In Shallow Grave, my book of short stories set in the fictional town of Rockville, I imagined what would happen to a young family trapped in their storm shelter after a tornado hits their farm. It’s not something I’ve personally experienced, but growing up in the Midwest I did spend lots of time as a kid playing games in the basement while we waited out a tornado warning. Thankfully, that’s as close as I ever came to being blown to Kansas. Until a couple of weeks ago, that is.

Most of the adventures in my life have been fictional, so imagine my complete shock when reality came over my house in the form of a nasty looking cloud, the likes of which I’ve never seen before. Some instinct told me that it was time to take shelter, even though our town’s warning siren never made a peep. Sure enough, I learned later that I’d seen a ‘wall cloud,’ the parent of the tornado that touched down across town. Truthfully, I’m just as glad that I didn’t get to experience anything more exciting than an ugly cloud hovering outside my house. I suppose Hemingway would have chased the storm until a tornado developed (or at least reported that he did), but I’m perfectly happy to imagine what could have happened. And to work it into a future storyline. All I have to do is drop in an alien and a murderous hitchhiker….

Seriously, the tornado did remind me of Rockville and that reminded me that I’ve been toying with writing a sequel to Shallow Grave for some time. When I first wrote about Rockville’s eccentric denizens, I was a displaced urbanite attempting to write about life in a small town. Four years later, I’m less the outsider and more a legitimate small town resident (it’ll still be a couple more decades before my neighbors consider me one of their own, but I think I’ve finally outgrown my outsider status). My perspective on small town life has changed and I’m looking forward to once again mixing my daily reality with the fictional happenings of Rockville. Just as long as I don’t encounter any more tornadoes!

Posted on June 29th, 2008 by EJ McFall
Filed under: General