Unraveling Secrets: Benjamin Hale on the Mysterious Disappearance That Haunts the Ozarks
LL: I’m always curious about the origins of a particular story. What was calling to you about this one? What was the ‘why now’ moment? Was the crime or disappearance the most important moment, or was it something else? Did you have false starts for Cave Mountain that you scrapped?
BH: Many years ago, I had the idea to fictionalize the story as a novel. I probably wrote about fifteen pages of that novel before losing interest (I have many first-fifteen-pages of abandoned novels in old notebooks and hard drives, as I’m sure most fiction writers do). I’m glad I didn’t do that, because the story is so weird it would never be believed as a novel—truth is stranger than fiction because fiction has to make sense; only nonfiction would do it justice.
