Last year, I read a book I really, really loved. It was MM, but it wasn’t romance. It was very dark, very creepy, and the sense of place and atmosphere totally blew me away. That book was Kraken, by M Caspian. I read and reviewed it—and gushed about it—before M and I exchanged a few emails and decided that hey, we should write something together.
That’s what I love so much about writing. It’s fun, and collaborating with someone else is twice as fun! Remember when you were a kid and you got all your dolls out and started playing with another kid? It’s just like that, except there are a lot more sex scenes. The story grows as you tell it (I’m not much of a planner) and the creative input from another person takes you in some wonderfully unexpected directions.
It turns out that M and I are both really interested in what makes people tick. Or, more to the point, what makes people good or bad. Where does it come from? Is it written in our DNA, or is it circumstantial? In a disaster movie when the world is ending and all the rules are thrown out, where do you end up? Do you become predator or prey, and are those the only options?
These are unanswerable questions, probably, but we like to explore them in our writing. The story we wrote together, FALLOUT is a book about a big disaster, told on a very small scale. Here’s the blurb:
High-school boyfriends Jack Haldane and Bastian Wade thought everything would be perfect once they reunited at college, putting disapproving parents and small-town attitudes firmly in the past. Now Jack’s on track for a PhD scholarship and a career as a researcher, and Bastian . . . well, living inside a broken body and trailing along in Jack’s shadow didn’t feature in his lofty teenage ambitions. A weekend camping trip back home offers a chance for them to reconnect, but an ugly confrontation with the local motorcycle gang is only the start of their problems. When disaster occurs and the world unravels, will Bastian and Jack manage to hold on to each other, or fall further apart as they try to survive?
FALLOUT by Lisa Henry and M. Caspian will be available on April 17.