The recent rain has made the trail muddy, and as we navigate a few patches, I notice Miranda is deep in thought her writing brain spinning. We stop to listen, enchanted by the sounds of the woods.
On our hike, we pass a pond filled with frogs. It's not giving away too much to divulge that the open window ends up being important.Ī thriller writer who is scared of many things
"I remember writing that and thinking like, is that something I will use or is that something I won't use?" she says. It lands on a clue halfway down: a window is left open in a cabin. "I'll try not to give any spoilers," she says as she trails her finger down the page. She pulls out the spreadsheet for The Last To Vanish. There are columns for important dates, plot points and clues. "I don't have a murder wall," Miranda explains with a laugh, "it's all on a piece of paper." Columns include dates, plot points, major turning points (ex: a body is found), and clues (ex: there's glass in her toes, blood in the hall but nowhere else.)Įlissa Nadworny/NPR Miranda uses spreadsheets to write her mystery novels. Her method of writing includes keeping spreadsheets that detail the story. There are elements of her new book around the room: hiking sticks she and her husband got on a trip to the Great Smoky Mountains lean against a bookshelf and there are pictures of her and her family hiking, hung up around her desk. The room where Miranda writes her thrillers is on the second floor of her home in Davidson, North Carolina. A man stood just inside as the door fell shut behind him, with nothing but a black raincoat and some sob story about his camping plans. The sound of rain cascading over the gutters, the rustle of hiking pants, the screech of boots on polished floors.
#Brian culbertson on my mind registration#
I was alone in the lobby, removing the hand-carved walking sticks from the barrel behind the registration desk, replacing them with our stash of sleek navy umbrellas when someone pushed through one of the double doors at the entrance. The type of conditions more suitable for a disappearance. He arrived at night in the middle of a downpour. She works at the inn at the base of the mountain, the last place so many hikers were seen alive. The main character, a young woman named Abby, is an outsider who moved to the small fictional town of Cutters Pass a decade ago. That seed of an idea turned into a much more complex web. I went home and started writing immediately." It reminded me of this idea of echoes of the past, of a town where everything you are seeing already happened. I took out my phone right then and started taking notes. "It had just rained," explains Miranda as we walk, "and inside the woods, it still sounded like it was raining. It was on a hike just like this that the idea for Last to Vanish came to her.
#Brian culbertson on my mind full#
The woods are lush and full in mid-July and you can't really see past 20 feet. Were they all accidents - hikers doomed by nature - or was it something more sinister?Įlissa Nadworny/NPR Megan Miranda's latest thriller, The Last to Vanish, takes readers to a small hiking town in North Carolina, where 7 people have disappeared in the woods over the last 25 years.Īs we hike through the wetlands trail near Miranda's home, the green trees glisten from recent rain, the air thick with moisture. There, 7 people have disappeared in the woods over the last 25 years. Her latest novel, The Last To Vanish, takes readers to a small hiking town in North Carolina, pushed up against the Appalachian Trail. Nature - woods, lakes, and the ocean - has become a consistent, often menacing character in Miranda's more than a dozen thrillers. "It's a place where things are hidden, but also you can hide. "You step inside the woods and it feels like legends can almost be real," she says on a recent hike near her home in North Carolina. So began Miranda's long obsession with the duality of nature - at once, a beautiful serene place, and also, with just a slight change of perspective, a terrifying one. "But at night I would just stare out into the darkness thinking, 'what is out there?' " "During the day, it would be this grand adventure," recalls Miranda. There wasn't any cell service - it was just her and her family out there in the woods, cut off from society. Growing up, thriller author Megan Miranda spent time at her grandparent's house in the Poconos.
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