Once, I found a roadside attraction that completely spooked me.  It was off the 10 Freeway in Arizona. For all I know, it will be there for years to come.  It was a big gas station emporium and, past the snowglobes and mugs, past the Country Crafty birdhouses and cactus cowboy figures, was an entry into darkness.

 Well, it only seemed like darkness—it cost about 75 cents to get in, and then you enter this long corridor behind the gas station.  Images of torture chambers abound.  Twisted desert wood, painted like devilish creatures on shelves rest along the walls.  A rich man’s car from the 1930s, supposedly once owned by a Nazi commander from Germany, is parked in one section.  And then...the main attraction, a mummified woman who might’ve been real or not.  I don’t know. 

It looked an awful lot like a real mummy.

It was creepier seeing the Nazi car and the torture chamber wood-carvings than seeing the mummy, which might’ve just been a dead person, dug up in the 1930s,’40s, or ‘50s.

When I got out of the show area, I asked the owner of the store about it and the other stuff, and he told me that he bought it all from a guy twenty years’ before, and he didn’t know anything about the origins of any of it. 

Now, a lot of people have gone to that particular roadside attraction (it’s still there—go see for yourself).  But for me, it stuck, because there was something completely insane about the contents of that 75 cent tour.  And something not quite right about those of us who paid the three quarters and went down to see it all.

But what can you complain about with something that cost under a buck?

It stuck with me, and I put a brief roadside attraction in a novel of mine called The Halloween Man.  Just a brief moment near the beginning of the novel, where a man and a kid stop to see a place off the road in Virginia, on the way up to New England.

But other ideas began forming, and somehow, I wanted to write a mummy book. 

Not a regular mummy book. 

Certainly not an Egyptian mummy book (maybe someday). 

When I write a novel, I have to have some kind of personal connection to the material.  I can’t just think, “Hmm, I’ll write a werewolf book because werewolves are cool.”

I have to find some truth within the lie of the story.  I have to know where my understanding and knowledge can be found within the tale.  Where I’ve been, where I’m from, where I’m going.

I went to a small college in Virginia, somewhat similar to the college mentioned in The Attraction, although it was very different, as well.  I used to take off on Spring Break for road trips to various places, and so I knew that a road trip had to begin this story.  I have driven across the United States at least ten times since I was 19.   Usually, I linger in the Southwest, because I love the desert so much.   I felt that if I were going to imaginatively travel, it would be across the desert. It would be to an off-center place in Arizona—a no man’s land of sort, where anything can happen. 

I’ve  always felt this way about the desert—that whatever slithers there, slithers alone.  Or at least, wants to slither alone.

And so, this particular road trip was born, with a group of so-called college friends who might not be that close at all, brought together by their attractions for each other. 

***

I had to find out what these five people—Josh, Bronwyn, Griff, Tammy, and Ziggy—were all about.  I found it through the idea of attraction.  How we’re attracted.  To whom we’re attracted.  How we lose our attraction and our attractiveness—the mysteries of chemistry and magnetism as applied to our dreams and wishes when we’re just starting life as adults. 

Once these college students came alive -- once I knew them as they got on the road to head West, to head toward the place of their destiny, the tale of The Attraction began writing itself.

And the creature in the back room of that  rundown gas station emporium on the edge of a desert hell came to life.
 

With best wishes,

Douglas Clegg