15 Miles Rob Scott

15 Miles

Samuel 'Sailor' Doyle has transferred from Vice to Homicide in the Virginia State Police. He has a mistress, an alcohol problem, a prescription drug dependency and a burgeoning self-loathing that alienates him from wife and family. Assigned to a double homicide, Doyle unearths secrets from the past and what looks like a revenge plot... from beyond the grave.

15 Miles is the perfect blend of crime and horror. It is essentially a police procedural thriller, but with supernatural undercurrents, that are so sparse, so understated, that somehow the book is made all the more frightening as a result. The horror scenes quickly flash off the page like a film roll spliced with a split second scene that is not meant to be there, imprinting themselves in your head like a subliminal negative shot, and staying with you, despite you questioning how real they are. Only a good writer can manage to make you so shit scared in the day light by barely describing the horror elements. Fans of Joe Hill will love being scared by Rob Scott!

This is the first of a series featuring 'Sailor' Doyle, a thoroughly messed-up nourish hopeless anti-hero that is perfect for the genre.

Rob Scott was born in New York. He has studied classical guitar and completed a Masters degree in education. Following a 1994 concert series in Brazil, he moved to Colorado to teach and to complete a doctorate in educational leadership and policy study. The Hickory Staff is his first work of fiction. He lives in Virginia with his wife and two children.

15 Miles
Hachette Australia
Author: Rob Scott
ISBN: 9780575093850
Price: $32.00

Interview with Rob Scott

How does it feel to have your writing compared to Joe Hill?

Rob Scott: I bought Joe Hill's Heart-Shaped Box after reading Neil Gaiman's review, where he described carrying the book all over the place: the grocery store, bathroom, dentist, wherever. I had a similar experience. Hill's writing scares the pants off me. (I keep an extra pair in the trunk of my car for just those embarrassing moments). About halfway through Heart-Shaped Box I started skipping meetings, assigning myself two-hour cafeteria duty, and sneaking into English classrooms to pretend I was following whatever novel the teachers had queued up for our literature students. All the while I rode along with Jude and Georgia, purulent fingers and wounded dogs notwithstanding. Knowing 15 Miles has been compared to Joe Hill's writing is thrilling for me; it's the very niche I hoped this book would find. I'll be pleased if readers find Sailor Doyle's adventures half as exciting.


Can you explain how you create a character like Samuel Doyle?

Rob Scott: Sailor's a mess. Yet, I wanted him to be a bit of a train wreck, because I needed the juxtaposition of his self-destructive vices against Molly Bruckner's innocence. She's a child-like character with the unfortunate potential to wipe us all out with a single cough. 15 Miles is a book about the poisons that can get in our bloodstream: guilt, frustration, regret, lust, and anxiety . . . not to mention alcohol, nicotine, caffeine and OxyCodone. Sailor's addicted to most of them. Like many of us, he self-medicates to get through his day. He makes some unhealthy decisions that leave indelible scars. I'm hoping that tendency is why readers will connect with him on some level. For many of us, there are days when it's a lot easier to drink a six pack than to go for a ten-mile run. Creating Sailor Doyle meant taking that tendency and ratcheting it up a notch or two in hopes of making him a compelling character, however incoherent. But don't lose faith in him yet. In the sequel, Asbury Park (the title so far), Sailor makes some healthier choices. Granted, he finds sobriety frightening, and he still manages to uncover a truckload of trouble, but at least he's off the pills and the booze.


How much of your inspiration for writing is taken from real life?

Rob Scott: Again, Sailor's an extreme case, but many of us self-medicate as we deal with life's hills and valleys. I mainline coffee from 5:30 a.m. until lunch. Then, I drink six gallons of Diet Coke before dinner. I run or bike most days, because it keeps me from eating my own weight in French fries, slurping down a quart of cappuccino chocolate chunk, and chasing it all with an oak cask full of flavorful Jack Daniels. (Okay, maybe things aren't that bad!). My father was a homicide detective for over twenty years. I suppose my decision to write a supernatural crime novel came from watching him deal with the stress, the miles, the bureaucracy, and the felons case after case. A young detective on his fist solo investigation seemed like the perfect protagonist for a story with a salad bar of unanticipated variables and unpleasant surprises. I imagine sitting in the driver's seat on a murder investigation would require a healthy dose of ambiguity tolerance, creative problem solving, and sheer resiliency. For me, any hero who survives a horror novel with any panache has to embody all of those characteristics.


Where do you get your ideas for writing horror stories?

Rob Scott: For 15 Miles, I wanted to create a flawed hero who hunts down an innocent villain in an epic pursuit across a stretch of barren Virginia wilderness. Using naturally-occurring, sylvatic plague gave me the opportunity to play with the idea that we all have poisons that get in our blood, even Molly Bruckner, the innocent villain. The poisons in Sailor's blood are as qualitative as they are quantitative, one of the things that makes him a gripping character for me and, hopefully, for anyone who's ever cracked open a bottle of wine after a hard day's work. His guilt, anxiety, frustration and self-loathing set Sailor up to be haunted (both figuratively and literally) by the mistakes of his past. Once those demons start seeping through the drywall at the Bruckner farm, 15 Miles is - I hope - as frightening as any slasher story. Sailor is a damned wreck, but he may be just a blurry version of the reflection many readers see when they look in the mirror. For me, what's frightening is that Sailor's character could be many of us after we've skated a bit too far onto thin ice, then regretted it.


Finish this sentence; the best thing about writing is…

Rob Scott: The best thing about writing is the change of pace it demands from me every day. As a high school principal, I move at full throttle all day, navigating from one crisis to another. It's an experience that engages my whole body, and most days I come home physically and emotionally exhausted. Writing requires that I shut that faucet off completely. The pace of my whole life has to change, to slow significantly, for several hours. I love that about writing. My desk is in a dark corner of a storage area adjacent to our basement. It's dimly lit, devoid of color or decoration, and quiet - the very antithesis of my office at school. It requires an entirely different set of muscles from being a school principal all day. That change is what I enjoy most about it.


15 Miles