Published by Valancourt Books, Richmond, Virginia
http://www.valancourtbooks.com
Cover design by Henry Petrides
PREFACE
When I began writing Blood Secrets I had just recently read Expensive People by Joyce Carol Oates, in which the first-person narrator is a teenage boy (or perhaps a very young man). I thought Ms. Oates did a fine job in “becoming” him, and so I embarked on becoming the female narrator in my story. At this time, in an English class I was teaching, my students were studying Rebecca, the famous Daphne Du Maurier novel that also has a first-person narrator: a shy and jittery young woman with no confidence in herself. My heroine, I decided, would be just the opposite—beautiful, intelligent, outspoken and witty, one of life’s “privileged” and rather arrogant about it, until she falls in love and marries and finds herself totally unprepared to deal with the skeleton in her husband’s closet and the horror it is about to unleash.
At the outset I had a general idea of the evil that awaits Irene; as the story unfolded, that specter assumed a shape I hadn’t counted on, surprising me every bit as much as it has surprised readers over these many years. A writer can’t ask for a greater thrill than that.
Or maybe he can.
Two days after I started the novel I met someone and fell deeply in love, the result being an eighteen-year relationship that lasted until death did us part. Blood Secrets is indeed a horror story, a “psychological thriller” if you will, but it is also a love story that had the good fortune to be written by a man who was undergoing first-hand experience.
Craig Jones
March 2, 2015
You never think this kind of thing really happens to people who’ve been to college. A strange consideration perhaps, but after the murder this was one of the first thoughts to strike me. And all through the trial I sensed that same thought hovering behind the faces of the jurors. In the beginning they seemed almost pleased, titillated by the fact I am an “educated, professional” woman, a teacher; each day their eyes would greet me with renewed astonishment. But as we progressed to the final stages they began to look embarrassed, and in the end, weary. In a trial as long as mine was, particularly a murder trial, there develops a bond between defendant and jury, at least on the defendant’s part. After a while, you know instinctively what words, what phraseology, will make this one chuckle, that one wince. From their glances at each other you see where alliances have been formed and hostilities upheld. You recognize the leaders and the followers, and when you receive an occasional furtive look of sympathy, you end up measuring its worth by which face it comes from. Does that sound cold-blooded? It is, and so were the proceedings—cold-bloodedly civilized. Just the facts. My uncivilized crime ended up in a civilized trial: hecklers were promptly removed from the courtroom; “hate mail” was intercepted by my lawyer and burned; the first and only time the prosecuting attorney raised his voice to a shout, he sensed the inappropriateness, and he lowered it in midsentence. The courtroom experience produces many revelations, and the strangest one occurred on the last day. After all the torture I thought I had gone through—all the testimonies being weeded, repeated, reweeded—I stood up to hear the verdict and found myself feeling sorry for the jury. They looked more beaten than I was. Even though it was my life hanging in the balance, it had been, after all, my crime, and they had been dragged through every detail of it. Who can say to what degree the whole ordeal of sitting in judgment taxed, perhaps even changed, their lives? One murder, yet who knows how far the reverberations can reach? However, I’m not going to tell you much about the trial. I’m going to tell you about the murder itself and the circumstances leading up to it. Not surprisingly, those circumstances were defined and determined by love, my own and my victim’s. Since love is neither static nor isolated from everyday events, it journeys through a number of stages, from one place to another. And for some, love’s last stop is a public courtroom. The newspaper implied as much when it printed my wedding picture next to a later photograph of my husband, my daughter and myself, our smiling faces looming above copy that detailed the grim events surrounding the murder. This juxtaposition was calculated to dramatize not only the death of a person but also the death of a marriage, the disintegration of a once happy family—and, of course, calculated to strike suspicion and fear in the hearts of the complacent.