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Parade
Bestselling Author Karin Slaughter Shares Her Favorite Books
By Michael Giltz,
5 hours ago
Best-selling author Karin Slaughter shares some of her favorite books with Parade. Slaughter has every right to enjoy a victory lap. More than 20 years into her writing career, she succeeds with both stand-alone thrillers and an ongoing series. Slaughter’s books have sold more than 40 million copies worldwide. The TV drama Will Trent starring Ramón Rodríguez [based on one of her characters] is ABC’s biggest new show and practically its #1 show outside sports, period. And it’s still growing in popularity, with season three already greenlit.
Her latest Will Trent novel– This Is Why We Lied– should reach its biggest audience yet. The story is a key turning point for the character–fans of the show have a lot of catching up to do, since Trent is on his honeymoon. And it’s also a playful updating of a classic, Golden Age “closed circle” mystery a la Agatha Christie. Will and his wife are celebrating their marriage by vacationing at an isolated mountain resort. When one of the staff is brutally murdered, Trent faces a limited number of suspects, all of whom have a motive for the crime. Is this the worst honeymoon ever?
“I think it was the one they were meant to have,” says Slaughter. “It was me saying, ‘Wow, I've never written a locked room mystery. I'd love to do that. And how can I do it in a way that doesn't fall into the familiar tropes? I mean, everybody knows Agatha Christie was the master of this. And she tended to kill people who you're like, yeah, this person definitely deserves to die. So I can see why everybody is a suspect. So I thought, let's get someone who's a little more complicated than that, who has a life and who has hopes and wishes and dreams and let's get into her character, in her psyche.”
Clearly, success and more readers are not enough for Slaughter. Like any major author, she’s laser focused on the writing that powers her career. Yet she’s always driven by a calling to keep the issues that drive her stories front and center. This Is Why We Lied employs black humor and a knowing nod to Christie, but it never shies away from the domestic violence and addiction these very real characters face every day. It’s not just the jokes that land here; it’s also the punches and the pain.
“When I was a kid growing up, my grandmother was being horrifically abused by my grandfather,” says Slaughter. “And she didn't have her own money, she had nine kids, she couldn't work outside of the house, she just had no resources and she lived in an incredibly rural area. It wouldn't have been easy for her to walk out. So I think about her. And it's never easy. Even women who have all the resources in the world, to think about leaving your house right now, don't look back? It's easy to sit from a place of safety and make value judgments; it’s quite another thing to be in the middle of it.”
“I grew up in a small southern town where people thought I was very strange,” says Slaughter. “And so did she. And I was told constantly that I should tone it down, that I shouldn't be interested in these things, that I certainly shouldn't be writing about these things. Flannery O'Connor was writing about these things in a very honest way and made a lot of dark, humorous jokes about the people around her. That to me was a revelation because I thought, ‘Oh, wow, you can do this.’ As a young woman in the South, seeing another woman in the South had done this was inspirational.”
“I loved Encyclopedia Brown,” said Slaughter about the series of kids books about a boy detective. Each mystery contained clues with the solution on the final page spelling out how Brown solved it. “I think that's also something very important to do as an adult writer. You have to play fair with the reader. Make sure when they get to the end of the story, they're not saying what the hell just happened, they're saying, ‘Oh, I can't believe I missed these clues.’
“And weirdly, I absolutely loved Erma Bombeck. I don't know how I came across these books. I just thought she was hilarious. And yeah, here I am a little girl and living in the South. There was something about her humor–just turning the everyday into something so funny and dramatic that really tickled me. And so I think those two writers were really informative of my view of what writing should be. You know, the puzzle aspect and then the humor of it, because it's a very Southern thing, that sort of dark humor. That was something that was writ large in my family. So, to me, that was the way to be a writer.’”
“One of the books that I got as a kid was actually from my ninth grade teacher, who was a mentor to me and later in life became a friend of mine,” says Slaughter. “She loved Shakespeare. That was her wheelhouse. She gave me a book of sonnets and…I'm weird. I have a weird reaction to poetry because I think a lot of poetry lies. And I think that's part of the reason she gave it to me. It was her way of giving me a lesson on how you can use words as a tool and how you can fashion language to say one thing when most people think it's saying another. And that's really the crux of writing a good thriller, right? It was a paperback. And it was actually from her own library, which made it more meaningful. So it was well thumbed. But she never broke the spine and she [said], ‘Don't break the spine!’”
Did Slaughter dive right into it?
“I was such a stupid kid, I was like, ‘Oh, sonnets. Great,’” laughs Slaughter. “And then I got bored. I didn't have anything else that was holding my attention. And I started reading. Keep in mind, this was before Wikipedia and the internet and all that. It took a lot for me to understand the time and place of Shakespeare and what these poems really meant. It takes a very good poet to understand their audience and say, ‘Well, I'm not showing off. I'm really trying to communicate something.’ If you look at Amanda Gorman, for instance, she definitely speaks in a universal language and people can enjoy her work. But if you really dig down into it, there's such a deeper meaning. That's one of the things I think I discovered [from Shakespeare]. Language can be a weapon, it can be a tool, and it can also be a door that lets people cross through to a deeper understanding.”
“Unfortunately, I'm at that age where a lot of my friends are dealing with the death of a parent, or a loved one. There's a very slim novel called Grief Is The Thing With Feathers by Max Porter. It's a very short read. And it's something that you read when you're ready to read. But it's just such a lovely little reflection on loss and love in a family.”
Karin Slaughter often mentions The Talented Mr. Ripley as not just one of the best thrillers of all time, but one of the best books, period. She offered praise for it when Parade wrote about the 222 Best Books of All Time. We asked her to tell us about the first time she discovered it.
“I first read it the summer of my senior year and I don't remember how I came across it,” says Slaughter. “But after that, I read all the Ripleys, all the Patricia Highsmith [novels]. “Just the cleanliness of the storytelling– there's nothing superfluous in there. They're very small, slim volumes of work and there's so much story in them.
“One thing I really love about the Netflix adaptation? A friend of mine was complaining about this. She said, ‘Oh, it's stairs, stairs, stairs and stairs.’ That’s classic Highsmith! The most mundane part of life was something that she always focused on so well in the books.
"One of the most delightful things that I've experienced as an author [happened when] I was in France. My publisher in France also published Patricia Highsmith. They have all of these letters that she wrote when she was living there, complaining about the fact that she could not get a functioning telephone in her house. When she had to make a phone call, she had to go up the street to the store and nothing ever worked. She would try to make long distance calls and she couldn't. The Ripley novels–if you read them–are riddled with Tom trying to place long distance phone calls, and always being stymied. To stake a good deal of her work on the shittiness of the French telephone system? I thought that was just the level of pettiness I could get behind.”
“Margaret Atwood's written so much,” says Slaughter. “Fantasy. Sci-fi. Dystopia. It's really commendable that she's able to do that and take these big swings. Because what other author would do that kind of thing? And would have the ability to do it? She's even written poetry. She's written short stories. To me, that's the sign of success–being able to just do whatever type of books you want to do. If I had to choose one, it might be Alias Grace.
“I remember reading The World According to Garp ,” says Slaughter. “It was a paperback and that’s a super thick novel to read in paperback. I had taken it on a business trip with me, so it took up quite a bit of space in my suitcase. My idea going out was I'm just going to have to get rid of this thing, if it's not worth it. And not only did I take it on the entire trip, but I brought it home with me. Usually I'll leave something. But I thought, ‘I can't. I can't let go of it.’ I still have it in my collection. That was 6000 years ago and I just saw it on the bookshelf in my office.”
“Fantastic,” says Slaughter about Donoghue in general and Slammerkin in particular. “There's another author who just bounces around and does whatever she wants and it's great. I love when you feel comfortable in a world and then an author [says], ‘Actually, now everything's gonna change.’ Because that takes so much thought and preparation. And you really have to understand structure. It seems like a really easy thing when you're reading it. Oh, well, I'm going to have this big twist! But if you look at those novels, if you look at Gone Girl, for instance, it takes work to be able to lull you into believing one truth and then you show them the actual truth. And it makes sense, there's a logical framework, it's exciting, it's interesting. That’s talent.”
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