Not A Happy Camper

“An overbearing alpha male gets his comeuppance in this smart, creepy thriller from Smith. Smith nicely balances the borderline-supernatural events with Alex’s mundane struggles as his blustering defenses crumble. Sharp, clear prose is a plus. This is a remarkably adept performance.” 

                          —Publishers Weekly, *STARRED Review 

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: How many times have you started reading a book, and realized—you could not put it down? Isn’t that the best? And that’s exactly what happened to me with JP Smith’s THE DROWNING.


I sat in the chair for hours, I mean not moving, and so much for making dinner. We had pizza, courtesy of JP Smith.



Not A Happy Camper 

    by JP Smith
I’ve always shied away from writing out of my own experiences. My thought was always that I’ve lived it, it’s gone, good night, goodbye, au revoir. 

But I’ve begun to find that some memories just stay with me, as though waiting for a fresh look. My sixth novel, Airtight, was based on something I did back in 1968 (yes, it was illegal, and, yes, it was fun), and I was able to build a story out of a character very different from me. In my screenplay, Somewhere Else in the Universe, I wrote about a 14-year-old boy from the Bronx getting involved with a UFO group in Manhattan back in the 60s, an experience that indirectly led me to become a writer (a subject covered by my blog on it, with the same title, on my website).

The Drowning became my first pure genre fiction, a psychological thriller. I’m not, per se, a thriller writer. All of my novels have in one way or another incorporated genre elements, whether thriller or mystery, though in the past they’ve rightly fallen under the category of literary fiction. I do enjoy thrillers on film and TV, but I don’t read many of them as novels, so I know that my approach will always be different from what readers might expect from genre writing.


The Drowning has its origins in my second year of summer camp, in Upstate New York, when I was eight years old. Towards the end of the summer our swimming counselor lined us up at the dock overlooking the wide expanse of the lake itself. Until then, not being able to swim and deathly afraid of deep water (both still applicable), I’d kept to the shallower waters. But he insisted we all jump in. I begged him not to force me, I told him I couldn’t swim, and he promptly threw me in. 

Of course I began to drown.


I still remember it vividly. He panicked and jumped in beside me. Furious not just that I had grabbed hold of a gold chain around his neck, twisting it until he began to choke, but that I had failed him somehow: I was the kid who’d learned nothing from him. Furious, he swam me out to a raft, put me on it, and told me: “Either swim back on your own or stay here and die.”


Years later I realized that something could be done with this: what if the counselor had forgotten about young Joey Proctor, as I called him? Night has fallen, and only when the counselor—Alex Mason—is asked what happened to Joey does he come down to the lakefront and shine his flashlight on the raft. And Joey isn’t there. An exhaustive police search reveals that he isn’t in the lake or anywhere on campus.


Twenty-one years later the counselor is now a billionaire real estate developer in New York, with a beautiful wife and two daughters, and it seems Joey has returned to get his revenge. And he’s not about to give up.


But The Drowning isn’t (to some advance readers’ consternation) a straightforward story. It isn’t a procedural, as one might expect from a thriller with this subject, and there are no easy answers. Real life is full of mysteries—unsolved crimes, missing persons cases that have gone cold after months, years, even decades.


But there is a solution in The Drowning, and it’s not what you might expect it may be, because, well, fiction can do that to you, can’t it?

Like the movies, fiction can mess with your head. One of the characters in the novel is, in fact, a documentary filmmaker working on a movie about an urban legend that had haunted the camp for decades, about a man who, every seven years, comes down from the hills to kidnap one of the boys. 

Twenty-one years after the disappearance of Joey Proctor the filmmaker says to Alex, “I play with reality. I bend it, I speculate, I make what you think is real into something completely incredible, just as I make the unbelievable into something you take as the honest truth. What we sometimes think of as reality may be just the opposite.” 

Alex Mason isn’t the only person drawn into the narrative; the reader is, as well.

For me, this lies at the heart of The Drowning. There are tales we tell, and those we sincerely believe, and then there are those we want to believe. And there are those which have already absorbed us. Am I right, or am I right…?


HANK: You know how I feel about his, Reds and readers. How do we know who to trust? Or who to believe? And when to say whom? 

So on this (rainy in Boston) Saturday—summer camp. Where did you go, and was there swimming?

And a copy of THE DROWNING for one lucky commenter! (US only, please, says the publisher.)

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(And yesterday’s winner of TRUST ME is holdenj! Email me at hyan at whdh dot com with your address!)



The Drowning will be published by Sourcebooks Landmark on January 8th, 2019. J.P. Smith’s website is: jpsmith.org.