Suspense Magazine gave me a chance to share two “postcards” of real people I knew on the streets of Chicago and reflect on how they impacted my writing. I hope you will click through to read the entire post and get a glimpse of Chris and John. These people influenced my portrayal of Cry and Samuel Walker in Painted Black.
In my years of meeting street people in Chicago and Seattle, I was struck by how their lives could seem like fiction, their world some dystopian underworld, if you didn’t actually experience it physically like they do. We prefer it that way. We enjoy being readers and observers of the dark and scary, but prefer them in the form of a noir detective novel, perhaps, or a gritty action movie. By doing that, we can remain, for the most part, untouched by the reality of the darkness.
Debra R. Borys 