Unraveling Secrets: Benjamin Hale on the Mysterious Disappearance That Haunts the Ozarks
The why-now moment was because I badly needed to revive my career. I spent ten years under contract at Simon & Schuster writing what became a 450,000-word novel, which the publisher ultimately rejected. I hadn’t published anything in seven years and I was seriously thinking about quitting writing and starting a painting company (I painted houses for a while in my twenties, and it’s pretty much my only other marketable skill), or perhaps jumping off a bridge, or (worst of all) maybe going to law school.
