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5 Minutes, 5 Questions With… Nick Quesenberry, author of Thorn
Enter into the life of Detective Jackson Thorn, of the Highland Meadows Police Department. His beloved wife has long lain comatose. His son recently perished in a fiery C-130 plane crash over the Atlantic. His adopted daughter languishes in suicidal depression, confined to the local sanitarium.
Despite all this, Jackson achieves the greatest success of his law enforcement career in an operation against the dominant Yakuza crime lord in North America, in which he suffers a serious injury. Meanwhile, a deadly international assassin, long thought to be dead, returns from the ashes of Jackson’s past. She seeks Jackson’s affection but finds a life-or-death showdown with the killer, whose agenda remains mysterious.
Even the principle players in this saga of romance, betrayal, suspense and intrigue can cost Jackson everything as he learns that the sins of yesteryear can return.
Joey Pinkney: Where did you get the idea and inspiration to write Thorn?
Nick Quesenberry: To be honest, at the time I began writing Thorn I was thoroughly miserable and morbidly depressed. I think that the need to write this book thus arose from a need to tell myself a story and thereby alleviate my depression. A story, to me, serves two exceedingly important purposes for the human psyche: it’s facially conflicting yet quite harmonious upon deeper reflection.
First, a story allows us to escape the tribulations and woes of our respective existences by affording us a mini-vacation from our troubles. Secondly, a story allows us to confront our troubles through a vicarious and cathartic experience taken in conjunction with the characters. What I mean by that statement is that stories allow us to place ourselves in the shoes of characters whose existences are as bad as, or worse than, our own. As these characters confront, struggle with and finally overcome their seemingly insurmountable troubles, we live that experience with them. In turn we are encouraged and strengthened to face our own demons.
In writing Thorn, then, I accomplished both of these purposes for myself. Firstly, the experience of writing the book and becoming engrossed in the story I was telling myself enabled me to escape for a time from the things that were causing my morbid depression. Secondly, as Jackson Thorn met and overcame, one by one, the impossible challenges he faced, somewhere subconsciously I was rejoicing with him in his triumphs and strengthening myself to face the boogey-men, both internal and external, that awaited me the moment I got up from the keyboard....
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