Origins: Sarah Pribek
On the character at the center of my first novel
Note: A version of this essay ran on my website. Since I no longer maintain a site for my novels, and there’s been some interest in Sarah with the release of the third book in the trilogy, I’m reproducing it here.
The year that Sarah Pribek began to appear in my imagination, I had just returned to California from three years in Minneapolis, where I’d studied journalism. I found a copy-editing job at a newspaper in San Luis Obispo, and though it was relatively fast-paced work, it was also one of those jobs where, when you’re done at the end of the night, you’re done. You don’t carry work home in a briefcase. With the extra time, I turned my attention to fiction.
It wasn’t long before I wrote a novella about a Minneapolis cop, a crime/horror crossover story with a rather downbeat ending. All the important characters from the future Pribek novels were there — Sarah’s boyfriend (her husband, in the books), the enigmatic Shiloh; Sarah’s grounded older partner Genevieve; the dryly flirtatious prosecutor, Christian Kilander. I could see that I had the beginnings of a viable novel on my hands. I just needed to scrap the supernatural angle (which was subtle to begin with) and find a solid mystery to hang the story on.
