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I’ve had a long association with North Carolina. I first went to summer camp in Weaverville (just outside Asheville) when I was ten years old. My father and his brother had also gone to this same place when they were children, Camp Sequoyah. Over the next ten years I spent most of my summers there, learning woodcraft, hiking and camping skills and eventually being invited to attend the more rugged and elite Camp Tsali, which was a version of what later came to be known as Outward Bound camps. I went on to work at Camp Sequoyah for several years, running the kitchen and the camp store. I fell in love with the Carolina mountains back then. Then shortly after hurricane Andrew destroyed the section of Miami where I lived and left us without power for nearly a month, my wife and I decided we needed to explore other options for summertime living. We went looking in western North Carolina for a getaway cabin and eventually settled on a place just outside of Boone. After writing two more Thorn novels, Off the Chart and Blackwater Sound, I thought it was again time to give Thorn a vacation. While Forests of the Night opens in Coral Gables, I quickly move the action to the Smoky mountains. The book was written shortly after the events of 9/11 and the heroism and self-sacrifice of that day was much on my mind. It was a simple transition to go from thoughts of altruism to the actions of Tsali, the Cherokee man who sacrificed his life so that some members of his tribe would be allowed to stay in their homeland in North Carolina. There is debate about the historical accuracy of this story about Tsali, but it suited my purposes. I began only with that one thing: Tsali’s sacrifice. The other two major ingredients that had been on my mind for a while was the research I’d been doing on facial coding—the science of reading peoples’ emotions in the facial muscles. I was also thinking a good bit about a friend of mine who has a child with schizophrenia. The voices he hears are as real to him as normal reality is to the rest of us. They give him instructions and direct his actions. I thought it would be a great literary challenge to go inside the mind of a schizophrenic. So all in all, this book was a radical departure in many ways from the books I’d been writing. The subjects make for a pretty odd assortment and the locale is very different. But I found the whole experience of writing about such different people and such a different part of the world very revitalizing.
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Contact James W. Hall
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