Merry is a very nice person who does a very nasty thing. On the run, her life in ruins, she hides out in a suburb destroyed in the name of cultural improvement.
Merry's only hope is two doors away, in the heart of James, a man who knows terror well and has the power of death stored carefully in his attic...
I started working on Glue when I THOUGHT I had finished Big Man's Barbie. This was in early 1995. After all the plotting nightmares, I knew I had to keep it simple, so I started with a simple premise - one girl, one guy, one place. Throw them together and see what happens.
There were three main inspirations behind this story. One was a photo that a guy named Tony gave me back in the 80s, of a deserted power station. It was a fuzzy, grainy, black and white job that I toted around because it reminded me of Throbbing Gristle and that kind of relentless industrial thing. THAT became the location.
The second inspiration was an interview I read with one of the surviving sons of the Rev Jim Jones, of People's Temple fame. This guy lost his family, his community, everyone he knew in the Jonestown mass suicides, and he was saying that every memory he had of childhood ended with him thinking, oh, that person's dead. What a devastated life - HE became the inspiration for James.
The third inspiration was a horrific dream where I dreamt I killed someone, and hid the body. All through the dream, I was in abject horror at what I'd done, and was thinking, how am I ever going to live with this? THAT was pure Merry.
I absolutely love the characters of James and Merry. It was my first writing experience with third person, and also telling a story from two alternating points of view, and I think it comes off really well. In the writing process, I became so involved in their headspaces that sometimes it induced rather chronic depression - hard not to, when you're trying to authentically write a character like James, who has lost everything. The tricky thing, in a love story between a murderer and a murder-murder-murder-murder-suicide victim, is injecting humour, but it's there, I'm proud to say.
In all of my novels, there are things, on reterospect, I'd like to change. In Nature Strip, it's quite a few bumpy scenes: in Big Man's Barbie, it's a helluva lot, but in Glue, there is nothing at all I would alter. I think it's deep and tender, and just writing this wrap-up of it has made me want to read it again.
I put myself through the wringer a lot writing Glue, and for my next project, I kept the KISS principle going, but added KEEP IT SIMPLE - AND FUN. The result was Eat Well and Stay out of Jail.