Bookwild - No Road Home by John Fram: Gothic Thrills, A Toxic Televangelist Family, and a Devoted Father

Episode Date: July 23, 2024

On this episode, I talk with John Fram about his genre-bending gothic thriller No Road Home.  We dive into how he found inspiration for the story in his dad, his use of Biblical imagery, and the touches of horror throughout.  No Road Home SynopsisFor years, single father Toby Tucker has done his best to keep his sensitive young son, Luca, safe from the bigotry of the world. But when Toby marries Alyssa Wright—the granddaughter of a famed televangelist known for his grandiose Old Testament preaching—he can’t imagine the world of religion, wealth, and hate that he and Luca are about to enter.A trip to the Wright family’s compound in sun-scorched Texas soon turns hellish when Toby realizes that Alyssa and the rest of her brood have dangerous plans for him and his son. The situation only grows worse when a freak storm cuts off the roads and the family patriarch is found murdered, stabbed in the chest on the roof of their sprawling mansion.Suspicion immediately turns to Toby, but when his son starts describing a spectral figure in a black suit lurking around the house with unfinished business in mind, Toby realizes this family has more than murderer to conceal—and to fear.As the Wrights close in on Luca, no one is prepared for the lengths Toby will go in the fight to clear his name and protect his son in this “grand gothic story as enthralling as it is terrifying."  Get Bookwild MerchCheck Out My Stories Are My Religion SubstackCheck Out Author Social Media PackagesCheck out the Bookwild Community on PatreonCheck out the Imposter Hour Podcast with Liz and GregFollow @imbookwild on InstagramOther Co-hosts On Instagram:Gare Billings @gareindeedreadsSteph Lauer @books.in.badgerlandHalley Sutton @halleysutton25Brian Watson @readingwithbrian 

I grew up in the church and I remember as a kid, you know, reading the Bible and just being like shocked. You know what I mean? Like you sort of grow up in the church. You're reading all the nice stuff, right? And like I remember as a kid this moment of like horror when you really start reading, especially like the Old Testament and stuff. It's like you're like, has this been in here the whole time? I wanted to push back a little bit on what felt like somewhere between a trope and an unhelpful cliche. Obviously, we have a long history of men doing horrible stuff, but I was like, can I find space in this genre for a fundamentally decent straight man? It felt almost like a challenge in a weird way. This week, I get to talk with John Fram, who is the author of No Road Home. This is, it's a longer book, but it is so worth the read. Like, it is just amazing.

It has all of these gothic elements and deals with memory palaces and all kinds of things. But here's the actual synopsis. For years, single father Toby Tucker has done his best to keep his sensitive young son, Luca, safe from the bigotry of the world. But when Toby marries Alyssa Wright, the granddaughter of a famed televangelist known for his grandiose Old Testament preaching, he can't imagine the world of religion, wealth, and hate that he and Luca are about to enter. A trip to the Wright family's compound in Sunscorched, Texas soon turns hellish when Toby realizes that Alyssa and the rest of her brood might have some very strange plans for Toby

and his son. The situation only grows worse when a freak storm cuts off the roads and the family patriarch is found murdered, stabbed through the heart on the roof of the family's mansion. Suspicion immediately turns to Toby when his son starts describing a spectral figure in a black suit lurking around the house with unfinished business in mind, Toby realizes this family has more than murder to be afraid of. And as the rights close in on Luca, no one is prepared for the links Toby will go in the fight to clear his name and protect his son. There's such an added element of suspense to this one because the main character has a kid with him and he's slowly figuring out that these people that he's with are pretty terrible and are doing some pretty terrible things.

there's so much I want to say about this book, but I said this in my review as well. You don't want me to talk too much about it because the reveals that happen throughout the whole book, but especially at the very end, it's just worth not knowing all of the great things about this book and going in as blind as you can. But if you like Gothic thrillers with rich people behaving poorly or challenging, um, religious structures as well, then this book will be for you. And you will love it. And then you need to DM me so we can talk about it. That being said, let's hear from John. So before we dive into your book, I did want to get to know a little bit about you. And I wanted to know when was the first time that you knew you wanted to be an author or you were like, I want to write something. It's funny. I was, I remember really clearly, actually, I was 12 years old, and I had always really enjoyed reading and writing. Like, I read a lot of books and, you know, always did it as a hobby. And then I went through this period when I was 12 where I was sick for like months. I got some sort of bug and I was out of school for a really long time. And I remember thinking at the time, like, again, knowing nothing about work or the real world, I was like, man, this would really suck if I was, you know.

sick and I wouldn't be able to go to my job and I'd be in a lot of trouble. And like, I remember I was reading Mary Higgins Clark at the time. I was on like a Mary Higgins Clark binge. And I looked at her and I was like, she seems to do all right. I'll just be, you know, Mary Higgins Clark. Not realizing, you know, she's like one of the most successful novelists of all time, right? Like, you know, lavishly wealthy and incredibly lucky and and very talented. I was like, I'll just be her. That's fine. And that honestly is what got me started on it. Yeah, exactly. I was like, whatever. This would be fine. Cool. That's awesome.

It was fun. Not that you were sick, but that you were like, I'm going to be her. Yeah, that's cool. How do you approach your writing process? Do you plan it out before you start writing? Are you a pancer? I've got to know basically where it's going in terms of,

if not necessarily the plot, I want to know the mood. Right. I really want to know where the story is going to go. emotionally and I really like to have a couple, I like to have at least two or three moments where they really excite me like scenes or images that can sort of like guide me through the book. And at first line,

so it's like I sort of assemble the sort of framework in my head. But I don't really like to do super detailed outlining. I find that I do the best work if I can do the first draft sort of as quickly as possible, like a rush, like you're trying to experience as close to real time as you can or i do um and that's typically also by hand so it's really messy and like all over the place yeah which helps me then because it's like you don't have that temptation that i think a lot of writers have or i did early on where you're done and it's so much work you're like this has to be good i'm going to send it out like the

great thing about working by hand is you know you're going to have to redo it and so that allows your brain a lot of space to really reconsider the book and sort of see what's working and what's not. So I would say that if I outline that first draft is almost an outline at points because the writing is sparse and it's just trying to get through it as quickly as possible. But I can't get going until I have at least two or three powerful images and like the last page, basically. Yeah, that makes sense. What about your characters? Do you try to get to know before you start writing or do you get to know them as you're writing? Again, a bit of both.

I think that for me, the most important thing is my hero. And like the dynamics that are going to drive the book. So in this case, it was very much about Toby and Luca. That was the heart, right? And I knew that once I kind of put them in the Lionsden, so to speak, the rest of the book would sort of come up around them. so that was huge like it was that and then the image from the very first page of the book of this old man dying on the roof of his house as the rain starts to come in and like he's looking at the stars like

that image had been with me literally since I was a teenager like I had it a long time ago and I'd never knew what to do with it and then when I had Toby and Luca and I knew they were going to a TV preacher's house I was like oh this could be the guy and so once I had those two two things. The rest of the characters really did fill themselves in. And that's again, part of what's so fun about that first draft is like it really feels like you're just showing up at a party. Like you don't really know who you're going to find along the way. And that's a really it's a really wild feeling, honestly. Yeah, that's got to be kind of trippy. Just like meeting them as you're writing. What draws you to writing horror or thrillers?

You know, it's such a funny question. I don't know. because I didn't grow up. I read horror, but I for me growing up I was always reading thrillers and suspense kind of of all flavors and so the idea of being a horror writer, not that there's anything wrong with the genre but it just feels odd because it's not what I think about. You know, I don't really think about myself in terms of genre. So with my first book, The Brightlands, that was actually just a police procedural. It was like a thriller up until the rewrite and then when I was rewriting the book all this supernatural stuff just sort of started

creeping into it and really galvanized it and gave it this really cool energy and so with this I was like okay I'm really interested in the idea of prophecy and I'm really interested in the idea of the question of like if a prophet could really see the future why didn't he stop his own murder or did he you know what I mean like is this a scam is it not And I don't know. And then somehow the other thing that crept into it was ghosts or the idea of, is there a ghost in the house? Is there not a ghost in the house? Because I think that these themes of the future in the past really are what interested me.

Seeing the future and being haunted by the past colliding. That was super cool to me. But in terms of like, are you a horror novelist? There was one time where I sat down where I was like, I'm going to write my like horror magnum opus. And it was going to be my second book. And it was a disaster. It didn't work at all because if you go into it self-consciously, it's not interesting. I feel like the horror, the supernatural, the surreal, like that has to arise out of the story and their characters.

Yeah. And you're in real trouble if you tell yourself, I'm going to be an ex-novelist because then you're telling the book what it's going to be before it's even been written. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense, too. what was your like main inspiration for this story definitely Toby and Luca old man dying on the top of his house and then as it got into it pretty quickly I realized that the Toby had come from you're not aware of these things until you're

like almost done with the first draft so it's a weird process right like it seems like it's just all flowing out of nowhere. And then with enough time, you kind of catch up to your subconscious. But Toby very much was inspired by my dad, not in any kind of direct sense. Like my dad and Toby, you're very different men. But I had had a really rough patch kind of coming out of COVID. You know, the Brightlands did well, but it was still COVID books. You don't really know if you have a career or not because most of us, I wouldn't say

it bombed. It did great for a COVID book. but it wasn't like, oh, I have a career. I have contracts and expectations and all this stuff. You don't know what you're doing. And I also, I just went through a bad patch and I kind of had to shut down for a little bit, stop working on stuff, just take a breather. And I wound up staying with my parents for a little bit.

And I hadn't done that as an adult. You know what I mean? I left the house when I was 20 or 18 and then I moved out of town when I was like 21 and never went back really. And so coming back a decade later and seeing your parents, both getting older and also sort of having the the distance on them was a great feeling because then I was like I realized just how fundamentally decent they're both great but in this instance I realize how fundamentally decent my dad is and once I had that I was like you know there's not a lot of good men in this

genre of fiction right right and we can talk about why that is but I was like this is it seemed like an opportunity to have a really cool father, like a really loving father, and kind of pushing him to the absolute limits of what he can endure. That was really, really exciting. Yeah. Yeah, I really loved how much he loved his son and he like really was willing to do anything for him and like put it into action, basically. It was a really cool through line. And you're right, you don't always, it's like the men are always the killers or something like that. Not always, but I totally get what you're saying with that. So it was cool just having him be like a purely good dad.

Precisely. And I missed, I wanted to push back a little bit on what felt like somewhere between a trope and an unhelpful cliche, right? Like I feel like men, obviously we have a long history of men doing horrible. horrible stuff, but I was like, can I find space in this genre for a fundamentally decent, straight man? It felt almost like a challenge in a weird way. And it was really, you know what I mean? I was like, this is such a bizarre. It was fascinating. It was a really interesting process to figure him out and realize how much I could relate to him. And yeah, I miss the shit out of him, honestly, both of these characters. Like, I think about them every day. It's a really weird feeling.

Yeah, I loved them. I loved them a lot. There's also a lot of religious imagery in the book as well. And how did you approach weaving some of the biblical imagery into a Gothic thriller? But I even noticed as I was reading it, I was like, actually biblical stories actually lend themselves really well for this genre. Yeah, I grew up in the church. And I remember as a kid, you know, reading, the Bible and just being like shocked. Do you know what I mean? Like you sort of grow up in the church. You're reading all the nice stuff, right? And like this isn't even really me shitting on religion. I don't think it's like all bad or anything.

But I remember as a kid this moment of like horror when you really start reading, especially like the Old Testament and stuff. It's like you're like, has this been in here the whole time? Like the violence, the goal. the sex, the genuine, like, almost HP Lovecraft levels of, like, cosmic horror. Of, like, you know, you read the book of Job, it's basically like a lovecrafting concept of, like, two deities toying with a man to see how far they can push him, right? And that just boggled my mind.

Like, I was like, this is genuinely scary. And then I lock a lot of people in our generation. I got really into the left behind books as a kid, like the books about the rapture. And they got me reading, you know, the Book of Revelation is like probably the most impressive piece of, I don't even know how to classify it, like horror literature or like epic horror or surreal epic horror.

It's just insanely wild. And so, and that made a huge, huge, huge impression on me. And so I think that the biblical imagery came out of, not necessarily because I was like had this huge axe to grind against Christianity it was more of just like okay if we're going to take the principles of the religion seriously which is to say that the god of the old testament and the god of the new testament are the same god right like that terrifying vindictive force hasn't gone anywhere yeah what happens if you pissed that guy off you know what I mean like what would really happen to your house if one of these old

Old Testament punishments was placed on you. And so for a long time, I sort of categorized the book as like, what if Agatha Christie but God? You know what I mean? Like you had this Agatha Christi plot and then like the Lord God himself sort of just shows up with his own agenda. Yes, that is perfect. I love that explanation of it. Um, since speaking of an Old Testament God, when I read that their house was called Ramora, like the first thing I thought of was Gamora, which is a city god that just like ruins because of its sinfulness, was that on purpose? I would be totally honest with you. When you said that, like when I read the questions before this, I was like, oh, maybe that's where it came from. I had read actually, I had gone back to

Genesis and read Abraham's story because in the patriarchs, Abraham, Jacob, Moses. Like I'd read the patriarchs, just to get the feel for it again. And I'm showing my ignorance now because I, what happened was is Abraham has a house called, or like an estate, basically, that starts with an R. And so I was writing the book. And like I said, I write pretty quickly and I try to do it pretty instinctively. And so I wrote the word Ramora thinking, It was a reference to Abraham's house, to Abraham's estate, because he's the great patriarch.

But then later I went back and I realized that it wasn't, but I kept it because I had the line that a character says early in the book where they say, it sounds biblical, but it's not, like everything else about this family, right? It sounds biblical. But, yeah, Ramora is definite. I mean, Ramora and Sodom and Gomorrah are such complicated concepts anyway. I think it, I honestly don't know how that didn't occur to me. I'm going to be totally honest with you.

I'm crazy because I was like, this is like brilliant foreshadowing with like biblical stuff. So that's awesome though that it just worked out. So the other thing that I loved is that you title the chapters like biblical chapters. So how did you come up with that? And did you feel brilliant when you came up with it? because I would. It was, so you mean how the chapter headings are like one colon one, one colon two? Yeah.

Man, this is getting into spoiler territory. Actually, let me see if I can do the polite version. If you can't, that's okay. So part of it came out of just a way to organize the material, obviously, and you want to put your own flavor on things if you can. practically I just I kind of wanted the book to just have a a distinctive feel to it you know I think that you look at like Stephen King he does this a lot like he's really good with like part names and place and like chapter names and segmenting stuff out several authors do this really well but not a lot

of people think hard about how they organize the book and I feel like it can make a really cool impression on your reader yeah I agree like all remember it for sure and I really liked it as I was reading it. I hope you're enjoying this episode of Book Wild and if you are, could I ask you a favor? Could you go and rate and review this podcast and whatever platform you're listening? Ratings and reviews make the biggest difference in discoverability of the podcast and I definitely want to find all of our fellow thriller readers out there. So if you could go rate the podcast and leave a short review, that would make a huge difference. Thank you. And let's get back to the show. So another thing that you touch on, two of the characters

and look have like a penchant for memory palaces and so I was wondering what made you kind of want to have both of these characters be obsessed with that concept I think for me um again in the way we were talking about how the past haunts this book I was also really interested in the way we think about the past and the way we think about times in our life and I think it's very interesting to me the way that Jerome has constructed a memory palace to accomplish one thing, and Toby has constructed it to do the exact opposite. And I found that it started with Jerome's memory palace. That was there from the beginning because I was really interested in the idea of this house

having an entire wing dedicated to recreating your life. Like that just struck me as really haunting and like pathetic and really sad in a way. Right? Right? And you're just like, how strange. And again, it's like also when you're writing in the Gothic genre, you want to do these weird old houses, right? Like all the great Gothic houses have something bizarre about them. And I was like, this is great. This is actually really interesting. But then in the revisions of the book, Toby's Memory Palace came up. That was actually something that my editor suggested. And it's a really brilliant suggestion. Lone at Atria. she was awesome because she was like, you know, you've got both of these characters who are very haunted by memories. One's trying to hide them, like push them away and one's trying to bring them back. If you think about it, doesn't Toby also have a memory palace of his own? And I was like, that's really interesting.

And then it also allows you to do something that I was fascinated with, which was like, what kind of connections can you make between these two men who were so diametrically opposed? Yes. Yeah. You get that. And so once, sorry, yeah. So once you have that, you're like, oh, shit, that's really, you can do a lot with that tension. Yeah.

I did think I thought that too as I was reading it because they are completely different people, but then they have this like one really specific thing in common, even though they used it differently. But another part as well that the book kind of focuses on is like the psychic debts that children get from their parents and how long it can take to even work through all of that. So is that a theme you kind of wanted to do from the get-go or to kind of just show up? So the very first working title of this book was His Dark Orbit. And so I was interested a lot in stars and in cycles, right? like these repeating patterns of the stars.

And from there pretty quickly, the idea of orbits just kept going, right? Like it kept growing. The metaphor in my head kept growing where I was like, well, if you think about it, like these people are all kind of trapped in this orbit of this thing that happened at one point and they're all still circling it. That sense that haunted me. And again, you go back to the Bible. there's a lot of this of like the tribe will do something bad and the kids have to pay for it,

right? Like someone will do something bad and then they get banished to the wilderness for 40 years and everybody's suffering for that one sin. And then I think too we just were, we were all realizing kind of coming out of COVID the way that society has trauma and the way that within that families have trauma and the way that traumas aren't just to us, like the way that stuff can just ripple and spread. It just, really haunted me. It really, really haunted me. And it made me very curious how far I could go with that theme. And how you can also be setting up a twist without the reader realizing it. Once you sort of understand the structure of what's going on under the hood, you know?

Yeah. There's a lot. That's what I had to say in my review. I was like, there's so much I want to talk about, but I really can't. And you just want to make it to that last 30% so you can experience it. So yeah, I loved how that all came together. There's a point when Toby is thinking, and one of his thoughts is, is a family of lying liberals any better than a bunch of honest bigots? So not that there's a true answer to this, but where do you fall on that? That's one of the big paradoxes of the book. I really don't know. Because on the one hand, you're You're in sync. Obviously, they're both bad. God, we could actually talk about this for ages because I've been thinking about it a lot just in terms of like living.

So I lived in New York City for a while and then I came back to Texas during the pandemic. And then even from there and then I came back to Waco, my hometown, which is not the big city at all. It's a lot more cosmopolitan, not a lot of Texas, but it's not a city city. You know what I mean? And I was really stressed about it. I really didn't know how I. always going to be able to fit in, you know, as a gay man and as a more liberal person, and it's just all of these kinds of things. You're like, I don't really know if there's a place

for me in this town. And I've been shocked at how open-minded and generous it is. And it's actually giving me a lot of hope for the future of this country where a lot of, but you then, you have this incredible cognitive dissonance. It's very hard to rationalize where you have people on the one hand who are really mad about abortion bans. They're really mad about homophobic They're really mad about racism. And yet they keep voting Republican. And it's like, it's not to demonize Republicans as a, as a collective. It's just like you're voting for people whose policies will harm all of these people that you're worried about.

And that split is really, really interesting. So I think if I had to say, who would I rather sit down and have a conversation with? I would prefer the honest bigot because I think that you could work them around, right, to see. what they're what they're talking about to seeing like the consequences of their vote right versus like a lying liberal i saw a lot of that in new york where you would just have these people who were incredibly well off and they would say they were really worried about black people and they'd say they're really worried about gay people and they would vote for very centrist democrats but they wouldn't understand that like all of the policies that we could put in place to help these people would

require taxing you more and they could not get on board with that they could not grasp like when Bernie Sanders was running, people were genuinely up in arms about the idea of having to pay more tax. And that was really, again, not saying they're lying liberals, but just again, this disconnect of like you realize

that everything costs money. And politics have consequences. Like, what are you going to do, bro? Like, we're not going to get there on good vibes. Right. You know what I mean? So it's like, I guess I was like, I would prefer the bigots

because I have actually, found a lot of comfort, like, best story that I had right after the Roversus Wade got overturned. There was this lady that I was working with at my day job. And she was like from the country, very conservative, but very cool. Like she wished me happy pride stuff. Like she wasn't an asshole at all. And she was like, the conversation came up. And at first she was doing some of the stuff of like, well, I just, I wish people would have

less sex. And I'm like, well, yeah, sure. like it'd be I guess whatever like I'm definitely not one to talk but like she was then like she sort of thought about it for a second and she's like but I just don't understand why they have to make a hard situation even worse and I was like okay that's the energy we're going for here like we can stick with that yeah okay you know and so it did give me hope I don't think that if you look at the voting track and you look at the Republican primaries you think that this country is like half the country are psychopaths and they're really not

Yeah. But it's by no means are we in a healthy place as a society either. Right. Yeah, my thing is, in some ways, I think it's just because if someone's being honest about their beliefs, I'm not concerned that, like, they're pretending to be one way and they're going to actually be another way when it matters. So that's where I end up falling on it. I think it's even more like insidious is the only word I can think of when people are

pretending to be really great and like they would do one thing and then it comes down to it and they're like oh that was just me talking i'm not actually going to do it so i'm with you for the most part there it's like if you're lying like what else are you lying about kind of yeah they're going to let you down at some point you know yeah so as a book nerd myself i thought this part was pretty cool but there's a point when Toby says he doesn't like to read novels because they make him feel like God poking around inside someone's head. And I was like, I guess that is what I love about reading. Like, that technically is that. So there's all this emphasis on gods and feeling like gods in the book. So were you also trying to make the readers experience kind of similar to that of a God?

again this book is so hard to talk about because of what happens in the last 30 you're right you're right you know what I mean but I do yeah on the one end there was definitely an element as I was thinking about as I was working in the book and you're thinking about it it did just kind of dawn on me where it's like yeah you do feel a lot like a god as a writer especially right like you have total power over these people and in the time that you're writing it they do seem, if not real, at least real-ish, right? They have this presence in their part of your life for a long stretch of time. And I was like, that's a cool feeling that then made me think about readers having that same

experience in a way. We're giving them this vantage, and it's one of the pleasures of reading in the same way that there's a comfort in saying God has a plan for our lives. There's a similar pleasure in fiction where you see the plan at the end of it. right um so that really interested me um and of course it also allowed me just to sort of send up the fact that the rights really do seem to see themselves as like god adjacent right like you have enough power you're going to think yourself capable of anything and you can outsmart anything and do anything so all of that was there um and then i wanted to see

how much i could do with that concept yeah yeah yeah Yeah, we'll just leave it at that. Yeah, I loved it because it's just like, I've similarly heard people kind of what you're saying, like when you're writing, you also feel like God because you are literally like making your own story. But I hadn't thought of it from the reading perspective too. So I'm probably going to be thinking about that multiple times when I read for the rest of my life now. Have you read anything recently that you've loved? Um, yeah, so I have a piece coming in a couple weeks from, or on crime reads. They asked me to write about, uh, the Gothic genre.

They were like, can you do anything about like queering the Gothic genre? Um, and I finally went back and read Sarah Waters' as finger smith. I don't know if you've heard of that. I've heard of it. I haven't read it. I, like, I remember the cover. Yeah. Like, so, um, if you like Asian.

cinema, Park Chan Wook did a really good adaptation of it called The Handmaiden, which I saw, I saw it in theaters and like it was an early screening. It's one of those cool things you get in New York City. If you hear about stuff in time, you can go to these like random early screenings of stuff. It was cool to be in this whole crowd of people. We had no idea what to expect because there was like no real trailer for it. It was very early on. And it's an incredibly twisty movie and novel. And I always wanted to read it. But the basic, but the basic The basic premise is this girl goes to, it's in the Victorian, the book is in Victorian England. This girl is sort of a thief from a house of like criminals and she gets sent to a country estate to be the new like handmaiden or ladies made to a rich young girl.

And one of the other thieves is going to come and sort of seduce this girl and run off with her fortune and lock her way in a madhouse. Like this very sort of classic Gothic setup and sue the main character, her job is to sort of smooth. move the way and make sure the hand the lady falls in love with this guy and you'll be whispering in her ear about how great he is and all of that um but pretty quickly sue starts to fall in love with this woman yeah and they might actually have something going on and i won't spoil it from that i mean it is truly one of the the movie doesn't even touch how twisty it is and the movie has one of the best plot twists of any film i've ever seen um there's so many revered in the book that are so satisfying and so earned.

And it is one of the few books where I think as a writer, it's really easy to sort of see through the tricks, right? Like you sort of, it's like why it's hard for like magicians to go to magic shows or whatever. Like you sort of know what to look for. And I can most books by this point, if you sit, give me 40 pages, I can lay out how it got, who did it and why. Like generally speaking, I can figure it out.

this one I was genuinely gobsmacked I had not see it coming and then the satisfaction of the last 20 pages was really something I mean it is an incredibly moving wow book yeah so I'm excited I'm working on that essay next week I'm really excited for it and uh so yeah fingersmith it's it's phenomenal uh the audiobook is really good and um but yet to also watch out like the audio book I had didn't have the last chapter And so it gets to the end. Yeah, I know. It got to the end. And it was like, the ending, the last line of the penultimate chapter, I was like, I mean, it kind of finishes the book.

But damn, we're leaving a lot hanging here. Oh my gosh. And I happened to have the print edition. And I went to, I flipped to the end of it. And I was like, son of a bitch, there's like 50 more pages of this. Oh, my God. So I went. Yeah.

So I think it's just a glitch in like the Apple audiobooks thing. It's fine. But the performance is awesome. And if you can listen to it that way, do. I mean, the woman who narrates, it's phenomenal. Yeah, and then now I'm reading an upcoming book that comes out. I want to say the same day as No Road Home called The Dissinence by Sean Hamill. Okay.

Yeah, he wrote a book called Cosmology of Monsters a couple years ago. It was really phenomenal. I really, really enjoyed it. And we're luckily doing an event together. Me and Sean in Houston a couple weeks. And so we're talking about each other's books. I'm reading his now, and I'm really enjoying it. So it's called The Dissence.

Nice. I'm always, I don't always get into historical fiction, but then when someone who kind of likes thrillers tells me about one, I'm always like, okay, that might be one that I'm interested in. So now I really want to read Fingersmith. You got me sold on it. 100%. It is, I mean, the thing that's really, really cool about Sarah Waters is her level of research must be really intensive because she knows so much. But it's, there's not many historical novels where you actually feel like you're there. You know, like blurbs always love to say that, but it's very rarely the truth. And it's like, Finger Smith is up there with like Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantle where it's just

this all-encompassing feeling, like the sense of being in another place and in another time with its own lingo and its own mores and its own surprises. Yeah. It's incredible. And then just her writing, just on a sentence to sentence level is, it makes you feel like a smarter person as you're reading it. You're like, this woman is such a brilliant. The way she understands the English language, it's just phenomenal. Yeah, I'm not going to read a better book this year.

I don't think. I mean, it was really a masterpiece. Yeah. You've got me sold on it. I'm going to have to get it. Where should people follow you to stay up to David? with everything. So mostly I'm on Instagram, John.framm.

And then I also have a TikTok. I think it's like John Fram 5 because somehow John Fram was taken. I guess somebody scooped it when the bright lines came out. But I'm John Fram 5 on there. Those are my two big ones, especially if you want to keep up with me. And then I do have a brand new website actually that's really nice and shiny. So you can sign up for my mailing list on there. And that's John Fram.

Those are the three big ones. Cool. I will put all of that in the show notes so that everyone can go and follow and thank you for coming on and talking about no road home. Thank you so much for having me. It was a blast.