to more
than 37,000. She was grown before their house had a telephone, and her grandparents
that lived in the county never did get indoor plumbing. It was expected that my
mother would never move but would live out her entire lifetime in that town of
416 (give or take a death or birth) much as her mother and her grandmother had.
But Mom married a man that would become an FBI Special Agent
at a time when agents were transferred on a routine basis. By the time I came
along, they were living in Washington, DC and over the next ten years we would
move to Cleveland, Ohio, Waldwick and Washington Township, New Jersey, Monterey
and Pacific Grove, California, and to the Mississippi Delta. The woman that was
accustomed to living in a town where one could walk to all four points and
literally where everyone knew her name found herself living in an apartment in
downtown DC and homes in the north that were completely different from the
culture where she had grown up.
I never experienced fear or trepidation when we were told we
were moving, because my mother made every move into a game. Moving excited and
invigorated her, and she passed those positive thoughts to her children. She
treated each move like the new chapter that it was; knowing doors would open
and our lives would be richer and deeper for the experience. Not every move was
positive; apartment living with three young children and thin walls had to have
been nerve-wracking for a young mother—but I remember how proud she was when
she navigated a city bus with us one day, purely for the experience. And though
I was convinced our home in Mississippi was haunted, she found the silver
lining—and blamed my nightmares on Barnabas Collins.
As I look back at my moves, I remember participating in the
Monarch Butterfly Parade in California; the swing set I loved in Cleveland and
how tree roots buckled the sidewalks, which made walking them an adventure akin
to Middle Earth. I remember Christmas in shorts on a California day, and
Christmas bundled under so many layers that my elbows couldn’t bend in New
Jersey.
And later, I would move alone from a sleepy town in the
Mississippi Delta back to the place of my birth in Washington, DC, an
experience I drew from when writing Kickback.
The heroes in books might relish the move, or they might
seek to avert it, but when the book opens to find our hero heading for an unfamiliar
place, we know whatever they find will forever transform them and make them
into the people they eventually become.
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