Stories Are Found Things: A Guest Post by Scott Carson
History and mystery collide in this gripping race against time in Scott Carson’s latest. Read on for an exclusive essay from the former Monthly Pick author (The Chill) on writing Departure 37.
Hardcover $28.99
Departure 37: A Novel
Departure 37: A Novel
By Scott Carson
In Stock Online
Hardcover $28.99
Past mysteries reappear in this terrifying tale in which forgotten Cold War secrets make a disturbing reappearance, from a writer Stephen King has called “a master.”
Past mysteries reappear in this terrifying tale in which forgotten Cold War secrets make a disturbing reappearance, from a writer Stephen King has called “a master.”
Stories are found things, Stephen King says in ON WRITING, and DEPARTURE 37 certainly was for me. I was on a hiking trip near Moosehead Lake in Maine when I saw a sign commemorating the crew of a B-52 that crashed during a blizzard in 1963. Bits of the fuselage are scattered through the crater the wreck left in the woods. Remarkably, two men survived, including one whose parachute didn’t deploy upon ejection. I did some reading on the accident and became fascinated by the idea that the same planes (not the same design, the literal same planes) that came off the assembly line in the Cold War remain in the sky today – and will remain in combat for another 25 years, minimum. I was also intrigued by the history America had of – oops! – losing the occasional nuclear weapon, including an armed warhead that would have exploded in North Carolina if not for two crossed wires. We’ve come that close.
They were good stories, but not a book.
One found story has a way of colliding with another, though.
I grew up in Bloomington, Indiana, not far from the Crane Naval Surface Warfare Center (a thousand miles from the nearest ocean, it is the third-largest naval installation in the world). Crane’s classified research was the subject of countless urban legends when I was a kid, similar to the Montauk Project that fed the Duffer Brothers in their creation of Stranger Things, and I’d always wanted to do something with it. These stories then met the contemporary spark: artificial intelligence and the era of the flawless Deep Fake. What if, I wondered, an AI system made calls to commercial airline pilots in the middle of the night warning them not to fly? How many pilots would heed the call? Not many, I thought.
But what if the calls seemed to come from their own mothers?
That might hit a little harder.
And then we were off. A B-52 that vanished in a Maine blizzard during the Cold War, a classified operation at Crane during the same era, and the intersection with our modern moment. Imagine, I thought, if we’d lost a nuclear-equipped plane while on the verge of war…and then it came back. What would damage control look like for that little dilemma?
Enter 16-year-old Charlie Goodwin and her unlikely allies, an alcoholic conspiracy theorist, Abe Zimmer, and his weary grandson, Lawrence, while on a separate storyline, tucked away in a lab at Crane, Marty Hazelton, a brilliant but damaged scientist, works Oppenheimer-style to save the world from the nuclear exchange that nearly occurred in October 1962.
The book was a joy to write. I hope it will be a joy to read. DEPARTURE 37 calls up some of my great storytelling loves and influences: Spielberg and King and Crichton, The Twilight Zone and The X-Files. I think it’s the kind of story we can all use now – characters challenged by paranoia, old sins, and new technology, resisting with courage and compassion.
Scott Carson