Mother Night

If you’ve read any of my novels, you know I like my protagonists to be flawed. The more morally complex the main character, the better, in my opinion. And how can you get more morally questionable than an American who becomes a propagandist for the Nazi party during WWII? But wait. Is he a Nazi? Or is he just playing a part?

Another thing I love is when genre fiction has a larger moral theme that runs through it. What can I say? I don’t like to be preached at, but I do prefer stories with a strong point of… show more.

Again, it’s difficult to pick a favorite Vonnegut book. I think he may have influenced my writing more than any other author. More than Ian Fleming. More than Elmore Leonard or Raymond Chandler. Some might say he isn’t really a thriller writer. Some may classify him as a writer of sci-fi. And yeah, maybe. But he’s so much more than that. He’s a zany magician and mad scientist who can turn utter tragedy into very black comedy. Mother Night is about Nazis and spies and war crimes and white supremacists. All the elements of a thriller combined with Vonnegut’s patented… show more.

I discovered Vonnegut in my early 20s and the first of his books I read was Slaughterhouse Five, which I quite enjoyed and still love to this day. But it was his fictional tale of American spy Howard W. Campbell that really captured my imagination. I consider myself a “thematically based writer” and I’m much more interested in exploring layers of challenging themes than I am actual plot. Mother Night had many themes, including the struggle with one’s conscience, freedom, and obsession but it was his central theme of “We are what we pretend to be, so we… show more.