Deathtrap: In the Country Dark

"DEATHTRAP" Chapter title meaning: The chapter where the danger begins. Cabel jokes about various places and things being deathtraps. One of three connected chapters with compound words as the title.

See the Introduction here

This chapter contains my all-time favorite foreshadowing. Since I'm going to talk about it, SPOILERS ahead.

The chapter begins with Troy driving Cabel along Cucumber Hollow Road in his old Ford Custom. The truck is directly inspired by my father-in-law's 1978 Ford Custom – a truck that he finally sold last year :( My brother and I also briefly owned a similar Custom, so I was very familiar with the truck's resilience.

Cucumber Hollow and Turkish Knob don't exist for real, so far as I know. The names were inspired by Pickle Knob, a small mountain we would pass on the way to check cattle on the family farm. Turkish is an homage to the main character from the movie Snatch. It's one of the best dumb criminal movies outside of the Cohen Brothers' library.

The gas in a milk jug also comes from the family farm. We had a gas pump for farm machinery. Anytime we needed gas for lawnmowers or small engine equipment, we would take an empty milk jug down to the pump and fill it up.

Cabel and Troy stop at a nondescript location marked by a steep bank and a faded political yard sign. I didn't have a particular idea of where this location would be in real life, but there are plenty of similar locations to choose from.

What follows is the scene from the book that went through the most rewrites. In the first several drafts, Cabel came with Troy to the cabin. The biggest criticism from the early reads is that Cabel would not be so complacent as to walk in on a crime in progress and not do anything but be a casual observer. I tried to find ways to justify it in the story, but nothing worked. My publishers helped me work out a solution. I'm really happy with the final change. Leaving Cabel at the truck forces him into the situation later when they arrive at the chicken house in the Obit chapter.

Oscruo was the second character created for the story. I had envisioned a bombastic curmudgeon, and he didn't change much from there. His mannerisms were partly inspired by any bearded character in this music video. Who he was evolved as I wrote the story went along, but I knew from the beginning he would be a shut-in who was missing some limbs. Oscuro ultimately has the most extensive lore of the entire series.

His name is a Spanish joke. He says it means "Recluse" but the word actually translates to "Dark." I did this deliberately because I thought giving the actual translation was a little on the nose for the book's dark theme. Though it's hinted at later in the story, I didn't finally explain the joke until In the Morning Hour.

Oscuro's associates, Frank and Lin, are a separation of the name Franklin, which was the town I was living in at the time and the real-life stand-in for Chancy. As a bonus, I was big into Lin Manuel-Miranda at the time, and it was a fun coincidence that two of the characters came from his name.

Troy goes uphill to the cabin alone. The conversation goes the way a lot of them do with older Appalachian folks. They always want to know who your parents are. If they know them, then you'll get a story often with details you did not want to know about.

The deal is made and Troy returns to Cabel. They have an exchange that includes my favorite foreshadowing of any of my published books so far.

Here's where the spoilers start.

Every chapter in the book is a single word. Three of the chapter titles are compound words. Those titles are Deathtrap, Downhill, and Uphill. This chapter, the first of these, contains this line. Cabel refers to the cabin uphill and the truck downhill. In Downhill, the truck kills someone and is destroyed by fire. In Uphill, the cabin kills someone and is destroyed by fire.

Foreshadowing that I never appreciated enough when I was writing is another reference to Troy losing a fistfight. This time the fistfight was lost to Cabel in a story from their youth. The fight is based on the only actual fistfight I got into when I was young. The story plays out almost exactly as how it happened.

That's all for this chapter. There was a lot more written from Cabel's perspective, but it was moved to the Obit chapter once Cabel was disinvited to the cabin meeting by my editors.