The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Last Thing to Burn: A Novel by Will Dean

Episode Date: April 10, 2021

The Last Thing to Burn: A Novel by Will Dean “Immediate, intense, gripping, taut, terrifying, moving, and brilliant.” —Lisa Jewell, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Invisible Girl A woman being held captive is willing to risk everything to save herself, her unborn child, and her captor’s latest victim in this claustrophobic thriller in the tradition of Misery and Room. On an isolated farm in the United Kingdom, a woman is trapped by the monster who kidnapped her seven years ago. When she discovers she is pregnant, she resolves to protect her child no matter the cost, and starts to meticulously plan her escape. But when another woman is brought into the fold on the farm, her plans go awry. Can she save herself, her child, and this innocent woman at the same time? Or is she doomed to spend the remainder of her life captive on this farm? Intense, dark, and utterly gripping The Last Thing to Burn is a breathtaking thriller from an author to watch.

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks chris voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey we're coming in there a podcast we certainly appreciate you guys tuning in oh my gosh we have one of the most amazing authors on the show he's the author of a multitude of books a whole bunch and he's written his newest novel this

thing is coming out april 20th 2021 it's uh by will dean and the novel is entitled the last thing to burn and i think you're gonna love it love it. Lisa Jewell, the number one New York Times bestselling author of Invisible Girl, called it immediate, intense, gripping, taunt, terrifying, moving, and brilliant. I think you're going to like this book, especially if you're into thrillers. So we're going to be talking with Will today. Take and watch the video version of this at youtube.com. For us, it's Chris Voss. You can see all the wonderful things in there.

Hit that bell notification button. See our groups on Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Also go to goodreads.com, Fortuna's Chris Voss, and read what we're reviewing and seeing over there. So today, welcome to the show. Dean, he grew up in the East Midlands and lived in nine villages before the age of 18. So what is that?

Two every, something, I don't know. I flunk math after studying law at the london school of economics and working in london he settled in rural sweden where he built a wooden house in a boggy clearing at the center of a vast elk forest and it's from his base that he compulsively reads and writes and i think he's coming to there from today his debut novel dark pines was selected for zoe ball's book club in itv shortlisted for the national book awards uk and the guardians not the booker prize and named a telegraph book of the year follow him on twitter and instagram at will r dean i don't know why i read the last sentence welcome to the show how are you will

i'm good, Chris. Thank you for having me, man. I appreciate it. We have a lot of fun on this show. So welcome to the show. You're calling from inside your Swedish bog home. Tell us a little bit about that, if you would. Talking to you from my swamp.

That's right. Yeah. So I live pretty much off grid in Sweden. I've lived here for 10 years now with my wife and my little son and a big St. Bernard. And we live, yeah, literally, if you imagine like a dartboard, we live right in the bullseye of a big moose forest, kind of moose wandering through the garden every day.

We have a well outside for our water, and I chop down trees for our heating and our cooking. No shops anywhere, no restaurants, really no take out no take out for 10 years chris wow yeah that's tough that's the downside of living does this help you write books like the the one year we'll be talking about today that kind of have that whole ooh going on i think in a way having no distractions helps if i if it was a bookshop or a music shop or a cinema, I would be out there all the time. But there's nothing apart from trees and moose and wolves. So I stay busy by reading and writing. And this book, The Last Thing to Burn

is yeah, it's a lot about isolation. It's a claustrophobic kind of thriller. And it's set in the fens in the UK, which is this very flat, open landscape, which is where I'm from. It's a really creepy kind of landscape. All right. There you go. Yorkshire Magazine Online called it a mix between misery meets room. And they call it a spot on description. So I skipped a part, but let's go back to it because I wanted to talk about the room you're in in the background, but give us your plugs or people can find you on the interwebs

and order of the book. Okay. You can find me at Willard Dean on Instagram, Twitter, on Facebook, Will Dean author. And also this is slightly strange, but on, on YouTube, I have a channel called Will Dean forest author, and it's not about my books. It's all about me trying to help the next generation of writers come through. So I'm giving tips on how to write a query letter, how to submit to agents, literary agents, how to start your first draft. Lots of practical tips and tricks to help people

from my kind of background, from a kind of blue collar town who aren't in the publishing world to try and get an agent and get a deal. That's pretty freaking awesome i do you have any videos of like your surroundings of yeah a bogville there's a lot of the dog i gotta go see that then you got you you got me hooked there yeah you'll see you'll see you'll see the shack and the isolation here yeah i i don't know why that i think this would be fun to go see so i'm definitely definitely going to go see it. So let's talk about the book. You've written several books.

What motivated you to want to write this one? So this one, it came to me as an idea at midnight in 2016. I was lying in bed next to my wife. She was asleep. And I suddenly had this vision, this kind of picture in my head, this image, from an aerial perspective of flat farmland and this little tiny two bedroom farm cottage right at the center of the farmland. And a woman who was walking in and out of the farm, in and out of the cottage all day long around it. She never went very far

away. And I came to understand that she was being held captive there against her will. So between midnight and 6am that morning, I came up with the entire story. So by 6am, I had it. And then it's taken me like five years to really get it finished because it's a book where I really wanted to do the main character justice. So I worked on it and worked on it and worked on it. And dream come true for me is it being my American debut on April 20th. That's my dream come true. Awesometh. That's my dream country. Awesome, Sauce. That's great.

I was just pulling up your YouTube channel here, and this is awesome. And you've got a lot of great instructional videos, but then you've also got videos. I saw a video where you have an incredible bar behind you. Yeah, I have a bar in my writing shack. You need a bar. So, no, hold on.

You have a main house, and then you have a writing shack? We have five shacks. One of them was already here. There was no water, no toilet, no road, but we slept here while we were building the main cabin. And the one you can see on the videos is my writing shack, which is about 70% bar, 30% desk. I'm looking at the thing. This is an amazing channel. All right.

After the show, I've got something to watch for sure. I'll catch up on this. But guys, check it out. Go to YouTube and check it out. So give us a, I think you gave us an overview of the book a little bit. Do you want to give a deeper one or do we? I was busy. Sure.

YouTube channel. I mean, what you said about it being misery by Stephen King meets room by Emma Donoghue. That really sums it up beautifully, I think. And I'm really lucky that anybody has said that about it, because I'm a big fan of both of those two authors and those two books. And it is that. It's just very tense. It's her trying to get away from this monster, this husband, this man who's holding her captive. And the whole book is really just two characters, two main characters on one farm. And it's him controlling every aspect of her life. Like he's installed cameras in every room. It's a horrible story in a way. And we're

really rooting for that main character so she can one day get away from this place. And the worst thing about it is, whereas in Misery and in Room, the person who's captive can't really see out, can't really get out. With this this book she can always see into the distance because the fields are so flat so she can see nine different church spires in the distance different villages yeah she can see traffic like a fruit pickers on buses and trucks and she can never quite get there so she's it's always dangled in front of her and she can never quite reach it you can see your freedom, but you can't. Wow.

That's exactly it. Yeah. And I think that hopefully the tension kind of ratchets up a different level as we go through the book, because like she has a child halfway through the book. That creates a whole nother level of jeopardy and of risk and for her of something that she loves that she needs to protect so it's i get it like it's already been out for a few months now in the uk australia south africa and i get letters and emails every week saying you've ruined my my my day at work because i couldn't sleep i went i read through the night to finish the book and for me as a writer that's a dream come true getting that kind of message what made you made the choice to just use very few characters in this?

What made you pick that choice? I don't know. You give me too much credit. I don't really think these things through. It's more that I... It came to you in a dream and the book was there. Yeah, pretty much. I saw these two characters.

I like going very deep on character. I like to really get my fingernails under the skin and understand the character. And it's a fairly short, intense book. So I wanted to flesh these characters out as much as I could. And if you have a big cast of 20 characters, you never really get to know any of them that well, apart from maybe the protagonist. So I wanted these two to be, to haunt you. I love those kinds of books where you never forget the character and they really get under your skin and you think of them years later. So that's what I like to read. So that's what I aim to try to to write i think that was one of the brilliances of this book because like you say yeah

too many characters you're like okay so what's going on over here and there's a subplot over here and you're just like what's going on and some of the real keys to this book in like room and misery is just the main people that are in it and you're stuck with them yeah you almost feel like you're trapped in with them but you're like the third person. And then a lot of the reviews I saw really talked about how you slowly amp up the character development. And so not only do you deliver these characters, but you slowly just bring them up. And from the very first pages when you start reading it, you're hooked. Like the first couple paragraphs, you're hooked.

You're just like, I got to find out what the hell's going on and what's up and and so that's another great progression that you put in the book and how they progress and a lot of people said they would have read it in one sitting but they either didn't have time or they were you know working or they had to go to sleep but usually they read it the next day like they finished off because somewhere around the middle of the book it just goes off the rails and they're like i have to find out how one ends congratulations for that was there any sort of insight that you went into that did you find that as was in your prior books or was this something new for you and what you're writing with this book thank you very much first of all i i don't know if it's i think all of it comes from me reading like i gotta give credit to every book that i've ever

read and all the brilliant authors that I read because it's not a very conscious process for me writing a first draft, writing the story. It's more that I'm telling myself a story for the first time. And if I'm not excited by that story myself, then how can I expect you and everybody else to get excited about it? So I, when I write a first draft, I write them really fast. I write them in, I wrote this in three weeks and I had, yeah in three weeks. And I had the buzz, like I'm

almost high all the way through it because I'm excited. I'm telling myself the story for the first time. And then all the work comes after that. Like for this book, it was like three years of rewriting and new drafts. But that first draft has to be like an exorcism, like it has to flood out of me. And then I know I'm onto something. And I think that kind of tension that you talked about, which is something again, that I love to read comes from character always comes from character. Because if you care about a character, if you genuinely are invested in a character's future, then you read the next page, you read the next chapter, you get to the end of the book. It's all about that for me. And I don't like I don't really love or enjoy gratuitous violence.

I much rather have tension. It's that whole thing that Hitchcock used to talk about instead of like the bomb going off, which is cool for two seconds. It's about watching two characters sit at a table. There's a bomb underneath the table and it's there. That is exciting. Yeah.

I like that analogy from Hitchcock. I never heard of that. Now the character you talk about in the book, the woman, is part of human trafficking. Did you want to make a statement on that at all? Or is it just that's the way it came to you on that day you had the dream? Or did you feel like some sort of alliance to that cause and what's going on and trying to shine some light on to it? It came from me having that kind of image in my head of this woman who couldn't get away. And then I came to understand very quickly her background and the kind of the journey that she had been on to that point. And my main focus at that from then on was

just doing her justice, writing her the best way I could. So that meant doing as much research as I could. I did six months solid research before I wrote the first draft. And then afterwards, I talked a lot with my sister-in-law, who's Vietnamese. And I talked through a lot of the subjects of the book with her. But I still understood that I didn't have the right to tell this story just because I have an idea and because I talked to my sister-in-law. So I just spent years on this book because I wanted to do it like my normal normally I write a book in a year and that's hard work but I get it done but this took five years and it was for that reason I would not want it published if I didn't think that I'd done the main character justice so I wanted I wanted a friend of mine who's Vietnamese to read it before it was published I wanted

another friend who works within the kind of human trafficking world as a counselor to read it yeah just so i just so i know that i'm doing it sensitively and i'm doing it in the right way simple yeah that's brilliant and probably give you a lot of insight to the development the characters what they think or experience and everything else excuse me it's because it's a tragedy what goes on with this stuff so it is do you want to i know there's an aspect of this book that is part of the thriller and it's part of the lead-up and the drama and stuff and it has to do with the title of the book do you want to talk about what the title of the book is about or sure do you want to leave that to

readers i can talk a little bit about that so at the beginning of this book we see the main character trying to leave this place trying to leave this man this awful man and she's walking down the farm track towards the road she's trying to get away she's desperate to get away and he comes back and he's not violent in that moment he's not physically violent very much at all he's psychologically violent he's controlling so he takes her back to the farm cottage and he lays out her four remaining possessions in the world which is a favorite book of mice and men it's a photo of her parents it's a her id card in her own language the last thing left in her own language and some letters from her sister and he asks her very calmly to choose one of these possessions and then he will burn it on their like wood burning stove where they

cook all their meals that night wow and that kind of sets the tone for the book in that he's terrifying in a bit of a hitchcocking kind of way like he's a true psychopath in a way because he believes this completely he thinks that their relationship is a normal marriage wow that's the scary thing yeah so she knows the truth of it she knows that he's holding her captive but of an evening when he's been filming her all day long and controlling exactly what they both eat and how it's cooked which is how his late mother used to cook everything he's obsessed with how his mom used to do things at the end of the day they'll watch football on tv and he insists on her kind of sitting on the floor.

He sits on the chair and he'll say things like, it's not a bad life, is it? We're doing all right here. Like he believes this charade that this is a normal marriage and this is his wife. So it is terrifying, I think, on that level. Yeah. I think I have some friends that have marriages like this. No, I'm just kidding but i think this is uh i think this is extraordinary because like you you talked about hishcock the psychological nature of this sort of terror or thriller

is you see the horror of what the person the evil person in the story is capable of but there's no like there's no immediate falling axe or stabbing where you're like on the whole psycho scene at the end there's none of that and it's drawn out and that's the real that's the real that's the real fear factor because like you say the explosion can be over in seconds the stabbing can be over in seconds but this is like you you start to realize the depth of the sociopath and you're just like what's next and how deep does this rabbit hole go exactly man it's that thing of the bomb under the table and how long can a rider keep that scene going where these two people are talking the bomb is there and the bomb is there and the countdown's ticking down

or the the fuse is shortening like that's that's what it's all about for me i want to write those kind of scenes and tell those kind of stories where at the end you're like how the hell is this going to end and how is she going to get away from this yeah and you talked about the opening scene too if i recall rightly on the first couple pages she can see the trucks going by on the road across the farm so you can see if just someone could see her exactly yeah she's that close well that's it and also like this i think the churches as well, like knowing that there's safety, the sanctuary,

there's people who are there who will help you, but you can never reach out to them. And he's got the, he's properly crazy. He's got the phone bolted down to the floor so she can never access it. It's in a steel box. Everything is locked. He wears the master key around his neck.

Yeah. He reviews the tapes every evening when he's finished his farm work to see what she's been doing to make sure she's done all of the farm the chores and the housework in the right way so he's almost a throwback 100 years ago to what some men were like 100 years ago but just on a whole different level much worse that's just wow that's just psychotic at a whole different level you use some different people to reference the book and build it out what were some of the other writing styles that you used or was there anything else thing else you pulled from to get inspiration from the book or in

in re-editing it one big thing when i was re-editing it and and working through it was getting len's dialect this husband's dialect right, because at the beginning, his dialect was really too strong. It was very much my dialect for my childhood, which is a very particular kind of Northern English dialect, which is difficult to understand if you're not from that part of the world. And gradually I had to make it authentic, but also make it readable because otherwise if it's, if it just slows you down too much, you get thrown out of the story. So that's something I wanted to do.

And I guess I worked on just the isolation and the control. And I think control, like a controlling relationship on some level is something we can all relate to. Because it's going on all around the world right now. Many households, you think it looks perfect from the outside and inside, one is controlling the other. And and that's always unhealthy and it's always slightly scary and this is just that but extreme on an extreme level yeah definitely most definitely it's an excellent book and everything i read through views people like this thing just you got to

almost read it in one read and sit down and just pound it through because it just the way it escalates and stuff it just takes you on that roller coaster ride and then you're just page turning at the end to see where it goes and it opens that way too like you you read the first part and you're just like i gotta know what's on page two and three and then you just keep running going anything uh you want to touch on before we go as to giving readers a tease or anything or maybe some other aspect of the book we haven't touched on i don't know i write a lot of food in my books this is not a teaser or a twist but i love writing food like a domestic setting how people how people interact with food how people think about food how they cook for other people because i think it's so it really illustrates our character like how we

eat together or we don't, how we, how quickly or slowly we eat a meal. I think that's really interesting. And so I use that a lot in the book. And in terms of the structure of the book, there are some key twists that come through this novel, but I don't want to talk about them overtly, obviously, but yeah, hopefully it will give readers that kind of gasp out loud kind of moment. And then they can go and talk about it with their friends. Now I have to go find out what the full food thing is about. I got to finish the book.

But I can see how that would play out because it really, that's part of the domestic aisle. What's the word I'm looking for? Domestic aisle sort of experience in thinking. And of course, I'm sure it's about a lot about the interaction of the two people and the technical bomb. So there you go. Will, give us your plugs before we go out to where people can find you on the interwebs to get to know you better sure okay so at willardine again on twitter on instagram it's mainly my dog my saint bernard but there you go will dean author on facebook and then will dean forest author on youtube if you need any writing tips, reading tips,

or like how to get published kind of tips. Yeah, I love this. You've got lots of great stuff up here. How will the events of 2020 affect your book? Standalone novels versus series novels. Agent query and pitching tips. How to restructure novel. Writing synopsis.

I'm just plugging the crap out of your channel right now. Imposter syndrome. Procrastination. How to write synopsis. I'm just plugging the crap out of your channel right now. Imposter syndrome, procrastination, how to write synopsis. So check these out, guys. Order up the book, of course, as well. But, Will, thanks for being on the show. We certainly appreciate you spending time with us, and we'll look for all the other scary stuff you'll bring out of that cottage in the fog.

That's my pleasure. Thank you very much. Thank you very much as well and to my audience go uh check out the book you can order it up on a million different platforms your local bookstore etc etc you can pre-order the book right now april 20th 2021 here in america the last thing to burn a novel by will dean you want to give a plug or a shout out to your other books real quick yeah i also write the two of the moody song books they're set in sweden they're nordic noir scandy thrillers kind of stephen king-esque small town mystery thrillers there you go check them out

guys order up his books uh we appreciate you guys tuning in be sure to go to youtube.com for just chris voss to see the video version of this hit that bell notification button go to goodreads.com for just chris voss all our groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and all that good stuff. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Wear your mask, stay safe, and we'll see you guys next time.