Tod Goldberg on Infusing Crime Fiction with Emotion

This week, Julia, Tod, and Rider go behind the scenes of Tod’s new book, The Low Desert, out now from Counterpoint.

From the episode:

Tod Goldberg: My editor was like, look, you’ve written a short story that in the first three pages has a dead five-year-old, who’s been drowned in the Salton Sea. There’s a real squee factor in this book, because he’s like pulling the skin around and looking to see what happened to him, and the moral questions are pretty significant. He’s like, if you’re going to write this kind of story, the emotions have to be huge, and the payoff has to be profound. The reader has to hit that last page and just think, holy shit, I’ve been hit over the head with something. I don’t know if that happens necessarily; I hope it does. But I couldn’t hold myself back. If I was worried about the reactions of people, then I couldn’t write this story.

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This episode is brought to you by Amazon Publishing, publishers of the Faraway Collection. Download now at Amazon.com/FarawayStories.