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Rich was born and grew up in the suburbs of Chicago, but after graduating with a degree in computer engineering, he decided to find the closest thing to running away to join the circus and moved to Hollywood. While in Los Angeles, he wrote for numerous television series with his writing partner Arnold Rudnick including, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Star Trek: Voyager, and The New Addams Family for which they won a Leo Award for Best Writing for Comedy or Variety. Once his son was born, he moved back to his hometown and recently he has been focusing his efforts on novels and short stories for his fiction podcast, Bedtime Stories for Insomniacs. He is a fan of Legos and Doctor Who, and now that there is a Doctor Who Lego set, his life is complete. Be sure to check out his other novels at https://RichHosek.com, his short story fiction podcast at https://BedtimeStories.studio and follow him on Twitter @RichHosek and on Facebook @WrittenByRichHosek.
I love your Author’s Note at the end of The Dead Kids Club because it offers so much insight into who you are as a writer and where your inspiration is pulled from. As noted there, the book concept came to you in a dream. Can you please share this story with readers?
It was actually a nightmare. I dreamed that my son—who was in grade school at the time—had been killed by a drunk driver, and my ex-wife and I decided that we were going to kill the man who had taken him from us. It was so disturbingly vivid that even after I awoke, the heart-stopping fear that my son was dead persisted until I could convince myself it was just a dream.
Writers are often asked “Where do you get your ideas?” Well, in this case, it came from my own subconscious, revealing a dark side of myself that I suspect every parent might possess to one degree or another when it comes to protecting their child, or punishing those who would do them harm.
I instantly saw my nightmare scenario as the premise for a novel. A story about two parents who couldn’t allow the killer of their child to go unpunished, and how opening the door to that side of themselves would lead them down a path that might be difficult to come back from. One of the tag lines I use for the book is, “Once we set aside our better angels to let loose our inner demons, there’s no turning back.” That is the theme that impels them on their journey, and takes them far beyond where they ever thought it would go.
I still wrestle with this concept of justice versus revenge. How do you define them? What makes them different in your mind, or do they bleed into one another?
Justice is what is meted out by society. It falls within the rules we all agree to as members of our community, state and country. But to make sure that those rules are ones that cannot be turned against us, we provide safeguards to prevent their abuse. Innocent until proven guilty. It’s better for ten guilty men to go free rather than have one innocent man suffer.
Revenge is more personal. It can occur with or without justice. And when a guilty person escapes the consequences of their actions by creating the illusion of reasonable doubt, revenge is a tempting alternative. Some say that killing a person who has killed someone you love won’t give you solace. It doesn’t bring that someone back. It just takes you down to the level of the killer. But I imagine that is a premise some people would be more than willing to test. And if you can get away with it, all the better.
I certainly don’t personally condone revenge as a default course of action. But I can imagine a situation where a person might see it as necessary, both from their personal point of view as well as protecting society at large. And that’s what drives the characters in The Dead Kids Club.
Generally, the more we do something, the easier it is to keep doing it. We may even find our skills improving. I felt like we saw this progression with Nick’s parents. From your perspective, what mental or emotional process do you think they went through to go from an IT specialist and a realtor to doling out vigilante justice as a side gig?
Great question! That transformation is engendered by their participation in the support group for grieving parents they join, initially as a cover for their plans to murder their son’s killer. However, once they achieve their goal, they wake up to the fact that they are surrounded every week by other parents who tragically lost their children and for some of them, justice failed. The relief they feel after successfully carrying out the killing—and the high of getting away with it—cause them to feel obligated to help others achieve the same peace they have found. They are actually at odds about this initially. The ex-wife sees it as their duty, while the protagonist argues against taking unnecessary chances. But the promise of returning to the life they had together before their son died, before their divorce, is too tempting a reward for him to resist for long. And after making mistakes the first time around, he becomes a little obsessed with the notion of getting it right.
Of course, each subsequent endeavor creates the opportunity to royally screw things up—no matter how carefully they plan for every contingency.
When discussing murder, we always want to know, “What is the motive?” While we know the initial motive of Nick’s parents, do you think that motive evolved as their characters evolved?
Absolutely. The protagonist actually questions this several times in the book and struggles to justify their vigilantism. Killing their son’s killer is straightforward, even necessary. But the subsequent murders are not so clear-cut from their point of view—or at least that of the protagonist. His ex-wife, we discover, is much more easily convinced that what they’re doing is just and even inexorable. It’s their duty. How can they leave others in perpetual torment, while they enjoy the solace of knowing their son’s killer is dead? But he needs additional motivation, an incentive that she knows exactly how to provide.
If the jury had convicted Anthony Vitali, do you think these young parents would have still gone down this path of seeking revenge or would justice have been enough? Were there killers inside simply waiting for a reason to make an appearance, or would they have remained in the shadows?
Looking back at it, I have to say Vitali was never going to get out of it alive. Even if justice had won out, I can’t imagine anything less than an eye for an eye would have ameliorated the grief Rebecca felt. In the beginning, the protagonist seems content to just mark time while life moves on around him. She’s the one who drives it. She was Nick’s mother. It’s a bond she tries to explain to her ex-husband at one point, and he struggles to understand. I can’t imagine her being content with anything less than Vitali’s death.
Some people believe there is a killer inside all of us, waiting to be unleashed under the right circumstances. After writing this novel, I tend to agree with them.
Who was your favorite character, and why?
Eddie Horne. He’s a crime writer on a quest to write a book on par with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. And he’s as much of a Luddite as you can get away with in 21st century America. In that respect, he is the complete opposite of me. I’m a total gadget freak.
Eddie is a character that I created well before I wrote this novel. A throwback to reporters you’d see in old movies like His Girl Friday. He’s someone who believes that technology has become a shackle on society, and that personal, real-world relationships trump social media.
Although he’s not a main character and has his own agenda, he serves as a connection to a normal life for the protagonist. They often meet for pie at a neighborhood diner.
The Dead Kids Club is actually part of a series of “everyman thrillers”—ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances—I call From the Files of Eddie Horne. It’s not a conventional series in that the main characters make an appearance from book to book. Instead, Eddie serves as the glue that connects them, inadvertently making himself a part of different stories that—if he knew the full truth—would be that bestseller he’s forever chasing. Keep an eye out for the next book in the series, The Tenth Ride. I even have plans for him to be the protagonist of his own novels as well. I have a great attachment to him and enjoy getting inside the head of a man who eschews the connectedness of the modern world.
Without question. I didn’t start out as a TV writer. In college (I was a computer engineering major) I was working on the side to become a science fiction writer. But then I got the TV and movie bug, moved out to Hollywood, and devoted my efforts to succeeding in that business. Writing for TV taught me a few things that heavily influenced my novel writing. One was structure. The whole beginning-middle-end thing. Another was thinking in scenes. The overall story had to have that beginning-middle-end, but so did each scene. And thinking visually was another skill I developed. I like to describe enough detail in a scene and describe enough of the action to give the reader a mind-picture of what’s going on. My goal with every chapter is to get the reader to visualize what’s happening, put themselves in the action. That’s one of the reasons I chose to write this novel in the present tense. When you write a screenplay, the action is described as happening right now. That sense of being in the moment, I think, lends itself particularly well to a thriller.
Confession time! I started listening to your podcast, Bedtime Stories for Insomniacs, and I’ve decided I can’t listen to it before falling asleep because you influence my dreams too much! Can you please share more about your podcast with readers and how they can find it?
The one thing that is frustrating about being a novelist is the timeframe. It can take months or even years to finish a book, revise and edit it, prepare it for publishing, and finally make it available to your readers. Then, once they finish it, they wait a period of months or years for the next one.
In television, you write a script one week, shoot it the next, and people are watching it on their TVs shortly thereafter. There’s a sense of immediate gratification you don’t get from novels. TV also trains you to constantly come up with new ideas.
I had come across an audiobook shortly before my first novel, Near Death – A Raney/Daye Investigation was published. A science fiction/horror story called Infected by an author named Scott Sigler. At the end, I realized it was Scott who was also narrating the story, which was also serialized on his fiction podcast. An author reading their own stories? What a great idea!
I enjoyed reading bedtime stories to my son when he was younger (he’s in college now) and always tried to imitate the style I heard in audiobooks. Scott’s success inspired me to try my hand at narrating my book. So, I bought a mic and started reading. You can listen to it on Bedtime Stories as well as purchasing it on Audible. Not bad for my first time, but I learned a lot about audio equipment and editing.
To satisfy my TV writer’s urge to have my work available to and appreciated by people in a more immediate form, I conceived the notion of writing short stories to fill the void between books and presenting them as a podcast. It also seemed like a marketing strategy that could help me sell books.
The Bedtime Stories for Insomniacs fiction podcast began in January of 2022 under the name, Written by Rich Hosek. Later, after realizing that I needed something more attention grabbing than a name no one knew, I changed it to Bedtime Stories for Insomniacs. I found the contradiction between bedtime and insomnia intriguing.
It’s a multi-genre podcast. I have science fiction, horror, mystery, suspense, a little urban fantasy and whatever else strikes my fancy. I like to describe it as a mashup between a TV anthology show like The Twilight Zone, an audiobook and classic old-time radio shows. As I’ve grown more adept at producing the episodes, I’ve learned how to add sound effects and create a more immersive auditory experience. I’m really quite proud of it.
The show was named one of the Best New Story-Based Productions of 2022 by the Audioverse Awards, and was recently nominated under the fiction category in the Podcast Awards. For those who prefer getting their stories from the pages of a book, I’m putting out an anthology of 26 of the stories from the podcast soon. Keep an eye out for The Charlatan’s Conundrum and other Bedtimes Stories for Insomniacs.
You can find Bedtime Stories for Insomniacs on all the major podcast platforms: Spotify, Apple, Google, I Heart Radio, Amazon Audible and more. Just search for it. And if you sign up for my email list, the Insomniac’s Snoozeletter, at https://BedtimeStories.studio, I’ll send you a free bookmark!
What current project are you working on? What can we expect to see from you next?
I’m working on the third book in my Raney/Daye Investigations paranormal mystery series, Far Sight, which delves into the phenomenon of remote viewing. If you’re a fan of the genre, or mysteries in general, visit https://RaneyAndDaye.com to learn more. The first two books, Near Death and After Life, both won in the Readers’ Favorites Book Awards. These novels are co-written with my old television writing partner, Arnold Rudnick, and our friend, parapsychologist Loyd Auerbach, based on characters from a teleplay we wrote years ago. Loyd brings a sense of realism to the stories as they are based on his actual experience as a parapsychological investigator. The second book, After Life, was inspired by the case that made him believe in ghosts!
My second everyman thriller From the Files of Eddie Horne, featuring the Luddite crime reporter, is due at the end of 2023. It’s called The Tenth Ride and follows a recently unemployed family man who turns to the gig-economy to make a few extra bucks, only to find himself caught up in a scheme of international intrigue that ends up threatening his wife and daughters.
What advice do you have for other indie authors?
Advancements in technology have almost completely removed the barrier to entry in publishing. Anyone can put a book up on Amazon.
But that’s just the beginning.
It has to be a good book, something that people will want to read and hopefully share with everyone they know. Make sure you have attentive, detail-oriented alpha and beta readers if not a dedicated editor. All books have typos. Make them look for yours!
And once it’s done, keep writing. I like to define the difference between an author and a writer as an author is someone who has written a book; a writer is someone who writes books. Be a writer!
You have to get the word out. It’s not enough to create an account on social media and make a few posts. We all hear the stories about people hitting it big with their books on TikTok or Instagram, but those are outliers. Most of us will not garner that level of attention. At least not at first.
Get yourself a decent webcam and a good microphone so you can offer yourself as a guest on writing podcasts or BookTube YouTube shows. There are new ones popping up all the time, and you never know when that one appearance is going to catapult you to the next level.
Seek out people to read and review your books. Don’t be afraid to give them away for free. I’m of the opinion that readers beget more readers, and the more copies of your books that are out there, the greater the chance that you’ll have your breakthrough moment. If you have short stories or micro-fiction, publish it on sites like Medium. Enter contests, submit them to publishers or podcasters who are accepting submissions. There are tons of lists out there. If you have something in the 3-4k range that is entertaining and has a twist, I’m looking for outside writers to contribute to Bedtime Stories for Insomniacs. Listen to the podcast and if you think you have something that would be a good fit, reach out to me on X or Facebook. I’ll not only throw a few bucks your way, but I’ll promote your books, website, podcast, whatever as well.
Networking with other writers, sharing mailing lists and combining resources is a great way to hone your craft (but don’t expect it to generate sales.) Become a part of the writing community on X or Facebook, but make sure you’re also finding avenues that expose you to readers! I’ve recently joined forces with a small group of writers, and we’re pooling our resources to present ourselves at book fairs and conventions. (You can find out more about this plucky little band of indie writers at https://hashtagwriters.com)
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