Interview with Jason Starr on "The Pack"

Over at Spinetingler, I have an interview with Jason Starr about his new novel, The Pack.

Here is an excerpt:

Both The Pack and your previous novel, Panic Attack, had a lot to do with the financial and emotional pressures of the modern nuclear family, as opposed to the singles scene as presented in The Follower. Was this shift deliberate?

I wrote an earlier novel, Nothing Personal, which was also about a family with a kid, but I wanted to take The Pack in a different direction than my recent crime fiction. So, I was trying to move away from Panic Attack. After I wrote Lights Out, The Follower and Panic Attack all in order I wanted to do something a little different, more of a post-9/11 type of suspense novel where it starts off in the real world and where weirdness slowly intrudes, but with very real, viable characters. That’s what I was going for here. I don’t think I’m tying to write “family” novels, but I see that now that you point it out.

Like in many of your novels, New York City plays a crucial role in The Pack. How did you pick the locations?

I try to find the neighborhood that would be best to tell the story. So, for Simon, he starts out as a high-paid advertising executive, so I knew I had to put him in a somewhat affluent area. I chose 89^th and Columbus because I used to live there on that corner, so I knew it very well from my own experience. On a side note, the building that Martin Scorsese filmed in Taxi Driver—where Robert DeNiro’s character lived and did the famous “You Talkin’ To Me?” scene—was on 89^th and Columbus, the same corner where I lived, but it’s a different building now. It was a tenement, but it was torn down. The condo where I lived there in my 20s is still there. So, I knew the building very well. I’ve done that before—I’ll choose a location because I have personally spent a lot of time there. It saves having to do research, but it also keeps it personal for me in my head. I felt like I wanted the reader to identify with Simon, and I wanted to pretend I was like Simon in that situation, so thinking in an area that’s familiar to me helped me accomplish that as a writer.