Okay, if this is the first book of mine you’re going to try, stop now. Return it. Grab another. It’s okay. I’ll wait.
If you’re still here, please know that I haven’t read Play Dead in at least twenty years. I didn’t want to rewrite it and pass it off as a new book. I hate when authors do that. So this is, for better or worse, the exact book I wrote when I was in my early twenties, just a naive lad working in the travel industry and wondering if I should follow my father and brother and go to (shudder) law school.
I’m hard on it, but aren’t we all hard on our early stuff? Remember that essay you wrote when you were in school, the one that got you an A-plus on, the one your teacher called “inspired”—and one day you’re going through your drawer and you find it and you read it and your heart sinks and you say, “Man, what was I thinking?”
That’s how it is with early novels sometimes.
Over the years, I’ve borrowed a bit from this book—names, places, even a character or two. Close readers may recognize that and will hopefully smile.
Finally, flawed and all, I love this book. There are an energy and risk taking in Play Dead that I wonder if I still have. Youth, as they say, is wasted on the young. I’m not this guy anymore, but that’s okay. None of us is stagnant with our passion and our work. That’s a good thing.
